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Comment by ncallaway | Hacker News Reader

I love that the launch and subsequent landing of a reused first stage is so unexciting that this article has no comments an hour in. It's truly impressive how quickly SpaceX went from experimental landings to boring and routine landings.

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When technology like this reaches the point where it becomes unexciting for most people it's when I feel the most excited. It's no longer "one day into the future experiments" but "I now live in the future".

Gotta Wait for the "Louis CK moment," where the technology it's so boring that people are annoyed by it

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/avmzsg/stand-up-louis-ck--give...

Well if we're searching for interest, a "first" for this one was that this was the first rocket that has landed on two different oceans. The first launch was from Vandenberg and landed in the Pacific. The second was from Cape Canaveral and landed in the Atlantic.

It's the first single orbital booster to have been launched from two sites actually, much less landed. The shuttle almost made it to a second launch site and would have been first here until they killed the Vandenberg pad after Challenger.

Anyword on the second stage? I know they're also working on getting those to land as well.

It incredibly expensive, a satellite that could be lift by a Falcon 9 with a first stage only recovery would have to be lifted by a Falcon Heavy if you wanted to recover the second stage. Basically you'd need to almost double the unfueled weight of the second stage with aerodynamic devices that can withstand the re-entry plasma and the heat shield. And then add the extra weight for the de-orbit and re-entry burns. You would probably more than halve the payload capacity. Even at best is borders on not worth it.

[EDIT] fixed typo

Not worth it - until the delta cost of fuel and maintenance on a FH is less than the cost of dumping a Falcon 9 second stage into the ocean.

They're looking at experimenting with that on the payload-less Falcon Heavy test flight. For operational use, the payload penalty of the extra mass on a second stage is sufficiently high that it seems likely that only on FH flights (and not even all of them) would they have the possibility.

Landing the second stage is gonna be Hard. That's Hard in the sense that landing the first stage was Easy.

There were a lot of complex challenges about landing the first stage, but nothing that seemed impossible. Figuring out how to control a spent first stage with almost-empty fuel tanks while falling through the atmosphere at supersonic speed and firing a rocket backwards was surely tough. Getting the control systems right to land that stage lightly on a ship when you're almost out of fuel and have too much thrust to hover is also tough. There's no reason to think that either one should be insurmountable though. If you have the budget and the will to run some experiments and trash some hardware, you should be able to figure it out, and SpaceX had and did.

Now for the second stage, there's a fundamentally harder problem of how to slow down the second stage from orbital velocity without making it so heavy to defeat the purpose. I haven't heard any good ideas on that yet.

SpaceX has rather different economics from most of the rest of the aerospace industry - they aren't getting any super-lucrative Government contracts, and depend on making a profit on fixed-price launches to stay alive. They don't need a ton of good PR or political will, as they're depending on the size of their invoices for launches compared to the competition doing their work for them. If I was them, I'd focus like 90% of my spare engineering effort on optimizing the first-stage recovery and relaunch process as much as possible for now. They've proven it can work, and now they gotta make it fast and cheap. This will bring in boatloads of cash to get the company in better shape and help them corner the launch market. Once they've optimized the first-stage reuse process, then they can really focus effort on looking for a way to recover second stages.

Interestingly, now that SpaceX has the X-37 contract, there is the possibility of launching and recovering a re-used first stage and payload, but not the second stage! I guess this almost happened with the Dragon that contained a re-used pressure vessel, but not-quite.

Be careful about what you love. Apollo went to boring and routine in the eyes of viewers in seven flights, even with the highly exciting third one.

The big difference: Apollo was a money sink, whereas each Falcon 9 launch is a profit for SpaceX.

When Apollo got boring, they lost funding. SpaceX has a waiting list of customers.

The Apollo program was a money sink because it was an experimental project based entirely on untested technology and subjected to very tight time constraints, whose client was willing to paying a premium to get the results he ordered in record time.

SpaceX doesn't have to deal with many of those constraints, and the project needs to be profitable in order to get the program running. Consequently, while the Apollo program design in a 10-year timespan about four launch vehicles, rebuilt from scratch about two dozen launch vehicles and conducted over a dozen manned flight missions to the moon, after nearly two decades of existence SpaceX is being lauded for using a rocket more than once.

Requirements are different. Therefore, planning is different and results are also different.

I would guess each Apollo was a profit for Boeing, North American, and Douglas, too, but that doesn't matter.

SpaceX has indicated that it wants to be more than a way cheaper way to launch stuff into orbit. That means it needs to find sponsors willing to spend lots of money, and keep them interested for a long time. If new tricks like reusing a rocket soon become "meh", that means it needs many such tricks.

When the extraordinary becomes ordinary, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

Paraphrased Asimov.

I mean, that's what happened with the moon landings.

Apollo 11 was a huge event, but by Apollo 13 none of the networks carried it.

I'm pretty sure the networks jumped on Apollo 13 pretty quickly given what happened.

Yeah people seem to be getting used to it everywhere, on many forums too. And this is obviously the goal.

also is late Friday night, here in most of US

or may be people are realizing that this was not really a big deal in the first place.....

Yeah we should go back to following the jitney cab news.

Haha, yeah, not really any big deal. I mean they're only the only company among all companies and/or nation states with launch capabilities who have ever done it in the history of space travel.

