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Falcon 9 Delivers Dragon Into Orbit, Flubs Landing
Falcon 9 Delivers Dragon Into Orbit, Flubs Landing http://aviationweek.com/space/falcon...n-orbit-flubs- landing Note that's not my title, that's Aviation Week & Space Technology's title. I LOL-ed because why don't they use this headline with every Atlas V, Delta IV, Ariane V, Soyuz, Proton, and etc. launch? Because every single one of them never even attempts to recover the firs stage. Now obviously there was a failure. Musk tweeted that a grid fin pump failed. You could see in the live stream video that the grid fin on the right side of the camera's frame kept tilting to the right, but never tilted back to the left. That triggered the stage's automatic abort system, which kept the landing trajectory on a spot on the ocean instead of redirecting towards the landing pad. That worked well. They do this on every landing, including on the autonomous drone ship, so that if anything goes wrong, it's not going to damage the landing facility (be it fixed or floating). That happened to the core stage of the Falcon Heavy on its first flight. It ran out of "starting fluid" for its engines and splashed down hard instead of hitting the autonomous drone ship. Also, the stage managed to land very well on the ocean (as can be seen in a video posted by an observer on social media). SpaceX also released the on board camera footage from the stage which showed that once the landing burn started, the engines were able to negate the roll caused by the stuck grid fin. All in all it landed very well (just in the ocean). After the ocean landing, Musk Tweeted, "Appears to be undamaged and is transmitting data. Recovery ship dispatched." Last I heard on Twitter last night, they had the stage secured to at least one ship and they were waiting for daylight (today) to resume recovery operations. I'm not sure this is something they've planned for in great detail, so how they get the stage back into port will be interesting. Luckily, they're not very far away from port. I still think it's funny that people focus so much on the landing when that's gravy for SpaceX. The primary customer (this time NASA) doesn't care if the landing succeeds or not, just that the payload (this time Dragon) gets into the correct orbit. By all accounts, this was yet another successful *launch* of Falcon 9. Jeff -- All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone. These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends, employer, or any organization that I am a member of. |
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