Not sure what else I can say beyond this is seriously cool.
Watch it again: SpaceX's boomerang rocket lands on robo-sea-barge
The remarkable engineering achievement of landing a rocket on a ship was repeated for a second time earlier today – and under more difficult circumstances. While delivering a comms satellite to a geosynchronous orbit at 22,000 miles above the Earth, SpaceX succeeded in landing the lower stage of the rocket safely on its barge …
COMMENTS
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Friday 6th May 2016 23:14 GMT JeffyPoooh
"I wonder if JeffyPoooh's happy now?"
LOL.
Regretfully, I missed the 'live' stream this time, but the YouTube version seems to indicate that the live video stream from the barge remained connected even while the booster landed.
Exposure was rubbish, but that's not Comms and thus not my department.
So congratulations; the SpaceX Comms people managed to do Comms successfully this time, which is very nice. So yes, I'm happy.
So what changed this time? Did they use Floaty McFiberOptic Cablesface? A different perhaps L-band SatCom link? A UHF or L-band RF link to the Mothership? So many solutions. They found one. Apparently.
By the way, last month's landing was 'broadcast' with live streaming video from a helicopter. ...Which made me smile. An 'interim solution' while the new Booster-Landing-resistant Comms system was commissioned.
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Saturday 7th May 2016 00:17 GMT SkippyBing
Re: "I wonder if JeffyPoooh's happy now?"
I suspect the live helicopter feed is only a daytime option rather than being an interim measure while they sorted out the comms link from the barge. Yes you can fly helicopters over the sea at night but, having done it lots, there are plenty of reasons not to if it's not a matter of life and death.
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Saturday 7th May 2016 03:05 GMT Sorry that handle is already taken.
Re: "I wonder if JeffyPoooh's happy now?"
By the way, last month's landing was 'broadcast' with live streaming video from a helicopter. ...Which made me smile. An 'interim solution' while the new Booster-Landing-resistant Comms system was commissioned.
Some of their very earliest live landing attempts had chopper/UAV footage so I don't think it's an interim solution
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Sunday 8th May 2016 11:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "I wonder if JeffyPoooh's happy now?"
They lose the comms link because a rocket exhaust chucks out masses of ionized gas which is opaque to radio frequencies. I guess it held up better this time because the very fast landing meant there was less ionized gas blocking the transmission path.
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Sunday 8th May 2016 14:00 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: "I wonder if JeffyPoooh's happy now?"
AC "They lose the comms link because a rocket exhaust chucks out masses of ionized gas which is opaque to radio frequencies."
SpaceX is very high tech, but they're not using 'Plasma Drives' for their boosters. Chemical rockets aren't hot enough to ionize their exhaust. If this did occur, then the SpaceX Falcon booster, descending through its own rocket exhaust, wouldn't be able to receive GPS signals; but it obviously does. Apollo era CM reentry is not similar to this.
The better theory is that they were naively trying to use Ka-band satcom with very narrow beamwidth antenna. The antenna tracking couldn't keep up with the barge movement, or the mount vibration, and the links was lost.
If you try to judge the timing, beware the latency of digital video. Apparent cause-and-effect can be inverted by several seconds due to latency. When such a link is dropped, you'll lose several seconds of digital video in the various buffers. On any digital video time scale, the cause might not appear in the successfully transmitted video.
What this means is you can't look at the live streaming video and say, 'See, as soon as the rocket enters the video frame...', because when the link is dropped, the latency consumes additional duration of buffered digital video. This detail can confuse the unwary.
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Friday 6th May 2016 23:15 GMT Mark 85
If he's not, that's not our problem. They did a successful "up" and then brought it back intact. That's more important that video, IMO. Well done SpaceX. Tall, cold ones are in order for this.
Edit.. I guess I posted this at the same time he posted his. This good all around then. Have a cold one JeffyPooh.
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Friday 6th May 2016 23:29 GMT Aslan
Much better view here
Much better view here, fullscreen, with several more camera angles and technical chatter.
https://youtu.be/1lYZLxr3L4E?t=29m18s
Everyone's right, getting that bright it did initially look like a crash, but I think the key is instead of one booster doing about a three second burn, I believe it was 3 doing a 5 second burn? Much brighter than previous landing burns, much later giving the cameras less time to compensate. Looking at it live last night, the rocket came down over the barge in a cloud of fire so bright nothing could be seen. Then suddenly the cloud went out and in the inky blackness was the silhouette of the rocket. I was amazed.
