Next Falcon 9 Rocket to Attempt Water Landing

in space on 2014-02-21 20:40 (#3EN)

The wonderful nasaspaceflight.com reports that the next flight of the Falcon 9 rocket will attempt a soft water landing. The goal is to test the newly installed legs and confirm that the rocket can touch down in a controlled manner before future attempts at a landing on solid ground. The flights main mission is to resupply the ISS using the Dragon spacecraft. If all goes according to schedule, which it rarely does in the launch industry, liftoff will happen on March 16th.

Re: Reusability is really, really hard. (Score: 2, Interesting)

by wildwombat@pipedot.org on 2014-02-22 06:56 (#4G)

I think that the engines will prove capable of multiple uses. They've ground tested them extensively for multiples of the flight time. While its definitely not the real thing I believe it to be good enough to reasonably assume they'll work for multiple flights. And the F9 first stage does have engine out capability. I'm more concerned with how the stage as a whole will deal with multiple cycles through the transonic re-entry regime and with landing system. We'll see how things play out, though.

Cheers,
-WW