SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch

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108 pointsgokhan66 comments

well it would become noteworthy that their failures make news simply because they had taken the concept of recovering the first stage to the point of people just assuming it was how rocket launches are meant to be.

I remember the first video of one successfully landing after launching and being wowed but when two landed together then it truly felt like science fiction had become reality

I watched this live with a friend. We had previously watched a couple of failures, and were almost expecting that one to fail as well. We went out of our minds when the smoke cleared and the booster was upright.

It does feel annoying when rocket launches, which are enormously complex, go right and get no press, but surface in the news when they explode or fail in some way. By most standards, this launch was perfectly successful, but every time the first stages crash the press treats this like some kind of major failure.

important to note that by any other launch provider's standards this was a perfect launch. Payload was inserted into the correct orbit, no one else even attempts to recover the booster.

However it's important to note that recovering the first stage makes sense only if it's successful enough times. Because it reduces the payload and it's more expensive as a single use.

>1 is enough times for an individual booster. Some failures are ok, as long as the average is >~1.2

I remember everyone in my office stopped working for about 30 minutes to watch that dual rocket landing and being completely blown away.

I wonder how it is when you're on site, it's hard to appreciate the scale on video

It’s surreal. We observed from the Canaveral AFB entrance observation bleachers, and I think it’s easier to appreciate if you can get closer to the landing zone pads (either with KSC’s “Feel The Heat” tour tickets or being a SpaceX employee).

Oooo, I haven't tried the AFB entrance location yet.

My first launch/landing was an F9 which I saw from the Port Canaveral causeway, and I've now seen FH launches/landings from both the "feel the heat" banana creek viewing area, and from the employees-and-friends bleachers at the turning-basin next to the VAB.

The "Feel the Heat" tickets are fairly close to the launch, but pretty far from the landing. Even the turn basin is equidistant from the launch, and only a smidge closer to the landing.

LZ1 is just really far away no matter what, but I think the causeway actually affords a better view of the landing. It's definitely worse for the launch, though.

Bein' a Detroiter and only catching a launch when I'm able to travel for it, I think I've been lucky so far!

It's hard to appreciate the scale in person too, it doesn't look real (I was there). Like the other poster said, it's surreal. But the sonic booms help remind you the boosters are large and moving very fast.

The sonic booms are just... breathtaking. One of the coolest things I've ever witnessed. (Was there for the first night launch of the FH. Just amazing.)

I was at a company off-site where we were supposed to be inventing the future of our company. I streamed it on my phone while listening to the lecturer blather on. The CEO, sitting next to me, got quite excited when the rockets both landed :)

Please all keep in mind that the primary mission is a success and that landing the booster is an optimization, not a failure if it does not work. A failure is when the primary mission fails, everything else is a success.

Also worth keeping in mind: Every other launch system out there "Fails" to recover their first stage on every single launch. SpaceX "Failing" here is reverting to norm.

Not quite, they re-flew this particular booster 3 times after the initial launch. Reverting to the norm would be a crash after the first flight. Makes you wonder what the maximum life expectancy is for these boosters.

Also:

1) This was this particular booster's 4th flight

2) This particular orbit was stated to be at the very edge of F9's performance.

Trying to recover the first stage significantly reduces available payload.

That's probably not significant for Starlink specifically, as they're constrained by fairing volume rather than maximum payload mass (which is to say: even if they weren't recovering the booster, they wouldn't be able to increase the number of satellites).

Success is measured by cost too... How much money is saved by recovering the booster?

I believe they do a little horizontal kick just before landing when they validate things are look good. Potentially something wasn’t right and it just crashed into the ocean like 100 yards from the drone ship.. the good thing is that spaceX seems to learn from all of these issues and compensates, so will be interesting to here what happened.

This is accurate. More good examples of this passive-safety landing procedure in action were in the Heavy demo flight and the CRS-16 mission. The Heavy demo center core failed to relight two of the three engines needed for landing, and plunged right into the water off the side of the landing barge (https://youtu.be/A0FZIwabctw?t=72). CRS-16's booster had a hydraulic failure of the grid fins but still had engine and RCS control, so it was able to make a soft water splashdown at the last second (dramatic video from the booster's perspective is here: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1070399755526656000).

