sevenperforce

Once a case is in court, you can file a motion for summary judgment (i.e., to have it dismissed before trial) if you believe the case is without merit as a matter of law. Then the judge rules on the law alone. If there are genuine issues of facts in dispute, then the case goes to trial. My next-door neighbors just bought a Model 3 and I'm dying to get behind the wheel.

Someone is shading Electron.... --------------- Visual conf of spacecraft sep!

On the topic of the current launch: Woo! Those who are willing to go frame-by-frame and chart altitude-v-time and speed-v-time will have a field day. We finally get to see now exactly what the Block V upgrades are capable of, given that this is an expendable mission with no sandbagging. Hopefully someone will do exactly that. Successful liftoff, MECO, sep, SECO-1, SECO-2. In extended coast before deployment. As I understand it the second stage will provide pointing before separation and the GPS-III will raise its own orbit. This GPS-III will end up at a semi-synch MEO with an apogee at 20,200 km altitude. It looks like perigee for the transfer orbit was around 1200 km, which is surprising. I would have expected a perigee between 200 and 400 km for Oberth advantage. Maybe it's a thrust issue on the payload. The semi-synch will have a 12-hour orbital period so it will circle the earth twice per day. This bird is 3.9 tonnes. We would need to see a detailed speed-vs-time chart to see if any performance was reserved on the second stage. Random: was the tip of the nose cone painted differently or was that only shadow? And, re earlier: WE HAVE GRASSHOPPER ON STEROIDS! Although if Grasshopper was F9, what's this? Giant Locust? Mantis?

Extendable arrays have more failure modes and more challenging abort aerodynamics. We've been here for a while now. Trunk fins are four-symmetric but radiator/solar array placement is bilaterally symmetric. The capsule has eight SuperDracos in four pods, arranged dual-bilaterally (they are at approx 60°, 120°, 240°, and 300°, with fins at 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270°). This allows structural space for the ingress/egress hatch over the 0° fin. Blasphemy! #EveryLaunchIsSpecial #NotAllLandings #YesEveryLaunch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect

It's still metric expansion.

The cap attaches to the interstage clamps which are used to hold the S2 tanks. Those engines are pristine.

I'd wager it is much more stable to climb on than it appears. It's just so freaking big. I want to see some closeups of the engines. I don't know whether smacking the water would have done any damage or not. Looks like a big section of the interstage peeled away on impact. Interesting, given that the interstage is carbon composite and thus likely constructed under tension. If they slap another interstage onto that booster and use it for the Max-Q abort test, it would be ridiculously cool. That way, if the rocket fails early...hey, even better!

There is negative pressure. Well, yes, it's counter-intuitive, but dark energy already fits the description of "continuously-created stuff" because energy is mass. So nothing new here. Yes, this is the part that makes me the most concerned. Dark matter distribution is impressively well-understood and well-documented. I am not yet certain whether this theory adequately explains observations of dark matter distribution. I mean, it's a hell of a lot better than MOND, but that's not a high bar.

And you'd have to have "failure of terminal landing burn during burn sequence" to endanger the landing pad. If an engine just craps out mid-burn, then yeah, that's a problem, but that is the definition of failure for every rocket ever.

Yes, and the computer absolutely made the correct choice. No question there. Also, as others have pointed out, engine gimbal was enough to correct the bad pitch and yaw, but it might not have been enough to perform the translation necessary to get over to the ground pad. My point is that even with a critical systems failure in the control fins, the vehicle still landed intact.

I'm not saying they shouldn't have aborted the transition in this case; I'm just saying that the water landing itself was stable enough to have remained upright if it landed on a flat surface.

They didn't realize it was coming down over water at all.

Yeah, grid fins are intentionally not used for any aspect of launch.

I wonder if that is actually ice. It appeared from the video that the grid fin on the left (in the video shown) stalled in a tilted position, causing a roll and yaw preference. The other grid fins worked to try and counteract it but were unable to do so. He is overly optimistic. Then again, it WOULD have landed safely, had it come down on the pad. Maybe a touch hard, but it would have managed. So that's encouraging.

A piece flew off of the booster during coast before entry burn. I saw it float back and clip a grid fin. This is not good for Elon's insistence that powered landings are sustainable for human flight.

Video from the ground will be interesting to see.

Booster started rolling wildly, the grid fins started flipping back and forth, and they cut feed.

Looks like they will lose the booster

Hmm. Possible, but icing on B5 is minimal, and that lump of whatever-it-was was huge.

Came here to ask the same question. Seems like the most likely possibility but I don't know of anything that large that comes off the booster. Actually nothing comes off the booster at all. No.

Great ideas! One distinction: aerospike nozzles do not typically exhaust an air jet out the tip. The reason to make the end blunt is that in an operating aerospike engine, you get gas recirculation within the rarefied space below the blunt end, which causes those gases to act as a virtual spike extender. So a blunt-tipped nozzle (also called a plug nozzle) is really essentially just as efficient as heavier, longer spike.

Although, realistically, any orbital speed collision will wreck you.

Incidentally (and not to SpaceX fanboi), this is yet another reason why liquid-based crewed launches are intrinsically safer than using SRBs with human cargo. Even though the LES tower was jettisoned before failure, the core stage engine (I refuse to call it the second stage on principle) shut down nominally and the crew capsule separated using only small liquid thrusters. Liquid boosters are more complex, but I'll be damned if they don't fail in delightfully clean and safe ways. Even CRS-7 incurred 0% damage to the capsule despite utter lack of LES.

Dragon 2 has no EVA capability whatsoever. If NASA wanted to repair Hubble, they could push money to SpaceX to accelerate Dragon 2, launch an unmanned Orion to a Hubble-aligned orbit on Delta IV Heavy, and send a crewed Dragon 2 up to the same orbit on Falcon 9 B5 before the first SpaceX ISS mission. Orion and Dragon would mate and move into a Hubble intercept. Previously-trained astronauts would use tethered EVA from Orion to repair Hubble, using both Orion and Dragon 2's thrusters for stationkeeping, and then return. The sheer complexity would make the Soyuz-Apollo joint mission look like a cakewalk held at a park during a picnic.