These days shots from a flying drone are a dime a dozen - when engagement shoots are being covered from a hovering photographic robot you know that the technology is ubiquitous. It's getting increasingly hard to impress someone with images or video from drones.
So it's lucky that privately-owned SpaceX happens to own its own rockets because it gives them the ability to capture stunning video, like this launch and landing test of the Falcon 9 Reusable (F9R) rocket. Captured with a hexacopter drone at the company's Texas launch pad, the F9R experimental rocket is filmed from above as it blasts off, hovers and then safely lands.
SpaceX is developing a rocket that will be able to land after launch in order to slash the costs of traditional space missions. The company will soon move tests to a New Mexico site where it can operate the F9R with fewer restrictions than it does in the Texas launch site.
While the F9R hovers at about 250m (820 ft), future tests will go much higher. Hopefully the drones will be able to keep up.
Nice job drone-using video makers! You kept that rocket in the frame very well. This is a testament to drone photography. Of course drone photography/videography is nothing new. We've had drones on Mars for about 40 years, right? But this was interesting to see anyway.
Thust vectoring I understand. What puzzles me is the burn control. That's got to be a solid rocket- a big firework. So firstly how do they control the thrust to decelerate to a hover and then finely control the thrust to control the descent and final shut-down?
What makes you think it's a solid rocket? Haven't you ever heard of liquid rocket fuel? The biggest, heaviest rockets in history worked with liquid rocket fuel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_5
Most modern space launch vehicles use liquid fuel, though there are a few notable exceptions (e.g. Shuttle boosters). This one uses kerosene + liquid oxygen, the same as the Saturn V.
Stop being silly. We could send a mission to Mars right now. In fact we already have done so - just not a manned mission. This is obviously a test. The idea is to make rockets that can return to Earth and land on the same launch pad they came from, after delivering a payload into space. The cost of the rockets is what makes space travel so expensive. If a practical, truly re-usable rocket is made, then space travel will become much more efficient and practical, making a Mars mission much less expensive. That would mean SpaceX could "sell" the idea of financing a Mars mission much more easily. Financing is the issue, though frankly I think that SpaceX could get the financing from the government, if they make a commitment to launch in 3 years. NASA wants to be the first to put a man on Mars. You can bet they'll finance it, so it can be a NASA astronaut, rather than some other astronaut.
All of the packages we've landed on the Moon and other planets were short and stout, with a low center of gravity. The gravity on the Moon is less than Earth, the Moon has no atmosphere, therefore, no crosswinds to knock it off center.
And landing, then taking off from the moon is a much different operation than taking off and landing. All the vessels that have landed and launched from the moon have left the landing platform on the moon. It takes a lot less fuel to launch the assent module from the Moon than it takes to launch all the components to the Moon. Most of the weight is fuel and most of that is burned getting into orbit around the Earth.
Tall rockets are inherently unstable and it's difficult enough to keep them stable going up; hovering and descending is much more difficult. Early tests were unsuccessful so the concept was abandoned long ago. All of the moon landers have had control rockets to stabilize them, but this rocket uses thrust vectoring.
One reason this didn't crash and burn like a lot of our early military test rockets is that this rocket is built with private money! The engineers made sure they knew what they were doing before they lit the fuse!
When a military funded rocket crashes under testing everyone gets to keep their job and gets more money to keep testing. When a privately funded rocket crashes everyone gets fired. The incentives are quite different.
Or that modern toaster ovens have more computing power than early rocket testing. Gyro sensors and algorithms for stable flight are not of our parents/grandparents generation.
Some Soviets were imprisoned when they were perceived to have screwed up. In many cases, their friends & colleagues were killed by failed launches. There was plenty of incentive.
Your premise you can't be fired from a public sector job for screwing up is also completely false. You have no idea what you're talking about.
The thing that impresses me is the heat resistance of the landing legs. I assume they must be covered in some sort of ablative material, such as tantalum hafnium carbide, but even so, to retain their structural rigidity after that extreme cooking, is amazing. They may be actively cooled by circulation of some of the rocket fuel through them.
