Talk-Polywell.org

Tom Ligon wrote:Yes, indeed, this is a watershed moment in the space business. The birth of the used rocket business!
Now when you pick a rocket, you're making an investment, and you have to consider resale value.
And, of course, it helps if you have more than one brand to choose from. .

How much for that used Firefly over there.

krenshala wrote:SpaceX definitely seems to be doing well on Musk's plan to make a fully reusable rocket, even if it has taken a number of years longer than he originally envisioned.

They'll probably have more setbacks, but hopefully not for a little while yet. It's got to be hard to have that on your shoulders on top of routine perpetual crunch mode to Mars.

Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the NROL-76 payload for the National Reconnaissance Office. SpaceX’s live video coverage begins at approximately 6:40 a.m. EDT sunday

The launch was scrubbed less than a minute before liftoff and a new launch is planned for Monday at 7 a.m. at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

Beautiful launch today! The footage was absolutely stunning.

Watching the latest launch right now, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQpkQ1etdA

Neatly done!

Notice the nice distraction. Get everyone watching the landing and ignoring the payload. I wonder how often this one will pass over NK? The real news on this one is that this particular payload was not launched by ULA.

It was a great launch
Having the footage both from the rocket and the ground up and down was pretty amazing.
I don't recall ever seeing stage separation from the ground before... And seeing the thrusters doing their thing and the retro-repulsion burn from both perspectives, very cool.

Here is some landing video from a different viewpoint.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BTjUcEYBqSQ/

another successful launch but do to weight and orbit there was no recover attempt
https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/15/space ... yload-yet/

I wonder if they tried to recover the faring?

Yes, congratulations SpaceX
Be interesting to know about the fairing - I'd guess not, if only to save a tiny bit of weight, it was running very heavy.

They've got another launch planned for June 1st, two more for the 15th and 29th and a more speculative one one for "late" June... If they can keep to that I'll be most impressed, not that I'm not impressed already!
Four launches in a month, I really doubt it. Even three seems a stretch but keeps to the 'every two weeks' thing so you never know...

It has been frustrating to try to understand progress they are making on fairing recovery compared to the booster recoveries where we got to watch every attempt. I wonder why SpaceX is being so secretive about the fairing recovery attempts?

Also, I'm a little surprised the fairing isn't susceptible to being burned on re-entry. Looking at what happens to the grid fins on the booster and the fact that the air wouldn't be dense enough to slow the fairing much until too late? I have no idea how to do the math on that, though...

Maui wrote:It has been frustrating to try to understand progress they are making on fairing recovery compared to the booster recoveries where we got to watch every attempt. I wonder why SpaceX is being so secretive about the fairing recovery attempts?

Also, I'm a little surprised the fairing isn't susceptible to being burned on re-entry. Looking at what happens to the grid fins on the booster and the fact that the air wouldn't be dense enough to slow the fairing much until too late? I have no idea how to do the math on that, though...

The fairing has a huge surface area for comparably little mass. So it would slow down higher up, where the atmosphere is less dense. IMHO that should mean less friction and thus less heating. And yes, it is interesting that we get to see that little about the fairing recovery. It generally seems like SpaceX has become a little more closed up in recent years compared to the earlier days. I think it is because they are now established and competitors are starting to take a much closer look at what they are doing.

To be fair to SpaceX while they've certainly given us a lot of footage from their rockets a lot of their even more speculative stuff and testing has been away from the cameras. When they've got closer to properly nailing it we may see more. Also, cameras and transmission equipment on the fairings seem like a fun but excessive thing to do - we'll see I guess. Be happy to just see them post recovery I think, or perhaps some long range camera work from after separation

Or....
They are exploring what happens with the fairing with an eye to establishing a recovery process for the two pieces.