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

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The Crew-1 mission is scheduled to launch today at 7:27 PM, EST.
(NOTE - I originally posted 6:27 EST, converting to Central where I am. Thanks for the correction Huxter).

Possibility of delay due to weather. CURRENT forecast is 16% chance of rain, 60% cloud cover. So it looks like weather probably will not be a problem (they don't worry about cloud cover %. Mostly about chance of lightning and rain).

It is the first operational launch of a NASA crew of four astronauts. Crew info: https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-1-astronauts

Can be seen on NASA TV , and SpaceX's webcast.

Webcast is LIVE now.


Also on Space.com (and others but i'm not going to look up others).
https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-1-nasa-astronaut-launch-day-webcast
The booster will land on the landing barge "Of Course I Still Love You".

A VERY high res image of the Falcon & Dragon 2. Original link: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=50525.0;attach=1987852;image

index.php


Hi-res image of 2nd stage, note solar cell details (black) on the Dragon trunk. Original link: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Crew-1-scaled.jpeg
Crew-1-scaled.jpeg
 
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I would love to be the fly on the wall in the Boeing executive board room this morning. Almost 8 billion blown and they have yet to even have a successful test launch of their vehicle. And now SpaceX has done it twice for less money. Knock on wood or maybe the keyboard but I wish them well. Musk may not do electric cars very well but he seems to have a crackerjack team at SpaceX. I envy those folks working there and I wish them all the luck...Real Buck Rogers stuff 👍
 
:) Not so much as a knock more like hey cars should be a lot easier to do they don't have to go 17,000 plus miles per hour in a vacuum where so much as a pin hole can be fatal. He's been working with cars since 2003 that's about 17 years the same for SpaceX. Look where they are today you would think that by now the cars would be flying like the Jetsons but they are even having problems keeping dealerships open. But it may be apples and oranges because we see cars differently than space ships. Just my view they do do good work.
 
I was in Cocoa this weekend, didn't stay through Sunday eve as I had other plans, but I did have dinner on Saturday just across the water from OCISLY, and the booster from the most recent launch laying horizontal on the pier next to it. Pretty cool to see. Was in Orlando for the launch, and we had very heavy cloud cover come through right at the same time and didn't get to see it. Should have stayed in Palm Beach Gardens as they had a great view from here.
 
Two Falcon-9 launches this weekend.

Today, Nov 21st:

At Vandenberg, Sentinel 6A Michael Freilich mission, launching at 12:17 PM EST (9:17 AM PST).

Booster will make a RTLS landing only a few hundred feet from its launch pad.

And Sunday Nov 22nd, at 9:56 PM EST, from Cape Canaveral, Starlink launch #15. Landing on the ASDS barge OCISLY.

Generic SpaceX link for mission info and video webcast:

https://www.spacex.com/launches/

Actual video link for the Sentinel 6A launch:

 
Video of the Vandy launch was unusually good, but I didn't care for the coverage otherwise. In particular, the landing coverage was very poor. I was watching the Spacex link, but it obviously was not a normal Spacex feed.
 
davel said:
Video of the Vandy launch was unusually good, but I didn't care for the coverage otherwise. In particular, the landing coverage was very poor. I was watching the Spacex link, but it obviously was not a normal Spacex feed.
Click to expand...
The camera placement for the two outside at Vandenberg was lousy. They kept talking about what a wonderful view they had of the launch & return but the online viewer was never shown what they were seeing. Disappointing.
 
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CRS-21 launch is scheduled for Sunday Dec 6th, at 11:17 AM EST.

bR4VXEG.jpg


This is a resupply mission. It is noteworthy as the first use of the cargo version of the Dragon-2 spacecraft. Some external differences from the crew version are that it does not have Super-Draco engines as used for abort motors, so the fairings that normally house them are totally enclosed with no exposed nozzles. Since it will not have abort capacity, it does not need 4 fins either. However it does keep two fins because those are covered on one side with solar cells. Internally, no life support, no crew seats, maximizing space for cargo. Article here:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/spacexs-new-cargo-spacecraft-may-make-its-debut-on-saturday/



UPDATE - a new infographic I found. Created by Tony Bela https://www.tonybela.com/
130116555_10159488508004363_5389220618068153431_n.jpg
 
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And....sometime in the next few days (?), the first test flight of "Starship", from Boca Chica. Now, that was supposed to happen over a yer ago. Late September 2019, Elon Musk had a huge press event standing near prototype #1, talking about it flying in 1 to 2 months (by end of November 2019), doing a belly flop and landing transition flight.

Below left, the wrinkly prototype SN#1 September 2019, and to its right SN #8 (fins still a bit wrinkly, but the body/tanks are a whole lot better)
EG1MvTS.jpg

Anyway, the badly wrinkled prototype turned out be totally unsuitable to fly, and it was pressure-tested to destruction. Several prototypes, intentional destructive tests, unintentional destructions, and one short hop without a nose or fin surfaces, the 8th prototype seems to finally be ready to fly to do the belly flop and landing test. Was supposed to fly sometime this past week but was delayed for various reasons. Was supposed to fly today but called off days ago. Maybe fly (?) Monday the 7th, but more updated info indicates probably not. So, maybe sometime in the next week.

It is supposed to fly to 12.5 kilometers (about 41,000 feet), and transition into a "belly flop" descent, as the orbital version is supposed to do for re-entry. That will be it's second-biggest trick, if it does that and is controllable so it steers on the path to approach the landing area (it will be over the ocean for most of the flight).