If I remember correctly this procedure was implemented after SES-9, which came in too hot and broke straight through the deck of the droneship.

I'm pretty sure it pre-dates the first landing, it's an important safety feature when aiming the booster at land.

I didn't know that. Thanks for the detail. Better to lose a booster than both lose a booster and cripple a droneship.

On that topic, I've always been impressed at how tough those droneships are. They've taken a lot of punishment but they've never lost one at sea yet. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall of the first meeting between reps from SpaceX and McDonough Marine.

"So, you folks make big rockets. I'm guessing you're going to need these barges to transport them around to avoid roads. And there's likely some insurance implications here."

"In that order: yes, technically yes, and definitely yes."

You're right with it not targeting the droneship directly from afar, but today's webcast [0] said "soft-landing on the water right next to the droneship". In other words not the full speed missile impact scenario. I'm eager to get news/details as well.

[0] https://youtu.be/8xeX62mLcf8?t=1531

Ah thanks for that.. I mean, come on spaceX, give us a pan-scan camera controlled by the internet so we can help look for the rocket when it crash lands!! we can have it hooked up to a discord server and people can type "LEFT" "RIGHT".. etc.. :-) totally would work..

Here's a list that includes all their landing attempts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

After their first successful drone-ship landing in April 2016, they had two failures of Falcon 9 in June 2016 and Dec 2018, two failures (of core only) on Falcon Heavy in Feb 2018 and June 2019, and 47 successful landing.

I believe it's 48 successful landings after the 1st as they kept mentioning today would be the 50th successful core to land. (Which counts each booster separately, including the FH side cores, but you must have been doing that too to get to 48 since the first)

I'm giving the number of successful landing after the first successful drone-ship landing, which doesn't include the first successful pad landing. (This seemed a more fair way to count because drone-ship landing are harder; if you start counting after the first successful pad landing you include two failed drone ship landing which should be considered still total experiments.)

Dammit. I read that 3 times before commenting and still missed that point of emphasis. Touché

No worries :D

SpaceX has made landing so routine that now failed landings are news.

I wonder if they're deliberate? Like if you're 100% you can land in "normal" circumstances, maybe try perturbing the parameters or input data a bit... to stress-test your algos, as if simulating wind, earthquake, different planet's gravity, different atmosphere, different rocket, engine failure...

Now that these are used to launch their own cargo (no not paid launches) I'm sure every loss hits them hard.

A failure on launch would hit them harder, but a failure landing the empty rocket costs the same as it always did, assuming they've got enough spare capacity to keep up the launch schedule.

The payload is smaller and they're more expensive than single-use.

It's cheaper if they land it multiple times, which they have. I'm not aware of the actual ratio they need to hit, although I'm sure they are.

Absolutely. Musk has openly shared that at spacex, failure is just a chance to learn. Successful landings don't teach you much, so the launch of an old core like this one (4 previous landings) is a good chance to experiment a bit.

>Absolutely.

There is no chance they are deliberately crashing rockets because landing them is too easy. That's lunacy.

Agreed. They do stress test old cores, but they make it clear that it's an intentional test before they do so. They don't shake up the parameters on a whim just because they've had a good stretch.

A failure is a change to learn, but a success is a chance to save 20 million dollars. Musk is philosophical about failures, but it's not a thing he's chasing.

I thought this launch was harder than the previous starlink missions. It's not like going to GTO but starlink payloads are really heavy and they mentioned the drone ship would be further down range due to a different orbit this time.

It will be good to hear what the problem was.

Based on the seas today as seen from the drone-ship camera, I wouldn't be surprised if they're willing to launch in conditions sub-optimal for recovery (but sufficient for launch) because the data they gather from a launch failure is still valuable and hitting a launch window is worth more to them than missing it and recovering stage 1.

Not quite the same as intentionally launching to crash, but it has a notional morphism to the site-reliability-engineering concept of "burning your error budget on a high-reliability system to satisfy other tradeoffs."

