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SpaceX successfully lands rocket on ocean platform for second time
Topic Started: May 6 2016, 11:10 AM (379 Views)
Demagogue
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http://www.foxnews.com/science/2016/05/06/spacex-successfully-lands-rocket-on-ocean-platform-for-second-time.html?intcmp=hplnws

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – For the second month in a row, the aerospace upstart SpaceX landed a rocket on an ocean platform early Friday, this time following the successful launch of a Japanese communications satellite.

A live web broadcast showed the first-stage booster touching down vertically in the pre-dawn darkness atop a barge in the Atlantic, just off the Florida coast. The same thing occurred April 8 during a space station supply run for NASA. That was the first successful landing at sea for SpaceX, which expects to start reusing its unmanned Falcon rockets as early as this summer to save money and lower costs.

Because of the high altitude needed for this mission, SpaceX did not expect a successful landing. But it was wrong. As the launch commentator happily declared, "The Falcon has landed."
People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would do them harm.
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Demagogue
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Considering the velocity and altitude of this boost I did not think they were going to pull off the landing on this one. It is great that they did and it bodes well for the future powered landings on high velocity locations like Mars. The "Space Cowboys" are doing interesting things and if they can reuse the boosters it could be interesting times ahead for the likes of ULA.

Here is the video of the launch and recovery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0bMeDj76ig
Edited by Demagogue, May 6 2016, 11:14 AM.
People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would do them harm.
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Robert Stout
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The Space X people show limited faith in their product....They land it on a barge to avoid photos of a spectacular splatter on land......... :lol:
Jesus can raise the dead, but he can't fix stupid
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Demagogue
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Robert Stout
May 6 2016, 11:19 AM
The Space X people show limited faith in their product....They land it on a barge to avoid photos of a spectacular splatter on land......... :lol:
I know you are making a joke but for those who may not understand, the reason that they land it on a barge is because there is simply not enough fuel on a geosynchronous launch to return to the launch pad. So it lands a couple hundred miles out to sea.

Landing on land is far easier than landing on a floating barge.
Edited by Demagogue, May 6 2016, 11:48 AM.
People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would do them harm.
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Demagogue
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Other than saving costs on orbital launches why is SpaceX trying to recover their first stage rockets? Simple, they are doing it to learn stuff that nobody has ever done before in preparation for attempts to land on Mars. They are sharing this knowledge with NASA as well as planning to use it themselves.

http://qz.com/656025/how-spacex-is-really-bringing-us-closer-to-mars-no-really/

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Only the space agencies of the Soviet Union, the US and the EU have landed anything on Mars. This week Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX said it would put its Dragon spacecraft on the red planet “as soon as 2018″—making it the first private company to go interplanetary.
It’s easy to get impatient with crackpot plans to head for the red planet. (I’m guilty of it, too.) But SpaceX is unique in combining its dreams of Mars with well-funded, hard-nosed engineers.
And as it turns out, the company’s long-running quest to build reusable rockets, with the aim of making it cheaper to launch satellites into Earth’s orbit, has had a stealthier goal too. SpaceX’s successful landing of a rocket at sea earlier this month was just one more step towards Musk’s bigger ambition, which is to land on Martian soil in a way that has never done before: Without parachutes, airbags or “skycranes,” but rockets alone....



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Losing the ‘chutes

Sending humans to Mars, however, requires a whole new kind of crazy.
“You’re going to have to land a two-story house on Mars, if you’re going to send humans,” says Bobby Braun, a veteran space engineer and former NASA chief technologist, who is currently a professor at the University of Georgia, “[and] land it right next to another two-story house that’s been pre-positioned and powered up and has all the fuel and food that humans will need to survive on Mars. Imagine the size of the parachute that one would need for that system. It gets to the point that its preposterous.”...

Doing that requires mastering a technique called “supersonic retropropulsion.” The Curiosity mission used subsonic retropropulsion: firing its rockets towards the surface of Mars to slow the craft’s descent, after parachutes had already brought it below the speed of sound. The Dragon would have to do the same while traveling much faster than sound.


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But SpaceX demonstrates the technology every time it attempts to land the first stage of one of its Falcon 9 rockets on Earth. When the rocket first begins firing its engines to slow its descent, at an altitude of around 140 km, it is moving at a speed of at least 1,300 meters per second, close to Mach 4. But the real magic happens at about 70 kilometers above the earth



There is more in the article but with the 25% limit I can't put all the details here. It is a good article.

People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would do them harm.
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