The legs are placed well away from the engine exhaust. And since this is the 1st stage of a multi-stage rocket, it doesn't go fast enough for aerodynamic heating to become a huge problem.
Titanium has to be heated to more than 3000 degrees to melt. The fire coming out of that rocket looks like it is around 2000 degrees. You can usually tell approximately how hot something is by the light it emits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire#Temperatures_of_flames_by_appearance
In the world of tomorrow, Chinese-made plastic junk rockets are so cheap it does not make economic sense to use sophisticated reusable American ones. :)
Space X is testing the rockets autonomous landing capability. Once ready, it'll be used to land the boosters once they detach at 80 000m during a launch. By landing the rockets instead of dumping them in to the ocean like you conventionally do, they'll be able to reuse the rockets after refurbishing them. This'll drastically cut down on the cost of a launch, as you don't have to re-build the boosters after each launch.
It's the question of what happens to the rocket (actually, to the rocket's first stage) after it detaches. The choises are pretty limited - smash into the ground (wasteful), splash-down into the water and either drown (wasteful) or get recovered by specialized ships (expensive and risky). A safe landing of fully-intact vehicle is a pretty big money saver.
Yes but the amount of fuel needed for a soft landing pretty much halves the booster's capability... or makes it twice as large... this has its uses, but it is not the ultimate technology. I don't see this technology being used in a Saturn V-type booster... But maybe a way to recover the crew module... just like in Buck Rogers! No parachure (unless emergency) and no runway!! But a big rocket needed to slow down the terminal velocity to a soft touchdown.
Got a source for that? They tested the Falcon 9R during a mission to the ISS already, and were apparently successful.
"SpaceX pricing and payload specifications published for the non-reusable Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket as of March 2014 actually include about 30 percent more performance than the published price list indicates; the additional performance is reserved for SpaceX to do reusability booster demonstration flight tests while still achieving the specified payloads for customers. Once all engineering changes to support reusability and recovery are made and testing is successful, SpaceX expects to have room to increase the payload performance for the Falcon 9-R, or decrease launch price, or both."
So 30% during testing, less once it's in regular use.
We will eventually see what happens. It wastes fuel and saves up on rockets. How many times can you reuse? How much have you to "refurbish" between flights. Maybe it is better. We will see.
I watched the video before I read the text of the article, and I thought I was going to see this thing crash and burn!
When I was a kid growing up in the 50s, the US space program was getting started, and many of those first rocket launches ended badly. Often those dud launches would look like this video at the beginning, but then end in a huge fireball.
"While the F9R hovers at about 250m (820 ft), future tests will go much higher. Hopefully the drones will be able to keep up. "
Not likely, since some of the planned tests are exoatmospheric (out of the atmosphere - > 300,000 feet), and even the lower ones will require the rocket to climb out at hundreds of mile per hour.
They already have space drones as many satellites have small rockets and the capability to move around and re-position themselves. The dragon space capsule that delivers supplies to the ISS is essentially a big cargo drone.
But if you want to film a rocket through the complete launch all the way to orbit, all you need to do is launch another rocket next to it with a camera on it.This was done quite regularly in the nuclear missile testing programs during the sixties and seventies.
They're significantly further along. They did an actual leg assembly deployment test after a genuine into-space launch over water recently, though, I have not yet seen the results (Elon Musk tweeted that the data was good, though).
These dromnes are usually operated by two people, one operating the drone and a second one operating the camera equipment using separate 14-18 channel remote controlls.
I didn't read the description and just watched the video. I was expecting it to go up, up, up. When it stalled and started coming down I was like "oh sh*t!" and waiting for the upcoming explosion. Then it just landed. I was thinking "huh, that's pretty cool."
Thanks for that clarification, because my mind couldn't wrap around the 'real news' in this article. Oh and in other news headlines, "Mc Donald sells food?"
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