I recall that the last landing had an unusually hard touchdown.

https://youtu.be/1KmBDCiL7MU?t=1188

Maybe they're trying to cut the fuel they take closer to the limit?

Starlink launches are heavy and I wonder pushing the envelope reduces the margin of error. The last successful barge landing with Starlink crushed the leg core as it came in hot and heavy.

I’m sure these tough landings will help SpaceX.

I'm hoping we get an info-dump into the public channel on the nature of the recovery failure.

Footage from the drone ship before they cut away due to no landing to show indicated the sea had larger swells than I remember seeing on previous attempts and some water striking the camera lens from somewhere. I wonder if they aborted the landing because they couldn't guarantee the drone would have the right attitude to receive the rocket at time of touchdown?

This was the fourth mission for this first stage booster, which is the most any core has launched yet, is that right?

Yes. No core has done 5 launches yet.

That's just a matter of time though. The rate they are going up it will probably happen this year.

I read they plan one of the next few starlink launches to be a fifth reflight booster.

Yes, one other core has done four missions (the last Starlink launch I believe). It successfully landed.

I remember seeing the first landing. I thought it was some fake footage. Glad to see they progressed so rapidly that a relatively minor failure becomes news.

the fact that a failed landing makes more headlines nowadays is pretty damn impressive

Perhaps apocryphal, but:

"You learn more from one failure than from ten successes"

- Von Braun

"I'd rather have ten successes"

- Elon Musk

this shouldn't be news. this isn't news

When are people gonna start talking about the elephant in the room? There is no publicly available data that points to reusable rockets being safe for human return.

There hasn't been a single failure of a reused falcon 9 booster on launch, which is the bit relevant to human spaceflight. Humans aren't going to ride a falcon 9 down to landing.

If you're talking about starship then I'm not sure how worthwhile extrapolating from F9 is. I would guess they're pushing F9 to its limits here - after all a small gain in launch efficiency multiplied by the size of the StarLink constellation is a big overall improvement!

I'm talking about extrapolating from any rocket launch. Sorry if I'm not clear, but I am talking about starship.

Nobody is trying to land humans on the reusable part of the rocket, this is the first stage returning under power. There is no elephant in the room, there is no room and no elephant either, so a lack of data is the expectation, not something worth mentioning.

Spacex plans to land humans on a reusable part of the rocket with the stardip.

Stardip?

They also plan to make a trip to Mars.

SpaceX has a lot of stuff on the drawing board and may or may not execute on any of that. For now what you have is a two stage to orbit vehicle that can be topped with a man rated capsule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon#NASA_Commercial_...

Good old 'parachute & splashdown'.

Starship is - for now - mostly fiction with some parts under test, if and when they plan to do their second stage controlled and re-usable landings you can be sure there have been very large numbers of landings without mishap or SpaceX will blow all their credit in one RUD.

So let's wait until it is 'on topic' before spouting off, there are plenty of possible reasons why this landing could have been aborted, a very large number of those possible reasons hinge on the state of the drone ship (platform stability, for instance) which might have worked just fine if the landing had been attempted over land on a pad.

Not sure if you're being serious or not, but the Shuttle was reusable (or at least, the part that carried the crew was).

Sorry, I'm I unclear. I'm talking about the star ship design of powered landing.

This comment is nonsensical.

Just like anything else, assuming SpaceX is able to build a functioning example of their Starship concept, they'll fly demonstration flights and iterate on the design and perform safety analyses until they're satisfied that it meets (at least) industry-standard safety margins (or until they see that it can't). I don't understand what you (apparently) think is fundamentally different about this particular technology vs. all the other machines humans put their trust in that are theoretically capable of killing them if something goes wrong.

There was no publicly available data that pointed humans can safely go to space and return inside a cannonball, eject and land via parachute yet Gagarin did just that.

Every new step in space race was pushing the limits of what was thought possible. Of course no one will take on these type of risks today but with enough testing the risk can be reduced and mitigated.

This is what it looks like to be part way along the path to human safety.

There is a ton of work ahead, but we are going in the right direction.

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