SpaceX Orbcom OG2 Try number 3, INCL Landing attempt

[Soda Popinski]

Anyone know what kind of delta-V they have to budget to land back near the launch site? Is landing on something like a converted oil platform (ala Sea Launch) or a nice steady cargo carrier feasible?

[NovaSilisko]

Anyone know what kind of delta-V they have to budget to land back near the launch site? Is landing on something like a converted oil platform (ala Sea Launch) or a nice steady cargo carrier feasible?

There is speculation they might try something like that for the core stage of Falcon Heavy. But F9R itself will just fly a steep trajectory for facilitate easier boostback (this could be seen very easily on yesterday's launch)

[Armchair Rocket Scientist]

Detailed review of rocket telemetry needed to tell if due to initial splashdown or subsequent tip over and body slam

My money is on the latter. A watertight falcon stage would be about 5% the density of water, which means it would only sink a couple of meters before toppling over, and the top would hit the water at somewhere around 30 meters per second. I doubt the stage is designed to withstand a huge impact like that.

[sojourner]

But F9R itself will just fly a steep trajectory for facilitate easier boostback (this could be seen very easily on yesterday's launch)

Nope, yesterday's launch trajectory was a requirement for the payload's final orbit requirement and only incidentally beneficial to boost back.

As for the next two Asiasat launches, they will fly without legs as the full performance of the F9 was promised to the payload provider. No boostback/landing attempts will be made on those launches.

[magnemoe]

My money is on the latter. A watertight falcon stage would be about 5% the density of water, which means it would only sink a couple of meters before toppling over, and the top would hit the water at somewhere around 30 meters per second. I doubt the stage is designed to withstand a huge impact like that.

Yes, that is one part of KSP who is pretty realistic, do not land high structures on water. now the stage is probably not watertight however the tanks are and I guess its closed at the bottom too to protect the rocket from blowback during liftoff.

[Streetwind]

http://www.spacex.com/news/2014/07/22/spacex-soft-lands-falcon-9-rocket-first-stage

The video quality is much better this time! In fact it looks like they managed to retrieve the recording device (or at least the data storage) intact, because the video includes the reentry burn at the upper edges of the atmosphere.

Link also briefly addresses future landing attempts. Looks like we have one more ocean landing coming up, and from then on they'll target dry land.

[sojourner]

"solid surface" does not necessarily equal "dry land".

[Streetwind]

But dry land is easier to hit than, say, an ocean platform which would require very high precision. On land you can easily get assigned a landing zone where you can be a mile off target and still not hit anything important (in fact, even Kennedy Space Center itself has more than enough room to do this). With a platform you can't be more than, say, 10 meters off target. Which is significantly more than two orders of magnitude of a difference.

If I was SpaceX, I'd definitely aim for actual land to make things easier for myself for the very first non-water touchdown.

[sojourner]

Yea, I'm sure if they could get approval to land on land they would. But they may be in the catch-22 of having to prove accuracy before being allowed to. Landing on a floating platform a couple times would be a damn impressive show of accuracy.

[B787_300]

they have the landing video up on Youtube...

no landing for the next couple launches, but they will try on launch 15 or 16 to land on some sort of solid platform or barge

[sojourner]

Yep, we know.

[photogineer]

So.... why did the camera lens ice up during the deorbit burn?

Matt

[deadshot462]

So.... why did the camera lens ice up during the deorbit burn?

Matt

I think it happened after reentry. Once the frictional forces were minimized, the stage was still in the upper atmosphere which is very cold. Same thing can happen on planes flying at similar altitudes.

[Dkmdlb]

Also, I imagine the rocket heading into it's exhaust probably didn't help.

[B787_300]

well granted the products of any combustion are water and CO2... so that is where some of the water came from

[Mazon Del]

How did you solve the icing problem?

[Sky_walker]

There is a problem?

Rockets can survive icing just fine. It's only cameras that don't like it. Move the camera away, heat it, add hydrophobic coating and/or eject/move protective glass sheet away straight before the touch down. There are many ways to solve it and all of them are relatively easy and/or cheap.

[sojourner]

Mazon Del was making an Iron Man joke.

[Doozler]

Is there an easy way to enhance that video? Seems like there must be a method of partially removing the ice/ water from the image as that bit is constant between frames, etc, etc.

[Streetwind]

But what do you replace the removed pixels with? If a piece of ice was in the way during recording, there is no data as to what is behind the piece of ice.

The first video was restorable to a large degree because a lot of the data was there - just garbled and errorneous. Those errors were fixed and the data moved into the correct place and order, and thus the video turned out nice after all.

But if there is no data to insert, then your best bet is interpolation between the sides of the missing area. That works quite well if there's a single pixel missing, but if you've got a piece of ice 50-60 pixels across, you're not going to get anything from interpolation other than a diffuse color gradient.

[sojourner]

Contrary to what you've seen on CSI, not every video can be "enhanced".

[Streetwind]

sojourner, your intuition was correct!

Barge landing confirmed: https://twitter.com/Rand_Simberg/status/493506095214645248

The guy actually implies that the very next attempt, that is CRS4 in September, will already aim for a floating deck. No more water touchdowns! Well, good luck with that SpaceX, that means you'll now have to have not one but two difficult to control vehicles that need to be in exactly the same spot at exactly the same time in unknown sea conditions

The video feed from the barge and its escorts should be nothing short of phenomenal though.