History-making SpaceX booster mostly destroyed in post-flight topple
collectspace.com
collectspace.com
It's definitely a loss, but not crippling in any way.
"We are planning to salvage the engines and do life leader inspections on the remaining hardware. There is still quite a bit of value in this booster. We will not let it go to waste."
Back then the go-to excuse for why other companies weren't pursuing reuse was that it'd take 10 flights to break even in terms of making up for the lost payload capacity. They claimed that since they were only launching like 10 times a year, this would make it so they don't have to produce any boosters for years, screwing things up for the assembly line. Back then SpaceX was still not as firmly established in the industry, so this was them basically claiming to know better than the "new kids".
Musk countered by roughly explaining the reductions they have to take (iirc 15% payload lost for the landing fuel and 10% for the extra hardware) and explained that with their costs, they've made up for that by the 3rd launch.
Of course since then megaconstellations came about and other geopolitical situations caught all the other big launch providers off guard leaving F9 as basically the only ride available with any spare launch capacity (even with Vulcan and Ariane 6 not too far off, they're fully booked for quite a while). Proving that the benefits outweigh the costs.
Of course, the new ones are better, so B1058 was outdated, which should lower its value.
They were spending 50 million per flight on these. Now they effectively pay 2 million.
It's flown 19 times so has already saved about 900 million in costs. And realistically.wqs going to get sunset at some point anyway.
Its dirty cheap to replace relatively.
> Falcon 9 B1058
> A portion of the record-setting Falcon 9 booster remains on board the Just Read the Instructions droneship. After its 19th launch and landing, the vehicle tipped over in rough seas during the transit back to Port Canaveral, and its top portion broke off.
> On May 30, 2020, B1058 launched Demo-2, the mission that returned orbital human spaceflight to the United States after the retirement of the space shuttle. It went on to fly hundreds of Starlink satellites and other payloads into orbit over its roughly 3.5-year flight history. It brought back the iconic NASA worm logo, and in the time since became a notable and sentimental booster for much of the spaceflight community.
> While its loss is disappointing, it's worth remembering that it flew 18 more missions than every expendable rocket that's ever flown, and the lessons learned from B1058 will contribute to further learnings about Falcon 9 and its recovery and reflight operations. Its 19 flights contributed to an incredible track record of over 250+ orbital class rocket landings, unparalleled by any other entity in the industry.
> Hopefully some of what remains can be put on display!
More generally, though, being a grammar nazi is silly. Dictionaries are defined by the common use of language and language is quite flexible, evolving, unique to individuals, and even used to be much more geographically continuous than it is today.[2]
1 - https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...
2 - Here's my favorite talk on the subject given by Chomsky, highly recommend a listen (especially to the poster of those dead comments): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdUbIlwHRkY
The freshly extruded meconium account names tell the story.
Kindof sad when you put it like this actually. I assumed it was a bot but I guess there's an HN captcha to prevent that? Well anyway I hope they're able to find some inner peace.
Especially when the correction is bogus, 'learnings' is proper English.
Still that spam was totally over the top.
The young American nation fell in lockstep with the Webster approach of a prescriptive dictionary whereby a self appointed gatekeeper decided for others what was and was not correct English.
They further pursued this path by embracing the doctrines of Strunk & White in The Elements of Style.
Meanwhile, back in the cradle of the English hodgepodge the multi-volume wall lining known as The Oxford English Dictionary took a descriptive path that described English as she is wrote.
"Proper English" is a car crash caused by a train wreck of Romance and other languages uttered by survivors wandering about a global incident site.
"We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language."
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...
Just because a word is in the dictionary it doesn't mean you can just drop it anywhere in a phrase. Languages tend to have more rules than that.
Nope, sorry. Same usage. Read until the end. It’s respectable to have a little humility in the face of contradictory evidence :)
> Languages tend to have more rules than that
This is a common misconception about language - to think that it has many strict rules. It’s a frankly elitist take and Chomsky, the most prominent contemporary linguist, disagrees. See my other comment for a talk by Chomsky to develop a better understanding of language
If/when you write documentation/work communication, you just throw words in and don't wonder if anyone will understand you?
Bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?
Every single person has a language that’s unique to them, and there’s a tremendous amount of both redundancy and context, cultural and situational, that need to exist to convey meaning.
Obviously increasing deviation from the “standard” lexicon or “laws” of universal grammar would at some point fail to convey any meaning whatsoever, but given the context of this discussion, we’re not discussing egregious violations - merely creative and valid use of existing words which, if you read the other comments, is already standard in industry.
My role frequently requires me to explain nuanced technical details to less technical folks or those with differing technical expertise. Even in the same building, between native English speaking coworkers using language in a fully “standard” way, when sharing ideas, there needs to be a back and forth discussion to reduce ambiguity and converge into a commonly held mental abstraction for whatever it is being discussed.
Don’t believe me? Why do you think legalese exists? Legalese should be the culmination of precision in conveying meaning, but even with legalese, it’s up to the value systems and judgements of courts and judges to interpret the law.
Language is complicated. Try not to be too uptight about it. Have a beer. Relax.
That's just you changing the topic and flamebaiting into arguing about grammar.
The matter is that OP hasn't made any great mistake (or any mistake, I believe) by saying 'learnings'. It was unnecessary and off topic to correct them. This should have ended there.
So it seems like they expected the risk of loss of the booster to be low, it just so happened that this time things went wrong.
They have previously delayed launches due to poor weather at the barge. So if that was the case this time, they would've just postponed, unless I guess they weren't really worried about losing a life leader booster that was apparently too old to be worth retrofitting with autoleveling legs.
Isn't it crazy that almost all of their competitors dump the whole first stage in the ocean every launch?
The newer boosters have self levelling legs which remove the lean caused by uneven crushing of the landing leg cores.
Sure enough, one of my friends I went with landed with his legs apart, despite the instructor yelling at him from the ground. He shattered the leg he landed on. (Parachutes weren't as gentle in those days.)
I expect it would be the same problem with the rocket. Any movement sideways when landing means the force is going to be on one leg. I wonder how they deal with that.
There's footage online of some of the early landings when the robot had not been implemented, where boosters slid across the barge in part due to landing at a bad angle.
If you need to optimize for both the launch weather and the landing site weather, your launch windows are even more limited. At the end of the day, losing an occassional booster isn't a reputational problem; losing the payload would be.
Musk betting his fortune on SpaceX and sticking it through even when they were close to bankruptcy was what ultimately blew the doors open for all the other new space companies and the increasing private investment in space technologies.