I recall that the last landing had an unusually hard touchdown. https://youtu.be/1KmBDCiL7MU?t=1188
Maybe they're trying to cut the fuel they take closer to the limit?
SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch
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Re: SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody is trying to land humans on the reusable part of the rocket, this is the first stage returning under power. There is no elephant in the room, there is no room and no elephant either, so a lack of data is the expectation, not something worth mentioning.
Spacex plans to land humans on a reusable part of the rocket with the stardip.
Stardip?
They also plan to make a trip to Mars.
SpaceX has a lot of stuff on the drawing board and may or may not execute on any of that. For now what you have is a two stage to orbit vehicle that can be topped with a man rated capsule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon#NASA_Commercial_...
Good old 'parachute & splashdown'.
Starship is - for now - mostly fiction with some parts under test, if and when they plan to do their second stage controlled and re-usable landings you can be sure there have been very large numbers of landings without mishap or SpaceX will blow all their credit in one RUD.
So let's wait until it is 'on topic' before spouting off, there are plenty of possible reasons why this landing could have been aborted, a very large number of those possible reasons hinge on the state of the drone ship (platform stability, for instance) which might have worked just fine if the landing had been attempted over land on a pad.
Re: SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember everyone in my office stopped working for about 30 minutes to watch that dual rocket landing and being completely blown away.
I wonder how it is when you're on site, it's hard to appreciate the scale on video
It's hard to appreciate the scale in person too, it doesn't look real (I was there). Like the other poster said, it's surreal. But the sonic booms help remind you the boosters are large and moving very fast.
Re: SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch
#44I believe they do a little horizontal kick just before landing when they validate things are look good. Potentially something wasn’t right and it just crashed into the ocean like 100 yards from the drone ship.. the good thing is that spaceX seems to learn from all of these issues and compensates, so will be interesting to here what happened.
You're right with it not targeting the droneship directly from afar, but today's webcast [0] said "soft-landing on the water right next to the droneship". In other words not the full speed missile impact scenario. I'm eager to get news/details as well. [0] https://youtu.be/8xeX62mLcf8?t=1531
Ah thanks for that.. I mean, come on spaceX, give us a pan-scan camera controlled by the internet so we can help look for the rocket when it crash lands!! we can have it hooked up to a discord server and people can type "LEFT" "RIGHT".. etc.. :-) totally would work..
Re: SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch
#45Re: SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
important to note that by any other launch provider's standards this was a perfect launch. Payload was inserted into the correct orbit, no one else even attempts to recover the booster.
However it's important to note that recovering the first stage makes sense only if it's successful enough times. Because it reduces the payload and it's more expensive as a single use.
>1 is enough times for an individual booster. Some failures are ok, as long as the average is >~1.2
Re: SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch
#47When are people gonna start talking about the elephant in the room? There is no publicly available data that points to reusable rockets being safe for human return.
This comment is nonsensical.
Just like anything else, assuming SpaceX is able to build a functioning example of their Starship concept, they'll fly demonstration flights and iterate on the design and perform safety analyses until they're satisfied that it meets (at least) industry-standard safety margins (or until they see that it can't). I don't understand what you (apparently) think is fundamentally different about this particular technology vs. all the other machines humans put their trust in that are theoretically capable of killing them if something goes wrong.
Re: SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is accurate. More good examples of this passive-safety landing procedure in action were in the Heavy demo flight and the CRS-16 mission. The Heavy demo center core failed to relight two of the three engines needed for landing, and plunged right into the water off the side of the landing barge ( https://youtu.be/A0FZIwabctw?t=72 ). CRS-16's booster had a hydraulic failure of the grid fins but still had engine and…
If I remember correctly this procedure was implemented after SES-9, which came in too hot and broke straight through the deck of the droneship.
I didn't know that. Thanks for the detail. Better to lose a booster than both lose a booster and cripple a droneship.
On that topic, I've always been impressed at how tough those droneships are. They've taken a lot of punishment but they've never lost one at sea yet. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall of the first meeting between reps from SpaceX and McDonough Marine.
"So, you folks make big rockets. I'm guessing you're going to need these barges to transport them around to avoid roads. And there's likely some insurance implications here."
"In that order: yes, technically yes, and definitely yes."
Re: SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch
#49Re: SpaceX first stage landing failed for Starlink-4 launch
#50Please all keep in mind that the primary mission is a success and that landing the booster is an optimization , not a failure if it does not work. A failure is when the primary mission fails, everything else is a success.
Also worth keeping in mind: Every other launch system out there "Fails" to recover their first stage on every single launch. SpaceX "Failing" here is reverting to norm.