SpaceX: Eutelsat/ABS Mission Hosted Webcast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLNmtUEvI5A

by pol0nium • 10 years ago

56 32 10 years ago

As for the first stage:

"Following stage separation, the first stage of Falcon 9 will attempt an experimental landing on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship. As with other GTO missions, the first-stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing difficult."

Mission Press Kit : http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/spacex_eutelsat_abs...

EDIT: Sounds like they lost the first stage, still not very clear on the details.

EDIT2: Confirmed loss of first stage by Elon Musk.

"Ascent phase & satellites look good, but booster rocket had a RUD on droneship"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/743096769001578498

AliCollins3• 10 years ago

Did the "experimental landing" work this time?

manaskarekar2• 10 years ago

No clear word yet. Feed froze as usual and whatever was on the screen was covered in black smoke.

I did see something upright though, so who knows.

Meanwhile, for anyone looking for one of the most epic moments: https://youtu.be/L0bMeDj76ig?t=29m28s

krallja• 10 years ago

It's not clear. The video feed cut off at landing. There was a lot of smoke, and possibly a standing rocket.

atonse• 10 years ago

Feed died.

I hope the next-gen of communications satellites improves the broadband-over-satellite situation.

If only there was a company in this day and age that is launching satellites often and at lower cost. :)

EA• 10 years ago

On the telecast they just said it appears the vehicle was lost.

jefurii• 10 years ago

I love the commentator's wording: "We'll see whether yes, we landed, or no, we've got more experimental data."

dtparr2• 10 years ago

No. It appeared briefly on the deck, but Elon tweeted it was a RUD, and that they'll be releasing video once they get access to it later today.

lallysingh• 10 years ago

I had to look it up: RUD is "Rapidly Unscheduled Disassembly"

larrywright• 10 years ago

This might be my favorite acronym of all time.

dopamean• 10 years ago

Rapidly or rapid? Is in the unscheduled part that is rapid or the disassembly?

outworlder• 10 years ago

Was it caused by a lithobraking maneuver?

pol0nium• 10 years ago

As usual, the reddit /r/spacex launch thread is a useful resource: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4o5u6r/rspacex_eute...

ritonlajoie2• 10 years ago

If you are wondering, the video feed from the barge got cut off during the landing, but it didn't appear that it was very good. Lot of smoke. But I'm no pro. For now, we (the viewers) don't know if the landing was OK or KO.

AliCollins3• 10 years ago

No telemetry from the landing stage? Or views from the nearby boats (how close is the nearest boat anyway?)

ritonlajoie2• 10 years ago

Well, they (the people at spacex) probably have everything, but I don't have access to this information :) Just watching the webcast, nothing indicated if the landing was ok or not. The people presenting the cast didn't know either.

dtparr2• 10 years ago

The boats are quite a distance away. During the JCSAT-14 mission, there was actually video on the webcast from one of the boats, and the barge was over the horizon. It was night, so it's hard to get a feel for just how far away, though.

cpwright• 10 years ago

SpaceX confirmed they "lost the vehicle."

AliCollins3• 10 years ago

O well - better luck next time. Hopefully they got some more good data...would rather they have this issue now than when landing Red Dragon on Mars..!!

wiredfool• 10 years ago

It was announced on the webcast that they lost the Falcon 9. Second stage is still looking good, on a good GTO orbit after the second burn.

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

Another successful satellite launch and more experimental data (aka they have a new failure mode for landing things). It is really awesome that they can be collecting the expertise to land the first stage "for free"[1] like this and every failure has improved the lander in some key way.

I can't wait to see the reconstructed footage of this event. From what we got initially it seemed a bit off to the left of screen and generating a lot of smoke.

[1] I realize it costs them time and money to operate the barge and recover the stages, but the cost of building those stages and launching them is covered by the launch contract so this work has extremely low marginal cost for rocket research.

xiphias2• 10 years ago

Am I the only one who thought the landings are already starting to be boring? Smoke, rocket is there, cheers from the engineers...I remember Musk expected a few months ago to be able to save 10-20% of the Stage 1 this year (while the ratio increasing over time). But I guess they already can achieve 70-80% success rate, which is a cost saving that is already enough to kill competition.

lutorm• 10 years ago

When 70-80% are reflown, that might be true. So far there has not been any cost savings whatsoever...

gozur88• 10 years ago

Yeah, this is the critical part. We still don't know what kind of reliability to expect from the used stages, and we don't know how much it's going to cost.

tdy721• 10 years ago

Here's the bit where they "landed": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLNmtUEvI5A&t=36m18s

Looks to me like they may have stuck the "landing" but it was hard, broke something and the vehicle was on fire. Listen to the crowd and I think you can hear when the RUD went down.

SpaceX: Eutelsat/ABS Mission Hosted Webcast

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