SpaceX Falcon 9 historic landing thread (1st landing attempt & most recent missions)

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The rest of the webcast isn't all that exciting so far, but it is kind of cool to watch the second stage tracing out its polar orbit --- coming up on Antarctica right now.
 
Watching the flight, my 9 year-old son says, "Cool! They put a GoPro on it!"

Lol! The landing video was a lot more stable than the typical 808 camera taped to the side of the airframe. And there wasn't all the annoying scratching sound of the recovery harness...
 
Last night I saw the post for the YouTube videos so I decided to set an alarm on my phone, just in case, although I knew I'd be thinking about it and wouldn't miss it.

This morning I was in the yard with my son, doing some work, and music starts playing from my pocket. What the heck? I pulled out my phone and looked at it and saw the alarm for SpaceX launch. Woo-HOO!! Thanks last night Me, you rock!

So I came inside to take a break and watched the awesome launch and landing. Thanks for the links George!!
 
Beautiful California day for a rocket launch (And landing). :)

Your right about that, !st sunny day in a while. Luckily for me I live less than a hour away from the launch site and have watched several launches over the years. Today we parked on a road that gets to within 1 mile of the launch. Was a packed house with literally thousands of cars full of rocket watchers. Tried for a rocket picture but the Iphone always has a hard time focusing

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Your right about that, !st sunny day in a while. Luckily for me I live less than a hour away from the launch site and have watched several launches over the years. Today we parked on a road that gets to within 1 mile of the launch. Was a packed house with literally thousands of cars full of rocket watchers. Tried for a rocket picture but the Iphone always has a hard time focusing

Thats great! I'm in CA, and I want to drive down some time to see a launch from Vandenberg.
 
I just noticed something that apparently is nominal, because I reviewed a few previous launches and it occurred as well. If you look at the middle, assuming fill hose, whatever remains in that hose appears to be concentrated enough that it ignites from the exhaust plume. Anyone know what that is?

Here are a couple of pics from today's Iridium 1 launch and a couple from the JCSAT16 and CRS9 launches showing the same phenomenon.







 
Thats great! I'm in CA, and I want to drive down some time to see a launch from Vandenberg.

Well, with several more Iridium-NEXT launches from Vandy coming up, you'll have more opportunities soon. Also some other launches from there. The ultimate would be for when they start doing RTLS landings there, so you could get two rocket events for the price of one. The Landing Pad may be done by now, no "official" permission for an RTLS landing there yet. But if SpaceX games things for that like they did for the first RTLS at the Cape, SpaceX won't go for permission long in advance of a planned landing (at least not seek a public reply long in advance), they'll hold things close until shortly before they want to do one.

Also, they can't do RTLS for just any launch, since it requires extra fuel to be able to do a Boost Back burn. The payload mass has to be low enough to allow for enough excess fuel to be left over, to do RTLS. And I do not know for example if the Iridium-NEXT payloads are too heavy to allow for RTLS, or not.

At least they FINALLY got the current version of JRTI to pay for itself today! Technically it's leased and heavily modified, but still.... it finally "caught a lot of money".

I just noticed something that apparently is nominal, because I reviewed a few previous launches and it occurred as well. If you look at the middle, assuming fill hose, whatever remains in that hose appears to be concentrated enough that it ignites from the exhaust plume. Anyone know what that is?

Gaseous oxygen trapped inside. I think that is part of the Liquid Oxygen loading line which fills the second stage (there were a lot of times before launch when gaseous oxygen was vented directly from the vehicle for a few seconds - check the technical webcast from before liftoff). But that is why it burns, leftover gaseous oxygen (even though it goes in as a liquid, once disconnected for launch the remaining liquid oxygen inside begins to boil out into gaseous form. though there may also some still in liquid form in the hose by liftoff.). Pretty common for every launch, a planned expendable item to replace.
 
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Quote: Gaseous oxygen trapped inside. I think that is part of the Liquid Oxygen loading line which fills the second stage (there were a lot of times before launch when gaseous oxygen was vented directly from the vehicle for a few seconds - check the technical webcast from before liftoff). But that is why it burns, leftover gaseous oxygen (even though it goes in as a liquid, once disconnected for launch the remaining liquid oxygen inside begins to boil out into gaseous form. though there may also some still in liquid form in the hose by liftoff.). Pretty common for every launch, a planned expendable item to replace. End Quote. (apologies, I can't get the iOS app to quote this morning)

But what burns? Oxygen is just part of combustion. There has to be something for it to oxidize.
 
But what burns? Oxygen is just part of combustion. There has to be something for it to oxidize.



There is most likely a tiny little bit of un-burnt RP1 in the exhaust plume of the rocket and the oxygen venting is enough to ignite it. You can see it in the night time launch also, post # 142.
 
There is most likely a tiny little bit of un-burnt RP1 in the exhaust plume of the rocket and the oxygen venting is enough to ignite it. You can see it in the night time launch also, post # 142.

There is enough ambient oxygen for any remaining RP1 to burn. That's what generates at least part of the plume. If I had to guess, I would think they purge the RP1 line with nitrogen in a way that ensures a controlled burn off.

Reinhard
 
I was lucky enough to watch the Iridium 1 launch in person from about 4 miles away. It was amazing to hear and feel the Falcon 9.
 
Launch pic from Saturday:

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They have begun to give the first stage cores larger ID numbers. While this was F9 launch #30, that's core #29, which hopefully will have a few more launches coming up.

And this is just a damn cool close-up of the engines and stuff....

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I would expect sometime in the next few days, some images and perhaps video from cameras onboard JRTI to be released by SpaceX.

At last report, JRTI may arrive in Long Beach Tuesday morning.
 
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The air is very clear so perhaps I can see it from the window where I work? Do you have a location where they dock in LB?
 
I love how this picture shows just how big the Falcon 9 is when you look at the people standing under it. When it's landing on the barge it looks much smaller than this.

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