The biggest and most important trick, will be to transition from belly-flop to vertical mode and land safely on the landing pad. I am very unsure of how well that is going to go. That aerodynamic configuration is not stable in both axes to flip upright for a tail-down descent. Also, I left out that the transition will be done VERY late, in the last kilometer, possibly the last 1000 feet, with very little margin for error (if it wobbles in yaw, aerodynamically unstable and could have yaw/roll coupling issues, and thus loses a few hundred feet before stabilizing upright, it may be too low to land safely).

Here's some interesting artwork from https://www.tonybela.com/ It shows a lot of things about the configuration and flight plan.

E8lsUHP.jpg


And here's a CGI video of what is supposed to happen. Was originally to be a 20 km flight, but that got reduced to 15 km, and just days ago 12.5 km

 
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My attitude about the flight test is that in this day and age success on the first flight would not be astonishing and that with this being rocket science a failure on the first test would not be astonishing.
 
modeltrains said:
My attitude about the flight test is that in this day and age success on the first flight would not be astonishing and that with this being rocket science a failure on the first test would not be astonishing.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it could absolutely go either way. I hope they don’t lose the prototype on the first hop. This thing is going to be amazing to watch no matter what happens.
 
Joined the livestream a minute late, but it was still cool. The falcon 9 flight was the 100th successful flight of a Falcon 9 and the 68th successful recovery of a first stage booster. When this thread started, the were still attempting booster recoveries and hadn’t yet been successful. Now they’ve done it 68 times. Wow!
 
The Dragon 2 sounds like some great upgrades. I miss the good ol days when the Falcon9 would slam that barge pretty hard - there were some great videos! :p Now, it looks easy...
 
Huxter said:
The Dragon 2 sounds like some great upgrades. I miss the good ol days when the Falcon9 would slam that barge pretty hard - there were some great videos! :p Now, it looks easy...
Click to expand...

Yeah, it’s been awhile since we’ve seen one crash into the barge, explode, and fall into the sea. Maybe we can relive some of that fun this week with the Starship prototype! It looks like pulling out of the bellyflop dive at the last possible second should be exciting.
 
Today's Falcon-9 was the 100th successful launch (one failed launch, and one blew up on pad).

The 68th to successfully land.

As for the upcoming Starship test (maybe Monday, maybe later), here is my main concern if the transition fails. A fundamental design issue that has no easy quick fix. All of the early Falcon-9 landing attempts that failed, had some little issue that was able to be solved quickly and easily. Run out of hydraulic fluid (open system) too soon, increase size of hydraulic tank. Have a leg fail to deploy due to ICE, add heaters (or whatever they did). "Sticky" throttle valve, tweak valve to not be sticky.

But if the Falcon-9's actual grid fins been "wrong" for whatever reason, it would h have been a year of more to redesign and fabricate new ones from scratch. And that is more along the lines of my concern about Starship, an inherent design problem that does not involve easily tweaked or easily/quickly revised parts.

That there may be aerodynamic interactions that SpaceX has not accounted for correctly. When it does that last-moment flip from belly flop to vertical, they will have the lower fin.wings fold up. Which will make it like a, well, 4 fined rocket missing TWO fins, so there's two fins 90 degrees apart, falling backwards. If there is any side-slip in yaw, those two fins will cause a yaw/roll interaction to make it roll. It has zero aerodynamic controls to counteract roll (those surfaces are hinged parallel to the body) . Can the three vectored-thrust engines counteract that? I hope so. It is in theory aupposed to be able to land on a single engine....which would not have any roll control whatsoever. It does have RCS thrusters, but those could turn out to be overwhelmed by aerodynamic yaw/roll interaction forces.

Of course this all presumes that everything is fine until that point. But the belly flop is so unique, totally untested in the real world. will it actually respond to the simple changes in fold angles of the rear wings and canards like they expect, to control the descent path accurately enough to make it to the desired 3-dimensional X-Y-Z point in the sky to begin the transition to land at the landing pad. That would be so double-disappointing if the belly flop control does not work out, because that would probably mean no useful data for the even more critical landing transition phase.

So, this is the big thing I've been waiting to see the results for, for over a year. The short hops didn't excite me much, other than the squat "Hopper" in summer of 2019, since it was so bizarre and literally was a flying water tank. It's the transition from belly flop to vertical landing, accurately and >reliably< , that is critical for this. Otherwise, probably require yet another redesign (for awhile they had a new design every year), or even put the whole project in jeopardy.

5zmbephhg3j51.jpg
 
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They will try to launch Starship SN#8 SOMETIME Tuesday. Sometime between 8 AM and 5:30 PM Central time (other info says ends at 5 PM Central). Actually, those are ROAD CLOSURE times. For safety reasons they ought not to even begin to fuel it until the road (that literally runs beside the launch site) is closed and evacuation confirmed. Figure it would be morel likely to fly after noon than in the morning, but we'll see (if it flies Tuesday).

If it is postponed, they'd go for Wednesday. Weather looks good for both days.

SpaceX's webcast is here:



Everyday Astronaut's live cast starting at 9 Central:



At the other static firings and test hops at Boca Chica, there has NEVER been any communication from SpaceX when anything would happen. Spectators start to suspect something may happen soon as the rocket gets fueled, and something may be imminent when there is a lot of venting. So it would be interesting if SpaceX's own live feed has an actual T-Minus time listed, even if they do have holds. Which if they did that, would mean a countdown. Also the other "webcasters" and spectators at the site would know when it is supposed to take off instead of waiting and waiting and waiting for ignition or never anything.

Otherwise....the only way to know when it launches, without watching the screen for hours, would be to have your computer's volume on high and go about doing other stuff, until there is sound of ignition, or sound of the Everyday Astronaut squealing (though that could lead to many false alarms).

I know, there will be other live videos too, such as NASA Spaceflight and a few others. I won't go digging those up, maybe someone else would like find and post.
 

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