SpaceX CRS-5 Launch | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX CRS-5 Launch

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91 pointsAYBABTME45 comments

"Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553855109114101760

I really want to see video of that! How hard? Explosion hard? Broken strut hard? Hole in the drone-ship hard?

Sorry, my KSP avatar took over there...

EDIT: I just used the term "drone-ship" legitimately in a sentence. We are living in the future.

We know where the target ship docks. I'm sure there will be photos of its state soon. I for one can't wait.

I'd think it was a good result if the stage came down within a few hundred yards of its target. But touching? Break out the champagne. They be able to dial it in for sure.

News outlets seem to be wrwriting this up as a crash, and therefore a failure.

But my thought is; holy crap they actually hit the target? Pretty impressive!

Exactly. SpaceX said this would be 50/50 at best so not a failure in that sense. They'll go again in a month with more hydraulic fluid and learn more. No doubt it'll take a whole series of tests to get this working reliably. Still impressive imho.

"Ship itself is fine. Some of the support equipment on the deck will need to be replaced..."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553856479590359040

"Didn't get good landing/impact video. Pitch dark and foggy. Will piece it together from telemetry and ... actual pieces."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553857574005915648

Don't military pilots say a carrier landing is much more difficult than landing on solid ground? Because the area is small, and not stable.

It seems like SpaceX have had to start out by attempting the most difficult possible landing scenario (for good safety reasons).

So they did OK, considering the difficulty.

Well, carriers have significantly shorter landing strips, require the pilot to either hit a cable or immediately take off again and usually move themselves to provide more favorable wind conditions to pilots.

SpaceX drone platform is easier in that respect, since the rocket is landing vertically and alot of those factors are mitigated. It's still a extremely hard and complex problem to solve - it IS rocket science after all ;)

It's an interesting comparison. At least, with a carrier you can go around, but I suppose that, for an aircraft landing on a carrier, the moment of irreversible commitment to landing maybe comes a second or two earlier than it does for SpaceX.

I don't know if the SpaceX vehicle is programmed to back off and wait if a big wave rocks the platform, but it could do that, wind permitting (edit: no, it couldn't, apparently, see reply by Denvercoder9). Fuel is limited, but it seems like it should be able to hover for a few seconds and wait for the platform to stabilize if necessary.

Anyway, they're not developing a sea-landing vehicle, so it's understandable if they don't spend so much time thinking about that. It's designed to land on solid ground, I think and the ground doesn't usually move, after all.

The thrust-to-weight ratio of an empty Falcon 9 is far too high to hover. Burn the engines too long and it'll just ascent again.

Their F9R test vehicle could hover. Isn't that essentially a mockup Falcon 9 first stage, but with only the centre engine?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwS4YOTbbw

I wonder how feasible / useful it would be to have realtime best-guess altitude from accelerometers / bouys / laser line-of-site relays etc to give the rocket up to date info to adjust thrust / vector to the drone-ship.

Or do they already do this?

Almost certainly they have really good GPS and inertial sensors on both. That should be enough. Any line of sight like laser or visual can't be trusted due to weather.

I doubt that heavy sea conditions are factored into design - I think currently the way to avoid that is simply not to launch when the weather is bad around landing and launch area. That's probably the cheaper and simpler solution.

I'd suspect the structure on a Falcon 9 isn't as strong as a F/A-18, relatively speaking. Also the F/A-18 engines don't provide downward thrust.

Wonder if an actuating deck would be worthwhile

"Grid fins worked extremely well from hypersonic velocity to subsonic, but ran out of hydraulic fluid right before landing."

"Upcoming flight already has 50% more hydraulic fluid, so should have plenty of margin for landing attempt next month."

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553963793056030721

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553964281025548289

For a few minutes we could see bubbles of liquid (water?) floating around in zero gravity in some kind of container, the whole scene being lit with pink lighting. Any idea what this is?

That's a camera from inside the fuel tank. The droplets started floating once you had engine cut-off, i.e.: it wasn't accelerating and therefore had no 'gravity' pushing the fuel to the bottom any more.

The world's most expensive lava lamp.

It was cool.

Liquid oxygen! Beautiful blue color, even more so when floating around in microgravity. I love that they light up the interior purely for our benefit. It's Elon's art piece.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553855109114101760

Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho.

I wasn't able to find much information about the details of the Stage 1 recovery. How long does it take for it to make it back? Will we know the outcome within a few minutes? (trying to decide if it makes sense to sleep)

EDIT: Reddit seems to have comprehensive coverage http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2rrdha/rspacex_crs5_...

From Reddit:

[10:05 UTC/5:05 EST] Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho. Aww, better luck next time.

SpaceX has said that they will announce the status of the first stage as soon as they know on the webcast. And if successful (and they have a good link to the barge), they'll also play a replay of the landing.

EDIT: Or not. Looks like they wound down the SpaceX broadcast. NASA TV is still broadcasting the launch though.

It'll be a few minutes. They said they'll show video of the landing on the stream if it is successful so it's worth sticking around until the stream is done.

Edit: hmmm, maybe that was wrong info, looks like they'll tell us about the landing on twitter. Probably time to head to bed I guess then.

It won't take long to reach the surface but I don't think we'll get the news of whether it was successful or not for some time...

I wish they provided a bit more narration with this. Would love to know more about what I'm looking at and know what is going on with Stage 1 recovery.

Indeed. Some live telemetry data to put on your second screen would also be cool.

NASA TV showed essentialy the same footage with a few more comments (http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html).

Anyone just see that piece of debris float away from the Dragon capsule? Is that normal?

At about t+ 00:12:55

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7x-SumbynI&t=1975

Looked like normal ice buildup.

Too bad the landing didn't work out yet but at least this will - hopefully - squelch the haters that keep repeating the mantra that SpaceX is merely re-using what was already known and not innovating. I figure they'll need a couple of tries at least to get that right, we're witnessing an enormous step on the path to access to space.

What's amazing is the increase in accuracy with this attempted landing, the whole grid-fin thing seems to work exactly as planned.

If they can nail this, and get it right...when the costs to space are driven down to what they're planning, it'll turn ultra-expensive efforts like the ISS into merely expensive efforts. Imagine if each country in the G-20 had a couple ISS-class stations up there plus a half dozen commercial ones as well!

Stage 1 separation. Here we go.

EDIT: "Stage 1 boost back shutdown"

EDIT 2: "Loss of signal from Stage 1" (expected)

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553855109114101760

"Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho."

Where is it? Is there a feed of its location, or the landing pad?

It's completed it's boost back burn, so it's on a trajectory towards the landing barge (positioned off shore a good distance).

EDIT: All this is just from the radio transmissions broadcast on the SpaceX YouTube stream.

From the Reddit post:

[T + 15:45] Jon - Mission success. We have data but not good enough to put on the live stream yet (poor connection). Updates here as they come!

Sounds good?

Bastards! I foolishly just assumed that it was going to launch at the same time as the earlier attempt last week (although 1 seconds thought would have made me realize that this was highly improbable...)

Dragon launch went flawlessly, looks like the first stage landing was close but not quite good enough:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553855109114101760

"Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho."

In any event, a great, very smooth launch. And folks at NASA must be breathing a sigh of relief since this is the first US resupply mission since the Antares launch failure.

Amazing ! A sunrise on space !

At the altitude the ISS and CRS-5 fly, a sunrise happens every ~90 minutes :)

If anyone missed it, here's the replay from T-1 minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7x-SumbynI#t=1140

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