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

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Building was at Port Canaveral. From a post by "FutureSpaceTourist" on NSF's SpaceX section:

Report on the fire: https://www.wesh.com/article/firefighters-extinguish-fire-on-roof-of-spacex-building/10314885

Includes this SpaceX statement:

“This afternoon a small fire occurred on the roof of a SpaceX building at Port Canaveral. Thanks to the Canaveral Fire Rescue and the Brevard County Fire Rescue, who responded within minutes, the fire was extinguished. There was no damage to any SpaceX equipment or hardware as a result of the fire. The cause of the fire is under investigation.”

And this update from Florida Today: https://www.floridatoday.com/story/...averal-caused-building-maintenance/485428001/

A crew was using a grinder on the side of the building Thursday or Friday. A hot ember sparked from that work landed on a piece of wood, and eventually ignited. It was accidental, he said.


spacex-fire-freeze-2j-1500252376.jpg
 
Tonight on Instagram, Elon Musk said the Falcon Heavy maiden launch would be in November.

Has he ever said anything that specific before? That's still 4 months from July, but I wonder how firm that is? (TWSS)
 
Musk's date predictions for SpaceX are historically inaccurate / optimistic. This does seem to be the first time they have "officially" said it is less than 6 months away, I'll take it more seriously when they say it is 2 months away (but I do not expect them to say that in September).

Around January-February of this year, I figured FH would finally fly First Quarter of 2018.

Still think so. Would love to be wrong.... if it is before then.

Too many things can crop up from 4 months away to push it into 2018. And in the last few years at the Cape, Thanksgiving thru the end of the year tends to have more slips than any other time of year. December is almost a half-month.

I'm leaving for NARAM later today, so may not be posting anything till I get back. CRS-12 launch planned for August 10th, last I checked.
 
So.......the range at KSC is operational again.

Falcon-9 rocket was test-fired Thursday, set for launch Monday the 14th, at 12:31 PM EDT.

Launching CRS-12, a Dragon spacecraft to resupply ISS.

Weather is 70% "Go" for the launch Monday.


rEOXWUb.png
 
Reminder, scheduled launch tomorrow (Monday the 14th), at 12:31 PM EDT.

Booster will do an RTLS landing back at the Cape, at LZ-1

CRS-12 presskit: https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/crs12presskit.pdf


Since this is a launch for NASA, NASA TV should have it. I try to watch both that and the webcast.

Webcast:

[video=youtube;vLxWsYx8dbo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLxWsYx8dbo[/video]


Patch:

L5T96nc.jpg
 
Launch in about 2 minutes.

Liftoff.

Staging.

NASA TV followed BoostBack burn.

Grid Fins deployed.

NASA TV showing a lot of the booster from long range cameras.

Entry Burn. Done.

Landing burn.

SAFE LANDING!

Second stage shutdown. In good orbit.

Dragon separated from 2nd stage. Solar Panels deploying.
 
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For the first time I watched the NASA channel simultaneously as the web cast.
The web cast is about 4 minutes arrears of the NASA channel, and with different views.
The NASA channel had a good up the rear view of the reentry burn start.
Quite amazing watch it start out as a squarish circle and flare into an oval.
I'll be watching both from now on.
 
The last thing they said on the Spaceflightnow.com webcast was "solar panels deploy in about one minute." and then... pfft. nothing.

Was the webcast supposed to end that abruptly?
 
It didn't end abruptly, and they did show the solar panel deploy. I was having drop outs on the SpaceX feed, needed to reload the page to get it back. Perhaps that happened to you at the end..
 
Re-entry burn begins with center engine then two outboards ignite. So that is why it starts the flame looks round then looks like a wide oval or rounded rectangle. Then later they shut down the outboards, and finally the center engine. Better vehicle control that way so the center engine gimbaling at full thrust can handle any yaw perturbations by brief uneven ignition to full thrust and uneven shutdown of the outboards. When they have done hot "suicide burn" landings on 3 engines (when payload mass leaves very little fuel for a landing attempt), they have done it the same way.

On the SpaceX webcast, they did show the panels deploying.

BTW - my time lag was that the NASA TV feed was about 2 seconds behind (watching it "live", but recording on a DVR that had to convert the signal, so that might add a second). But I did have to keep advancing the SpaceX Youtube scrollbar to the far right to keep it updated (I knew it was behind when before launch the NASA TV feed showed a countdown clock that was ahead of SpaceX's webcast). Sometimes you can hear them say "landing burn has started", but nothing on video till a few seconds later.

Odd thing, while the NASA feed was behind by about 2 seconds, it showed the LANDING before the SpaceX webcast did, at least as far as the onboard Falcon camera. I have noticed this before, the onboard Falcon camera is several seconds behind real time. Signal probably gets "bounced around" a few times plus whatever on the fly processing is going on, more so than with the fixed ground cameras.


