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)
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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!
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadEDIT: "Stage 1 boost back shutdown"
EDIT 2: "Loss of signal from Stage 1" (expected)
EDIT: All this is just from the radio transmissions broadcast on the SpaceX YouTube stream.
[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?
"Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho."
EDIT: Reddit seems to have comprehensive coverage http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2rrdha/rspacex_crs5_...
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.
EDIT: Or not. Looks like they wound down the SpaceX broadcast. NASA TV is still broadcasting the launch though.
[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.
NASA TV showed essentialy the same footage with a few more comments (http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html).
It was cool.
At about t+ 00:12:55
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7x-SumbynI&t=1975
Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho.
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.
But my thought is; holy crap they actually hit the target? Pretty impressive!
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.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553856479590359040
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.
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 ;)
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.
Or do they already do this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwS4YOTbbw
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/553857574005915648
What's amazing is the increase in accuracy with this attempted landing, the whole grid-fin thing seems to work exactly as planned.
"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