SpaceX: Eutelsat/ABS Mission Hosted Webcast | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX: Eutelsat/ABS Mission Hosted Webcast

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56 pointspol0nium32 comments

As for the first stage:

"Following stage separation, the first stage of Falcon 9 will attempt an experimental landing on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship. As with other GTO missions, the first-stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing difficult."

Mission Press Kit : http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/spacex_eutelsat_abs...

EDIT: Sounds like they lost the first stage, still not very clear on the details.

EDIT2: Confirmed loss of first stage by Elon Musk.

"Ascent phase & satellites look good, but booster rocket had a RUD on droneship"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/743096769001578498

Did the "experimental landing" work this time?

No clear word yet. Feed froze as usual and whatever was on the screen was covered in black smoke.

I did see something upright though, so who knows.

Meanwhile, for anyone looking for one of the most epic moments: https://youtu.be/L0bMeDj76ig?t=29m28s

It's not clear. The video feed cut off at landing. There was a lot of smoke, and possibly a standing rocket.

Feed died.

I hope the next-gen of communications satellites improves the broadband-over-satellite situation.

If only there was a company in this day and age that is launching satellites often and at lower cost. :)

Apparently the broadband out there is great. The issue isn't lack of satellites or speed.

The issue is that when you have a Merlin 1D (or 3) firing directly at a mobile platform, it's going to shake violently. And when you have sensitive equipment on that platform shaking, you're going to have a satellite misalignment and signal cut outs while the lock is reacquired.

Considering this is a pretty unique scenario (I would imagine 99% of satellite internet connections don't have rockets landing on them), I doubt it's a high priority to resolve somehow.

On the telecast they just said it appears the vehicle was lost.

Seems like one engine was low on thrust:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/743097337782763521

I love the commentator's wording: "We'll see whether yes, we landed, or no, we've got more experimental data."

No. It appeared briefly on the deck, but Elon tweeted it was a RUD, and that they'll be releasing video once they get access to it later today.

I had to look it up: RUD is "Rapidly Unscheduled Disassembly"

This might be my favorite acronym of all time.

Rapidly or rapid? Is in the unscheduled part that is rapid or the disassembly?

that would be a rapidly scheduled disassembly. "yeah, we totally planned that in half a second".

Was it caused by a lithobraking maneuver?

I believe in this case it was a skafobraking maneuver. Not many lithos out in the Atlantic to brake with.

Another successful satellite launch and more experimental data (aka they have a new failure mode for landing things). It is really awesome that they can be collecting the expertise to land the first stage "for free"[1] like this and every failure has improved the lander in some key way.

I can't wait to see the reconstructed footage of this event. From what we got initially it seemed a bit off to the left of screen and generating a lot of smoke.

[1] I realize it costs them time and money to operate the barge and recover the stages, but the cost of building those stages and launching them is covered by the launch contract so this work has extremely low marginal cost for rocket research.

As usual, the reddit /r/spacex launch thread is a useful resource: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4o5u6r/rspacex_eute...

If you are wondering, the video feed from the barge got cut off during the landing, but it didn't appear that it was very good. Lot of smoke. But I'm no pro. For now, we (the viewers) don't know if the landing was OK or KO.

No telemetry from the landing stage? Or views from the nearby boats (how close is the nearest boat anyway?)

Well, they (the people at spacex) probably have everything, but I don't have access to this information :) Just watching the webcast, nothing indicated if the landing was ok or not. The people presenting the cast didn't know either.

They have just said that they got lots of good data. Even though the landing failed.

The boats are quite a distance away. During the JCSAT-14 mission, there was actually video on the webcast from one of the boats, and the barge was over the horizon. It was night, so it's hard to get a feel for just how far away, though.

SpaceX confirmed they "lost the vehicle."

O well - better luck next time. Hopefully they got some more good data...would rather they have this issue now than when landing Red Dragon on Mars..!!

It's awesome that this is just an "oh well" rather than the huge disaster it would have been with any past reusable system. It would be better if it had worked, but I love how they've set it up so that their program can tolerate failures like this.

Here's the bit where they "landed": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLNmtUEvI5A&t=36m18s

Looks to me like they may have stuck the "landing" but it was hard, broke something and the vehicle was on fire. Listen to the crowd and I think you can hear when the RUD went down.

It was announced on the webcast that they lost the Falcon 9. Second stage is still looking good, on a good GTO orbit after the second burn.

Am I the only one who thought the landings are already starting to be boring? Smoke, rocket is there, cheers from the engineers...I remember Musk expected a few months ago to be able to save 10-20% of the Stage 1 this year (while the ratio increasing over time). But I guess they already can achieve 70-80% success rate, which is a cost saving that is already enough to kill competition.

When 70-80% are reflown, that might be true. So far there has not been any cost savings whatsoever...

Yeah, this is the critical part. We still don't know what kind of reliability to expect from the used stages, and we don't know how much it's going to cost.

Right now it is, but as they built the rocket, they are able to repair it and save money for sure. From what Elon said, landing was the tougher part. He was much more sure about being able to relaunch some of the stage 1s (except 1) than about being able to land (which took a lot of effort)

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