21 thoughts on “This Morning’s Launch And Landing”

  1. Did you catch some posts that KC put up on NASAWatch? Comments by Walker and Gingrich? Basically called for the end of SLS… the space states must be steaming…

  2. I’m not sure whether they showed the descent because they couldn’t show the second stage, or if it was just a lucky set of circumstances. This was the fourth landing at LZ-1. Two of them were at night, and I believe the other one had overcast skies.

    For ASDS landings, I don’t think they would get such good ground footage, since it would be descending hundreds of miles from the launch site.

    At any rate, I saw it live, and they are really starting to make it look routine. I noticed that the progress bar at the bottom of the webcast no longer says “experimental landing”, just “landing”.

  3. Yeah I saw this one afterwards. That descent sequence footage was just awesome!

    To think we could have had this with DC-X like three decades ago is kinda disheartening though. I mean how many failed Shuttle replacement programs did NASA have in the 1990s-2000s?

    Only lamer story with more missed potential has been ESA’s Ariane 5 replacement program. After a more or less promising start with FLPP they decided to copy the Constellation program. ESA can be really lame like that. They never lead, they only follow, even when they could do otherwise. They always have to be copying the USA’s last program. With FLPP it was a copy of the Space Launch Initiative, which was cool, with the original Ariane 6 it was a copy of Constellation with solids and more solids. I wonder what they’ll copy next. Vulcan or Falcon 9. Ah well.

    ESA actually had a decent proposal at the end of FLPP of a rocket with a reusable first stage with a LOX/Methane staged combustion engine and an expendable Vinci powered LOX/LH2 upper stage at one point. But they had to go with the solids. Pathetic. Now they backpedaled and Ariane 6 is supposed to be a rehashed Ariane 5. Which I can’t say was an unexpected outcome. But it’s still lame.

    1. “To think we could have had this with DC-X like three decades ago is kinda disheartening though.”

      Well, if people are using DC-X as the standard, …appropriate in my opinion, then I can point out something about it. Bill Gaubatz told me that DC-X guidance was basically an F-18 inertial guidance system that had been re-programmed to think it was just flying a really weird landing on an aircraft carrier. The F-18 first flew in November of 1978.

      The guidance hardware tech for this flew nearly 40 years ago! Or, if you look at the aircraft that was derived from, the YF-17, that first flew in June of 1974. The guidance hardware level needed for Vertical landing of rockets is *not* a new invention!

          1. Good point.

            Did that actually have anything we’d really regard as a guidance computer, though? I thought it just fired the engine once it reached a predetermined altitude.

      2. I was just saying the same thing to a couple of friends. This was doable by 1970 or so.
        What a lot of time has been wasted.
        It also seems that SSTO was a blind alley. TSTO requires far less stringent weight control.
        I wonder what an optimised passenger/light cargo TSTO would now look like? With designed in second stage/integrated orbital spacecraft recovery.

      3. DC-X and LEM could both throttle to thrust/weight < 1. The falcon-9 first stage coming in can't do that, which makes for a very "sporty" landing.

    2. DC-X could never have made it to orbit, but the DC-Y should’ve. If the DC-X hadn’t been destroyed in what I seem to recall was kind of a d’oh accident.

      1. The accident made little difference. The problem was once DC-X was moved from the SDIO to NASA they basically turned what was supposed to be a demonstrator prototype of technology for a future launch vehicle, into a pure test article for technology development. Then they made the contest for the next generation Shuttle replacement and the overly risky X-33 prototype of the Venturestar was chosen instead of the DC-Y proposal. Allegedly because DC-X was old hat and not “interesting” enough or whatever. I think it was more like NIH syndrome. Later, after X-33 failed, I think some people started saying the DC-Y was impossible too.

        1. If NASA were serious about a shuttle replacement they’d favor the less “interesting” design, the truck instead of the sports car. Not that the shuttle was ever a proper truck, but that’s what it was supposed to be.

  5. I was also amazed by the landing footage. For the first time, I watched the velocity and altitude gauges on the way down (I think they usually show the main ship, not the first stage). It was amazing how the velocity varied; not what I had expected, probably because I don’t know much. The thing was in free fall up accelerating to about about a kilometer/second. Later it undergoes rapid deceleration without any burn, presumably because it was then in atmosphere. I hadn’t known that a falling telephone pole would decelerate that fast. And it’s still going really fast (~300 m/sec) when the landing burn starts.

    3. The first stage is mostly empty tanks on the way down, so not very heavy relative to the size.

  7. The footage was just spectacular this time. SpaceX is getting better at this.

    Landing these things is getting routine, which is the whole point. Yet I never get tired of watching them do it.

    1. I’d say that SpaceX has pretty well perfected the technology. From this point on (or perhaps starting several launches ago), any failed landing will likely be due to a hardware malfunction or an out of limits weather condition such as a sudden wind gust.

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