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

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Tonights Falson 9 is an RTLS. Always a bit more interesting than landing on the Drone ship.
 
Working late tonight, this may be one of those rare early morning launches I watch. On the other hand, working late risks my missing the Ariane 5 launch of JUICE in the morning.
 
Sooner Boomer said:
Why the shorter nozzle on the mvac?
Click to expand...
Agreed! I was really surprised by this. I figured F9 was set in stone by now.

Also the booster changed up the return burns; this time the re-entry burn was 1 engine & the landing burn was 3 engines. The commentator said this was due to/enabled by the nozzle change on the second stage...?
 
hobie1dog said:
technology is rapidly developing while we ignore the basic needs of humans.
Click to expand...
Technology is for solving problems. In other words: to satisfy needs.
Example: reusable rockets allowing wireless internet to be affordable for humans in remote areas.

I'd be happy to further discuss this but don't want to hijack this thread.
 
cvanc said:
Agreed! I was really surprised by this. I figured F9 was set in stone by now.

Also the booster changed up the return burns; this time the re-entry burn was 1 engine & the landing burn was 3 engines. The commentator said this was due to/enabled by the nozzle change on the second stage...?
Click to expand...
I'm intersted in why they did this too. Shorter nozzle on the MVac engine should be less efficient (although a bit lighter). The single engine entry burn with the 3 engine landing burn looked like a very smooth landing, but I didn't hear why they changed it up.
 
There was an explanation of the shorter vacuum nozzle extension during the webcast. Basically it's a choice they will be making when they don't need the performance of the full nozzle they've been flying. These are still getting thrown away after one use, so I can see just saving cost/materials when you can. In yesterday's "deep space update" from Scott Manley, that was his speculation as well.

Since this one was an RTLS launch, clearly they had some excess performance.

Also mentioned in that webcast was that the return of the first stage was done a little differently in that the entry burn was single engine and the landing burn was three engines. It was hard to tell from the video but the return and landing looked normal. This was the tenth flight of that first stage.
 
Charlie Garcia has some comments on the (surprisingly large) potential cost savings of the shorter nozzle, as well as a good overview of radiatively cooled nozzles in general:

 
BEC said:
Thanks for that. I hadn’t encountered him before, but seeing what he is into, perhaps I should have.
Click to expand...
He's a mentor of Joe Barnard (BPS Space), Joe's guru on structures and seemingly other topics. Very young but knows his stuff and works in industry. I wish he had more time to make videos.
 

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