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

davdue said:

So why did the Apollo capsule burn so violently then?

Click to expand...

Lots of fuel around (wires, velcro, seats, space suits, etc.) to burn. The pressure built up quickly in the closed capsule too.

My point was that in an open field the grass would burn (and anything else nearby) but the cloud of oxygen would not burn by itself. There would be no BIG fireball.

georgegassaway said:

This infamous film (from around the early-mid 1970's?) shows what LOX can do without what many would think of as "fuel".

Click to expand...

But in all cases it was still fuel, even if many wouldn't think of it as such.

I've never suggested that things wouldn't burn inside a cloud of oxygen, only that a cloud of oxygen itself would not burn as you said it would when you said, "a big fricking fire if any spark ignited the oxygen cloud".

I talked to someone who works with LOX. They said that at most there would be localized burning but at low pressure a fire on the ground is not going to sustain itself from the LOX. Without a lot of aerosolized fuel, there would be no big fireball. It's not like in the video, where it was the actual liquid or under high pressure. That was a low pressure vapor cloud.

The best example of this is the post about the cars catching fire at Pad 39A. The fact that they were in a pool of LOX on the ground and all the drivers had time to walk away from the vehicles shows that LOX by itself isn't an explosion danger even with a strong source of flame.

But unless SpaceX lets us know, it could have been LN2 rather than LOX.


Tony

Love that "Man from LOX" video . Never seen it before!

OverTheTop said:

Love that "Man from LOX" video . Never seen it before!

Click to expand...

Holly crap that was a pretty entertaining film. That is right up to the last scene; talk about a shocker, that was real!

mpitfield said:

That is right up to the last scene; talk about a shocker, that was real!

Click to expand...

I showed that scene to my wife, who is a nurse. She would have seen some bad burns in her time as an ICU nurse.

Above: an actual billboard on Interstate 4 in Orlando (photo by Ed Herrick)

So, uh, yeah, time to get back to launching rockets rather than busting and scrapping them. So, this will launch a Dragon spacecraft on a resupply mission to ISS. Interestingly, the booster will land at sea, not an RTLS as is usually possible to do with Dragon-1 launches.

There are theoretically 5 Falcon-9 flights in December, but realistically it's a matter of getting in 3 or 4. 4th being another Starlink mission.

One that should fly in December is the In-flight abort test of the Dragon-2, on a booster making its 4th and last flight (The abort will happen at Max-Q, the booster is expected to break up). It will launch from pad 39A, the only December launch planned from 39A, so no "waiting for a pad" problems for it.

Launch set for Wednesday, Dec 4th

"SpaceX is targeting Wednesday, December 4 for launch of its nineteenth Commercial Resupply Services mission (CRS-19) at 12:51 p.m. EST, or 17:51 UTC, from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. Dragon will separate from Falcon 9’s second stage about nine minutes after liftoff and attach to the space station on Saturday, December 7. A backup launch opportunity is available on Thursday, December 5 at 12:29 p.m. EST, or 17:29 UTC.

The Dragon spacecraft that will support the CRS-19 mission previously supported the CRS-4 mission in September 2014 and the CRS-11 mission in June 2017. Following stage separation, SpaceX will attempt to recover Falcon 9’s first stage on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean."

From spaceflightnow.com

Launch time: 1751 GMT (12:51 p.m. EST)
Launch site: SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the 21st Dragon spacecraft mission on its 19th operational cargo delivery flight to the International Space Station. The flight is being conducted under the Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA. Delayed from Oct. 15. [Nov. 19]

Looks like it slipped a day.
Weather and choppy seas.

Rescheduled for 12:29 PM, EST Thursday the 5th.

More from spaceflightnow.com

Here are some statistics on today's launch:

• 76th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket since 2010
• 84th launch of Falcon rocket family since 2006
• 1st launch of Falcon 9 booster B1059
• 61st Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral
• 46th Falcon 9 launch from pad 40
• 19th SpaceX CRS mission to the space station
• 21st flight of a Dragon spacecraft
• 8th time SpaceX has flown a reused Dragon capsule
• 10th Falcon 9 launch of 2019
• 12th launch by SpaceX in 2019
• 14th orbital launch based out of Cape Canaveral in 2019

A good launch, and landing on OCISLY.

Normally, a Dragon launch allows for an F9 booster to have the fuel to do an RTLS to land back at the Cape.