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It didn't end abruptly, and they did show the solar panel deploy. I was having drop outs on the SpaceX feed, needed to reload the page to get it back. Perhaps that happened to you at the end..

Maybe it depended on which feed you were watching. I was on the Spaceflightnow web window. Just a few seconds after they said, "one minute until solar panels deploy" the feed stopped and only showed colored bars. It didn't show the panels deploy, they didn't say goodbye, it just stopped.
 
Maybe it depended on which feed you were watching. I was on the Spaceflightnow web window. Just a few seconds after they said, "one minute until solar panels deploy" the feed stopped and only showed colored bars. It didn't show the panels deploy, they didn't say goodbye, it just stopped.

Seems like an issue with SpaceFlightNow's own feed that was copying the SpaceX feed. Sort of like complaining that a copy of a copy of a copy is not as good as the original, or even the first copy.

I never watch SpaceFlightNow for a SpaceX launch. Sometimes beforehand, when the SpaceX webcast has not begun yet, and the launch is in doubt due to weather. But not after the SpaceX webcast is running on Youtube.
 
Didn't SpaceX used to have its own video stream? I remember on previous launches having three windows open - The SpaceX feed, the youtube narrated feed and the youtube technical feed. Or is my brain having an bad day?
 
Did they ever post a landing video for the barge landing for the flight before this one? As I recall it was a particularly hot landing and the video cut out during what was apparently some last minute maneuvers with the resumption of video showing safe landing but near edge of the deck. I remember wanting to see the whole thing but never saw a video.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3000 using Tapatalk
 
Seems like an issue with SpaceFlightNow's own feed that was copying the SpaceX feed. Sort of like complaining that a copy of a copy of a copy is not as good as the original, or even the first copy.

I never watch SpaceFlightNow for a SpaceX launch. Sometimes beforehand, when the SpaceX webcast has not begun yet, and the launch is in doubt due to weather. But not after the SpaceX webcast is running on Youtube.

That's the one I know I can find quickly and whose address my computer (and me) has memorized. Since my computer froze up and needed to be rebooted, causing me to miss the launch because it was taking so FREAKING LONG to restart and boot Chrome, I was lucky to see any of it let alone take the time to go look for a better feed.

What addresses do you use to find other feeds?
 
Does anyone know what they are doing with the second stages, are they d-orbiting them at all or letting gravity and time take it's effect?

I recall reading that some of the stages from the Apollo program are still floating around up there. I would think that there should be, if not already, a focus on mitigating space junk with these more modern rockets.
 
I pulled up the hidef SpaceX/YouTube stream as well as the hidef NasaTV stream. Gathered quite a crowd, neither stream dropped. Saw the panels fully extend, then we all hit lunch.
 
Did they ever post a landing video for the barge landing for the flight before this one? As I recall it was a particularly hot landing and the video cut out during what was apparently some last minute maneuvers with the resumption of video showing safe landing but near edge of the deck. I remember wanting to see the whole thing but never saw a video.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3000 using Tapatalk

I asked the same thing just after that landing. My guess is that SpaceX is not releasing it to the public since it was not a perfect landing.
 
That's the one I know I can find quickly and whose address my computer (and me) has memorized. Since my computer froze up and needed to be rebooted, causing me to miss the launch because it was taking so FREAKING LONG to restart and boot Chrome, I was lucky to see any of it let alone take the time to go look for a better feed.

What addresses do you use to find other feeds?

Well, for Monday's launch I used this message for the webcast link:

https://www.rocketryforum.com/showt...p-most-recent-missions)&p=1718823#post1718823

Which is a few posts up from this one, either I or someone else nearly always posts the webcast link in this thread.

But if you want a bookmarked site, then use this on the SpaceX website:

https://www.spacex.com/webcast

They usually post the upcoming launch's webcast link there.

As for second stages, they usually actively de-orbit them if there is enough fuel, while most others naturally decay. A small number have either used up their fuel or by the time the stage reached apogee on a synchronous orbit launch, the stage's batteries had died and/or too much LOx had vented off. But in more recent flights they have extended the 2nd stage's electrical power supply among other mods to allow restarts hours later rather than around 45 minutes previously. And it takes very very little delta-vee from a short burn to de-orbit from a highly elliptical orbit such as the ones for Geostationary Transfer orbits, "just" do a tiny retrograde burn at apogee, which dips the perigee into the atmosphere (Have done that in Kerbal Space Program a number of times, mostly for aerobraking. Even RCS burns are effective enough for some situations if the KSP ship had enough RCS fuel left).


And... here's a photo posted on the SpaceX Flckr account:

KJ8SGiv.jpg
 
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Thanks George. I really hadn't had any trouble with the Spaceflightnow feed until now. I'll probably switch and use the direct SpaceX feed from now on.
 
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