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Saturday 7th May 2016 21:51 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Much better view here
"I can't help but wonder if my sense of awe & wonder was akin to what people felt watching the Apollo programme footage back in the day. "
As someone old enough to have seen the Apollo launches I can say with some confidence "YES IT BLOODY WELL IS!!!!!!!"
The bit I still can't quite get over is the full HD live (FFS, LIVE!!!) coverage of the entire launch all the way to the "top". With the Apollo and earlier craft we got to see sometimes poor coverage of the launch and then nothing else until, maybe, there might some grainy black & white coverage from orbit.
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Sunday 8th May 2016 12:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Much better view here
Whilst I feel the same as you I think we are in the minority. In the Apollo days (well up to Apollo 14) everyone watched. I know I was riveted to the TV when a mission was on and I don't think I was that much more of a geek then. Now people want and get a new thrill every day (cute kittens on the internet) so this doesn't captivate most people that much.
The pictures this time round are so much better, but what they don't convey is the size of that booster standing on the deck. It was only when I showed my daughter a picture of a person standing beside a 50 meter tall recovered booster that she got the sense of scale and said wow.
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Sunday 8th May 2016 14:22 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: Much better view here
"...full HD live (FFS, LIVE!!!) coverage..."
Essentially live.
If you watch the same 'Live' video stream via two different sources, then you might find cases where there's huge differences in the latency.
We once watched some newsworthy rocket launch via 'Live' streams. Because it was interesting, I backed up the PC with an iPhone using mobile data. Two independent sources, networks, codecs and devices. Delta latency (just the delta!) was more than 45 seconds. The launch was up and away and arcing over, while the other 'Live' stream was still counting down.
It can be informative to watch 'Live' streams of New Year's countdowns, sitting beside a carefully calibrated clock.
As a student of 'The Axis of Time', it's ever so slightly annoying how much latency is built into some communications systems.
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Monday 9th May 2016 13:10 GMT rh587
Re: Much better view here
The bit I still can't quite get over is the full HD live (FFS, LIVE!!!) coverage of the entire launch all the way to the "top". With the Apollo and earlier craft we got to see sometimes poor coverage of the launch and then nothing else until, maybe, there might some grainy black & white coverage from orbit.
This. I am very much not old enough to remember Apollo (my mum was in her last year at primary school, which bought it's first television especially for the kids - and the rest of the village - to view the Apollo 11 Landing).
Nevertheless, I got chills during Tim Peake's docking. I watched the launch at work, and later was sat watching a Soyuz capsule docking with a space station in orbit in real-time on my phone pulled up in a car park. That was fucking cool.
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Sunday 8th May 2016 10:12 GMT Anonymous John
Re: Much better view here
Definitely. I'm old enough to have seem manned space-flight go from science fiction to reality. But rockets landing on Earth on a pillar of fire remained science fiction. Until now.
And for the first time since Apollo, there are serious plans to leave Earth orbit.
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Saturday 7th May 2016 08:38 GMT MrT
Landing just before the 30-minute mark...
...sound of someone laughing in the background just after as if the announcer was totally surprised to see the rocket on the pad and nearly forgot to announce it!
Was this a new S1 or a relaunch of the one that made the last drone-ship landing?
Either way, well done!
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Saturday 7th May 2016 09:27 GMT Gene Cash
Re: Landing just before the 30-minute mark...
Yeah, from the flare, it looked like just another crash explosion so the announcer sounds really disappointed, then things cleared and they're "holy crap, it's landed! in one piece!"
This is a new 1st stage. They haven't gotten around to test-firing the other recovered stage yet, as (I think) they're still taking it apart for engineering analysis.
I don't know if that's a bad thing ("oh crap, look at all the broken stuff") or not...
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Saturday 7th May 2016 13:30 GMT waldo kitty
Re: Landing just before the 30-minute mark...
This is a new 1st stage. They haven't gotten around to test-firing the other recovered stage yet, as (I think) they're still taking it apart for engineering analysis.
actually, they have test fired the previously ship-landed S1 vehicle... it is reserved for a test flight that may carry something into space but what that is hasn't been determined yet...
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Saturday 7th May 2016 11:24 GMT John Deeb
Bravado?
When seen from an engineering perspective this development is impressive, very impressive. But so was the Space Shuttle program...