This article explains why it didn't today, a longer burn of the booster to save some fuel in the 2nd stage for a 6 hour orbital experiment of the 2nd stage after the Dragon separated.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/12/...iment-on-tap-after-falcon-9-launch-wednesday/

SpaceX will perform a multi-hour experiment on the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket after the launcher deploys a Dragon supply ship on the way to the International Space Station Thursday, gathering thermal data and other information to verify the vehicle’s ability to perform long-duration missions and inject payloads into demanding, high-energy orbits.

The experiment will use up some of the Falcon 9’s excess lift capacity, leaving an insufficient fuel reserve in the rocket’s first stage to perform maneuvers to return to a propulsive landing at SpaceX’s recovery site at Cape Canaveral. Instead, the first stage will aim for a landing on a SpaceX drone ship parked in the Atlantic Ocean.

“After Dragon is dropped off into orbit, the Falcon 9 second stage stage is going to continue on for a thermal demonstration,” said Jessica Jensen, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX. “So it’s going to be a long six-hour coast that then results in a disposal burn.

“We need extra performance for that demonstration, so basically what we have to do is burn the first stage for a longer period of time, so that the second stage can have its performance reserved for that demo,” Jensen said Tuesday. “Since we’re burning the first stage for a longer period of time, it doesn’t have as much fuel to come all the way back to the launch site. So we’ll do a partial boost-back, which is where the drone ship is located.”

This stuff never gets old.

Agreed!

I wonder why they can't use the Starlink satellites that are in orbit already to help with the video feed from the landing ship? Anyone know if this is even possible?

Perhaps they have to have more in orbit before they can network together and be useful, or perhaps the programming requires that they all be in orbit before working - although that seems like a silly way to start. Hopefully soon they'll be able to point the signal from the landing ship up and get at least 3 satellites in communication and the dropped video feed issue will be resolved forever.

The video cut-out that usually happens at landing is due to the exhaust vibrations affecting the uplink antenna on the ASDS. Has nothing to do with satellites in orbit, as long as there's ONE to point at.

georgegassaway said:

The video cut-out that usually happens at landing is due to the exhaust vibrations affecting the uplink antenna on the ASDS. Has nothing to do with satellites in orbit, as long as there's ONE to point at.

Click to expand...

Starlinks are substantially lower though, so the vibes would have to be a lot more powerful to misalign the beams as far.

I've often wondered why the landing stream isn't done from a drone held maybe half a mile off. The drone could maintain constant enough station to stream a 1080p signal reliably to the nearest ship, and would be far off enough to be unaffected by the descending booster's braking thrust. While not a super up close view, it would easily give a good view of the last few hundred feet of landing with the proper zoom lens.

Marc_G said:

I've often wondered why the landing stream isn't done from a drone held maybe half a mile off.

Click to expand...

Great idea but you'd have to double-hop the signal.

A drone can't possibly uplink directly to a geostationary satellite. It would have to send its' signal to a nearby satellite uplink dish. Said uplink can't be on the landing barge because of motion (and perhaps ionized exhaust affecting RF? dunno).

So you would need another ship, one not bothered by the gyrations of the landing, to hold the uplink dish more stably. This ship would presumably be manned, which raises safety questions.

(Hmmm. The barge is towed all the way out to sea by a tugboat, isn't it? Where does it go during landing? How far away is it required to be? Maybe an uplink could be put on that...?)

cvanc said:

Great idea but you'd have to double-hop the signal.

A drone can't possibly uplink directly to a geostationary satellite. It would have to send its' signal to a nearby satellite uplink dish. Said uplink can't be on the landing barge because of motion (and perhaps ionized exhaust affecting RF? dunno).

So you would need another ship, one not bothered by the gyrations of the landing, to hold the uplink dish more stably. This ship would presumably be manned, which raises safety questions.

(Hmmm. The barge is towed all the way out to sea by a tugboat, isn't it? Where does it go during landing? How far away is it required to be? Maybe an uplink could be put on that...?)

Click to expand...

Right. My idea was that the drone links to the tow ship and from there up to the satellite. My understanding is there are technical teams on the tow ship that inspect the rocket after landing, even if Octograbber now takes care of securing it to the deck.

Marc_G said:

I've often wondered why the landing stream isn't done from a drone held maybe half a mile off. The drone could maintain constant enough station to stream a 1080p signal reliably to the nearest ship, and would be far off enough to be unaffected by the descending booster's braking thrust.

Click to expand...

