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.

Reusability is really, really hard. (Score: 2, Insightful)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-02-21 21:06 (#49)

Making a reusable crew transport vehicle like the Dreamcatcher (or, for that matter, what the Shuttle was originally supposed to be) is "easy" enough, for certain values of that word. Making a heavy-lift system that's fully reusable ... isn't. Full reusability is a great long-term goal, but maybe that's something for the next generation?

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

by foobarbazbot@pipedot.org on 2014-02-22 05:42 (#4F)

At this point, they're going for landing the 1st stage, with an eye to eventually reusing it. Full reusability (i.e. including the 2nd stage), probably is waiting till the next generation.

Of course it's all a bit experimental at this point -- nobody's ever soft-landed their heavy-lift liquid-fuel boosters (though the SSMEs are close, in a way), so what sort of damage they receive and what economical refurbishing practices will look like is not really known... depending on how many (and which) components turn out to be cheaper to replace every flight than to overbuild and maintain for repeated uses, "full" reuse may never happen.

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

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

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-02-22 15:40 (#4Q)

>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.

Yeah. That. The engines are tough--they have to be--but I can easily envision a scenario where perfectly good engines rip themselves out of an overstressed airframe (spaceframe?) that developed some kind of undectable fatigue over the course of multiple launches.

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

by tibman@pipedot.org on 2014-02-23 23:40 (#5B)

The rocket seems to handle engine failure pretty well already. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/rockets/spacex-engine-failure-the-good-bad-and-ugly-13506860

Re: Reusability is really, really hard. (Score: 1)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-02-22 15:36 (#4P)

>Full reusability (i.e. including the 2nd stage), probably is waiting till the next generation.

Ah, I guess I missed that part. Well, that makes sense, I guess.