Hans Koenigsmann at SpaceX just said in a press conference that he (or someone) is estimating a 75-80% chance of success, with the redesign of both the Falcon and the drone ship. And the pad-abort test is tentatively scheduled for May 2nd. Which is the final day of the Space Access conference. Cool, if it happens. It will give us something to talk about.
15 thoughts on “Tomorrow’s Landing Attempt”
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Seems overly optimistic to me. But they are getting close alright.
I wonder if there’s a pool in Vegas. 4-to-1 or 3-to-1 odds seems optimistic to me as well. But I’d bet 2-to-1 odds.
I was aware of the increased volume of hydraulic fluid for the grid fins. Were there additional modifications to Falcon to facilitate recovery?
The vehicle itself is significantly improved in performance, through reducing previous conservative margins to allow higher thrust, and subcooling propellants. From memory.
I thought those improvements (which some have dubbed Falcon 9 1.2) were going to debut with the SES mission, a few launches from now.
If they get it this time, guaranteed they’ll be landing on a pad at the Cape in the future. Landing on that fancy drone ship at sea is like learning to fly by landing on an aircraft carrier.
RTLS takes a bigger boostback burn than barge landing. If memory serves, Musk says barge landing is a 15% hit on payload & RTLS 30%.
http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/spacex-press-conference-september-29-2013-2013-09-29
I remember meeting Henry Spencer, John Schilling and George William Herbert at a Space Access Conference years ago. Hope to attend this one and meet some of the folks I’ve see on space forums.
They’ll land one soon. Then we’ll (they’ll) get to find out the real mystery: what kind of shape is the booster in after a completely successful landing? That’s the million-dollar question that determines how reusable is reusable.
And what will be even more satisfying will be the fact that despite decades of science fiction spaceships landing on planets with their retro-rockets, this will be the first one to do it for real.
(Don’t forget Apollo.)
Not the same in my mind. It worked in reverse, and was not reusable.
I logged in to the Vox live feed (Spaceflightnow was swamped and not responding) just in time to hear them signing off until another attempt tomorrow. Based on the image of the rocket with clouds everywhere and the weather forecast from earlier today, my guess is that they scrubbed due to weather?
Next attempt tomorrow at 4:10 EDT, from what I could gather.
Anvil clouds encroached on the 10 mile exclusion zone. With three minutes to go, I felt pretty cheated. I expect the weather there can become severe quickly, but it smacked of the “safety first” culture to me.
It was, somewhat, but no huge cost to delay a day.