Second Landing of Falcon 9 First Stage at Landing Zone 1 | Hacker News Reader

Second Landing of Falcon 9 First Stage at Landing Zone 1

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33 pointsCogito9 comments

My favourite part of this landing was the on-board camera view of the landing burn.

Hopefully they will release the entire on-board footage, would be really interesting to watch the launch from the rocket's perspective.

Have you seen this[0] from Thaicom 8's landing on the ASDS? Shows everything from grid fin deploy onward during daylight hours.

0 - https://youtube.com/watch?v=4jEz03Z8azc

I have, it's a pretty fantastic view!

What I'd love to see is that view for the entire launch and landing, in real time instead of sped up.

I didn't think about it, but you're right in that the view wouldn't be great for this one as it was at night time.

The video coverage is much better this time, with a distant camera on the landing and a camera on the booster. Then, after the landing, they bring up spotlights on the booster. The barge doesn't have all that, but it probably will in time.

That's because they're landing on a fixed landing pad on land, where you get nice hard-wired cameras right to the video processing facility. On the ship, they're doing it by trying to punch a limited-bandwidth satellite data link through the thermal bloom of the landing rocket. It makes a big different.

This was also a NASA launch, so they probably provided additional cameras and/or stuff like that, like they did with CRS8's chase plane (the first successful landing on the ship, the plane circling the boat was provided by NASA since that too was a ISS mission)

I am guessing that NASA (or more likely the USAF who owns the range) has a lot of the cameras on the launch complex, but not at the landing complex. You can see this on NASA TV which runs a different camera angle during launch, and immediately follows the launch broadcast with a series of replays from a bunch of different camera (running each camera's footage straight). However, during the landing, NASA TV just re-ran SpaceX's content (complete with overlays) and the landing replay was just a single camera shot from the same ground camera.

(However, I totally believe that the tracking camera during the re-entry burn was a NASA/USAF asset).

Given that the launch complex had/has a lot of existing infrastructure predating SpaceX and the landing complex was bulldozed to basically a giant concrete pad and a fire suppression system, that's not out of the question.

Incredible, its almost becoming routine now!

Landing large vehicles will never be routine. Every ship that moors, every plane that lands, is a life-threatening event that can go wrong in ways the public will never anticipate but the professionals have entire subsystems designed to manage.

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