> I mean they're only the only company among all companies and/or nation states with launch capabilities who have ever done it in the history of space travel.

That assumes all of them were trying to do it all this time, and were failing all the time, which is not true.

I mean, we had control systems in missiles that could track a jet that is doing evasive maneuverer while going as fast as a bullet..like what? half a century ago?

Seriously. i don't think landing a small rocket on a barge comes anywhere close to that...

This thing is powerful enough to put a capsule designed for 7 people into orbit. Not being one of the biggest ever doesn't make it small.

Note the reusable part. That sort of tracking is much easier if you don't need to resuse the hardware afterwards.

Anyway, anyone else who wants to be able to compete with SpaceX on price is going to need to start doing this before too long, so we'll see how difficult it is.

> That sort of tracking is much easier if you don't need to resuse the hardware afterwards.

Says who?

Your tracking is either precise or it is not. What you are using the precision for is immaterial in this regard..

>anyone else who wants to be able to compete with SpaceX on price is going to need to start doing this before too long, so we'll see how difficult it is.

Wait a minute. Are you seriously calming that spacex is the only company that have landed a rocket successfully?

Imron said "compete with SpaceX". I don't follow developments real closely, so could easily have missed something. Can you point me to any other company which has landed a rocket after putting a payload in orbit? Because if they aren't deploying payloads, they aren't competing with SpaceX. (Yes, NASA and Bezos have landed rockets, but only straight up & straight down. Nothing close to orbital velocity.)

>Can you point me to any other company which has landed a rocket after putting a payload in orbit? Because if they aren't deploying payloads, they aren't competing with SpaceX.

Alright then. It might be true no one else had done this. but take a look at this, which might explain why no one else is doing it..

[1] https://www.quora.com/Havent-other-space-companies-thought-o...

Note that the Falcon 9 first stage is not travelling at orbital velocity, or even that near it really. At separation time -- when it starts to slow down to re-enter -- "[f]or a reusable Falcon 9, [speed] is around Mach 6, depending on the mission." (Quoting Elon Musk, the SpaceX CEO, on Twitter.)

cough space shuttle cough and its boosters cough

The STS was reusable in name only.

They discarded the fuel tank, and the SRBs landing in the ocean required a dive team and significant refurbishment before they could be reused. Even the shuttle itself required significant refurbishment before it could be reused.

True but the claim that Space X was the first company to ever think about reusable space vectors is laughable at best.

No-one claimed that.

But everyone is acting like that.

I mean, isn't it the oldest trick in the pr/advertisement process. To create an impression without actually claiming anything.

Interesting.

I mean yes it can be, but this isn't really an instance of that. What SpaceX has done is create a reusable booster which lands using retrograde rockets. This is a big deal because with retrograde rockets you can land the thing with precision and upright. Whereas with parachutes you'd end up having a high probability that the rocket would land in a precarious position because it's then at the mercy of the wind much more than the retrograde landing is.

It's kinda like well no Henry Ford didn't invent the car, but he made the car affordable. Heck he didn't even invent the assembly line but he sure did use it in a different way.

Elon is doing to the rocket industry what Ford did to the car industry. Making it more accessible.

Not to mention that getting good at retrograde landings will be necessary for landing on other bodies in the solar system.

Please remind me of the time the space shuttle's boosters and fuel tank ever landed (as opposed to splashing down).

The Shuttle was a:

(X) reusable vector

(_) non reusable vector

Technicalities of the hows doesn't change that reusing stuff was already done extensively

If our cars threw away half of their parts and cost $10k to refurbish every time we drove to the grocery store, would we really call them reusable?

What, exactly, do you think is a reusable rocket? You can't just land it, refuel, attach it to a second stage, and fire it up again. Everything has to be retested and tons of stuff replaced because the forces during launch, let alone reentry, are extreme. Until they have lots of data on failure modes in the reusable stage, they are probably ultraconservative with what parts they replace so I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of reuse is ~40-50% of the cost of a new one (on mobile so I'm too lazy to look up spaceX's official numbers).

SpaceX's stated goal is exactly that - turning spacecraft into something more like a commercial airliner. Quick inspection, refuel, send it up again within 24 hours.

The Shuttle threw away its fuel tank, dropped its SRBs into corrosive salt water, and needed all 35,000 tiles inspected every time. The SSMEs needed a full removal and rebuild.

SpaceX has deliberately gone with multiple, redundant, lower-performance engines that are easier to maintain and less sensitive to the forces of launch and re-entry. More like a Toyota Corolla versus the Space Shuttle's F1 racecar - and every generation of the Falcon (there've been five so far) incorporates lessons learned to make it more rapidly reusable.

Interestingly enough, Elon Musk did set a goal of reusing a booster within 24 hours of landing.

https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/84759420821933670...

There are plenty of companies who are the only company that manage to do something ever in the history of something.

For example Boston Dynamics had an autonomous robotic mule that can travel pretty much through any terrain. How awesome is that? Yet, that doesn't make the evening news, does it?

In this case, SpaceX is a company that managed to reuse the same equipment to try to cut their operational costs. Well, that's neat and all, but do you understand why no one stays up late at night to watch this sort of stuff happen live? Or at all?

"no one" is a bit strong when Hacker News has multiple people who stay up late a night to watch this kind of stuff happen live -- see all of the complaints about Elon fanboys over the years?

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