From a scientific and economical point of view however, the quintessential American approach of SpaceX might be more bravado than being actually viable or interesting on the longer term. Simply because of the harsh realities of time scales needed to develop the technology and track record needed for safety and repeatability, any investor patience and what happens if other solutions, even with their flaws and limitations, become available way earlier and possibly cheaper.
Viability and pricing has a lot to do with track records in this business, like a >95% success record which becomes meaningful after 50 sequential launches at the minimum but need really 500 to establish any real market value. Since SpaceX operates with private money, these consideration will start to count at a global market place.
The criticisms of a few famous US astronauts and many others have been centered around this aspect: can we afford the time needed to reach that level without massive government funding to foot that sky-rocketing bill? It becomes a matter of faith. Good luck SpaceX, sincerely!
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Saturday 7th May 2016 12:04 GMT notowenwilson
Re: Bravado?
I'm curious about your thinking here.
There are only a finite number of satellites that need to be put into orbit in any given year so you can't short-cut the time to statistically significant failure data unless you want to just punch a bunch of rockets into orbit for the fun of it. Which no-one is going to do. Because it's a really bad idea.
Currently SpaceX have launched 23 (including ISS missions), of which 22 were successful. So anyone who comes up with something newer and better, even if they manage to do it today, are 23 behind already.
The only chance there is of someone beating SpaceX to the super-cheap-reusable-launcher prize is if someone figures out how to alter an Atlas 5, Ariane V, Proton or Soyuz rocket in such a way that; it is reusable AND it doesn't change the rocket so much that it invalidates the rocket's reliability statistics (i.e. no changes to major parts or control systems) AND it doesn't add so much weight so as to drop the rocket into a lower class.
That's a pretty massive ask.
Also, let's remember that the US government IS funding SpaceX. They pay SpaceX, (and ULA etc) for launch services, because they don't have any capability to do it any other way. In fact, they pay Russia for launch services to ferry astronauts to the ISS. So SpaceX aren't just doing all of this out of Mr Musk's bank balance (or any other investors for that matter), they are providing a service for a price and using that money to develop their systems.
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Saturday 7th May 2016 20:54 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Bravado?
"There are only a finite number of satellites that need to be put into orbit in any given year "
That's mostly restricted by the cost to do so for LEO, so you can expect the rate to increase as costs decrease.
What's _really_ needed for GEO work is the ability to put large birds up there (reliably, and keeping them reliable). The bigger they are the more stationkeeping fuel they can carry and the more services they can operate, etc.
Clarke and friends envisioned football-field size GEO birds with human staff. With Falcon XX on the way, orbiting complexes of that size do seem viable but the staffing would most likely be waldos or fully autonomous robots.
GEO is _crowded_ and one of the bigger problems is keeping birds at nominally the same position from bumping into each other. If they could be attached to a giant flying truss then this problem essentially goes away (modules for something like this would only need sufficient fuel to rendezvous/attach/detach at end of life, with fuelling pods handling the navigation work). It'd also pretty much eliminate the issue of zombie (dead) sats slowly precessing through the belt requiring everything in their path to get out of the way and (perhaps) allow the possibility of keeping something up there to capture and anchor the things.
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Saturday 7th May 2016 13:50 GMT JeffyPoooh
Re: Bravado?
John Deeb "...[any given rocket booster] need really 500 [successful launches] to establish any real market value."
If I understand your logic, leaving the Soyuz-U (with 763 successes and 21 failures) as about the only rocket booster with enough launches to earn any John Deeb-certified "market value".
Oh, but production has stopped. Too bad.
You actually intended the count of "500" in the context of rocket boosters? That doesn't really make much sense...
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Monday 9th May 2016 11:19 GMT GettinSadda
Re: Bravado?
Erm.... wut?
So, the Space Shuttle program (135 launches over 30 years, average of 4.5 per year) was a success. But Falcon 9 (24 launches over 6 years, average of 4 per year and increasing rapidly) is a failure. But one of your main gripes about SpaceX is they haven't yet has 500 launches?!
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Saturday 7th May 2016 16:08 GMT frank ly
Landing Barges
I like the way they name the landing barges after Culture minds/ships. Or maybe the barges named themselves. In case anyone missed it in the video, that one is called 'Of Course I Still Love You'. I think a previous barge was named 'Just Read The Manual'. Never mind Gravitas, let's have some fun.