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Falcon 9 Delivers Dragon Into Orbit, Flubs Landing



 
 
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Old December 6th 18, 12:06 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
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Default 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
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