Falcon 9 v1.1 launch congrats & video...

On 10/2/2013 7:49 AM, Jeff Findley wrote:
Later in the trajectory a single engine was started for the final
descent. Unfortunately, as this burn was taking place, the stage went
into a roll which exceeded what the control system could handle. This
caused the fuel to spin to the outside of the tanks which made the
engine shut-down due to lack of fuel at the (central) inlet in the tank.


As was mentioned in arocket roll stability is going to be tricky to
manage. I suppose on a true Falcon 9R with legs extended that will help
but the photos I've seen so far show no RCS components on the legs
themselves. Not sure they can rely on rotational inertia alone.

This caused the stage to hit the water hard. SpaceX reportedly
recovered at least some first stage debris for analysis.


Work to do, bad enough to hit hard on water, worse to hit hard on land.
Even if you might be able to obtain more fragments of the rocket, you'll
also have to deal with fragments of stuff that was once intact on the
ground.

OTOH not sure how this Falcon launch profile will mimic those actually
used for a Falcon 9R. My understanding is that Falcon 9R flights will be
more vertically oriented for the first stage, and put more of the
orbital insertion burden on the second stage.

Uh, well, er, assuming the second stage remains viable during those flights.

I think this flight is going to go down as one of those "important
learning curve" milestones.

I'm beginning to wonder if the pressure to make SpaceX a commercial
success with the focus on getting payload to orbit may interfere with
these aggressive plans to make components of the system reusable. It'd
be interesting to go over a SpaceX launch contract. In the fine print
I'm wondering if a potential customer enters into a a Falcon-9 launch
with the understanding that parts of the system remain
"works-in-progress" and hence present somewhat additional risk the
customer agrees to. Since Falcon 9 is considerably cheaper than other
ELV options of similar capacity, it still might be worth that additional
risk to many customers.

In this flight many of the system "re-usability experiments" occurred
*after* payload to orbit parts of those systems (mission critical
components) had completed. So far this type of dual-track development
has worked out for SpaceX. No one has been scared off yet.

Dave