I've theorized this as well. Pretty much concluded they COULD do it relatively easily, they just don't wanna. The loss of signal on landing usually clears up shortly after landing (though the launch before last, it stayed steady all thru the landing, first time ever for live landing video). They have recording cameras, even GoPros, recording at various locations. After landing, the boarding crew sometimes gets the camera data, or perhaps it does not happen until getting back to port. They have released on-board videos of a few crashes recorded by those cameras, also some videos of some very neat landings that were not seen live due to the cut-out.

They could have a multicopter just a few hundred yards away from the barge, automatically set to record the GPS location (the exhaust would not affect it from even 200 feet away, they had a multicopter get pretty close to some "grasshopper" tests). No humans needed other than maybe to press "start" to begin the takeoff. Although I also theorized it could be fully automated to just take off after getting a signal that the Falcon-9 has launched, and fly to the desired location. It could even be stored aboard the ASDS, not necessarily the tug. There are actually ships at sea that have their own fully autonomous drones that "live" in their own protective shelters that open up to let them fly and close to protect (and auto-recharge them) after landing. Transmit the signal to the tug that tows the ASDS barge, which sits out about ten miles or so away for landing. And the Tug could then re-transmit/relay the signal to a geostationary Comsat. It's a tens of thousdands of dollars type of thing, not a hundreds of thousands of dollars thing (with the multicopter being the cheapest and easiest to replace part)

But, again, I have concluded they just don't wanna bother.

Video could be like this, but much closer. This was shot by a NASA research aircraft, during CRS-8 's landing (first successful landing at sea)

I remember that one. I couldn't watch it live due to timing but caught the replay a few hours later. Thanks for the memories!

JCSAT-18/KACIFIC1 MISSION

SpaceX is targeting Monday, December 16 for launch of JCSAT-18/Kacific1 from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The launch window opens at 7:10 p.m EST, or 00:10 UTC on December 17, and closes at 8:38 p.m. EST, 01:38 UTC on December 17. A backup launch window is available on Tuesday, December 17 that opens at 7:10 p.m EST, or 00:10 UTC on December 18, and closes at 8:38 p.m. EST, 01:38 UTC on December 18. The satellite will be deployed at approximately 33 minutes after liftoff.

Falcon 9’s first stage for the JCSAT-18/Kacific1 mission previously supported the CRS-17 mission in May 2019 and the CRS-18 mission in July 2019. Following stage separation, SpaceX will land Falcon 9’s first stage on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. Approximately 45 minutes after liftoff, SpaceX’s two fairing recovery vessels, “Ms. Tree” and “Ms. Chief,” will attempt to recover the two fairing halves.

Nice launch and landing. Anyone see any report about the fairing catch attempts?

Marc_G said:

Nice launch and landing. Anyone see any report about the fairing catch attempts?

Click to expand...

Per Twitter and SpaceflightNow - two misses. Fairings pulled out of the drink for possible refurbishment.

From SpaceX:

STARLINK MISSION
SpaceX is targeting Monday, January 6 at 9:19 p.m. EST, or 2:19 UTC on January 7, for its third launch of Starlink satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. A backup launch opportunity is available on Tuesday, January 7 at 8:57 p.m. EST, or 1:57 UTC on January 8.

Falcon 9’s first stage supported a Starlink mission in May 2019, the Iridium-8 mission in January 2019, and the Telstar 18 VANTAGE mission in September 2018. Following stage separation, SpaceX will land Falcon 9’s first stage on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. Approximately 45 minutes after liftoff, SpaceX’s fairing recovery vessel, “Ms. Tree,” will attempt to recover a payload fairing half.

Clear skies made for a great view from Tampa Bay - You could see the booster separate clearly-
And these are from my cell phone, from less than a 1/4 mile from the house in S Tpa - I even drove back and watched the booster land on the barge live Too cool

From Spaceflight Now:

01/13/2020 09:08

The Falcon 9 is returning to its hangar this morning, where the Crew Dragon capsule will be attached in readiness for Saturday's planned in-flight test of the emergency escape system. The rocket was lowered to the horizontal position on its transporter erector in the early hours of this morning.

SpaceX successfully conducted a test of the rocket's nine Merlin first stage engines this weekend.

Click to expand...

The upcoming Crew Dragon in-flight abort test sounds like it is going to be spectacular! The booster is expected to explode after the Dragon capsule escapes. Boom!

Unfortunately, it sounds like I’ll need to set an alarm to watch it. Looks like 8am Eastern, so 5am for me. Boo.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-destroyed-dragon-fire/