I'm not putting this spacecraft stuff down. I just wonder if anyone has ever seen this given the recent events. Just an interesting different perspective....
Did you actually see it land? On the live feed I watched, uplink video to satelite cut out just a second or two prior to touch down, then when it came back the money shot had already happened! Can hear the conspiracy loons getting all hot & bothered & worked up over fakery now!Beautiful launch, and cool landing of the booster on the SpaceX barge.
All good.
Did you actually see it land? On the live feed I watched, uplink video to satelite cut out just a second or two prior to touch down, then when it came back the money shot had already happened! Can hear the conspiracy loons getting all hot & bothered & worked up over fakery now!
BTW, Is there any effort to recover the second stage booster or is it a total loss component? It was shown following the crew module for a long time after separation.
I seem to recall something about the extra altitude & velocity it gets to making it impossible to perform re-entry without a heat shield etc. Makes sense.I believe the second stage is considered a loss, AFAIK it is not equipped with the necessary (and very heavy) landing apparatus. Talk of balloons, parachutes etc... so still in development.
Watch out for the bald guy trying to steal their 'secrets'The landing of the first stage on the floating pad is sureal.... when you watched Thunderbirds as a kid, never thought I would actually see it for real
Just watched it on DVR.
VERY impressive.
Hard to compare what SpaceX did getting 2 men into Earth orbit to what NASA did getting 1 man into orbit, because SpaceX had ALL of NASAs research history to draw from. STILL, what a fantastic achievement by SpaceX, and we are BACK IN IT to get back to the Moon, then Mars... Congrats to one and all!
I sure hope this thread doesn't get political, then get deleted. I think we;re better than THAT...
Yeah, that's correct.
At second stage shutdown, and separation from the Dragon capsule, second stage is traveling close to orbital velocity.
Reentry would require a heat shield to avoid incineration., but even at that, recovering the booster stage for reuse is a huge
improvement in space launch technology.
NASA has been working on a SSTO - Single Stage to Orbit for decades, since the Space Shuttle's retirement was inevitable.
The SSTO required materials light enough to provide a much better mass ratio between launch mass and final orbital mass.
The Lockheed/Martin X-33 was one such vehicle designed to demonstrate the technologies of SSTO, but the project was abandoned due to technical problems. The biggest problem to building a structure light enough to reach orbit with one stage was to make light weight fuel tanks capable of sustaining the loads experienced during launch. Lockheed was working with composite materials for fuel tanks but test failures convinced them that the technology just wasn't ready yet. Project was cancelled in 2001, but a few years later, the fuel tank issues were resolved, so we may see something like the X-33 in the future.
Link to X-33 project description
Cool stuff.
Lockheed Martin X-33 - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
The landing of the first stage on the floating pad is sureal.... when you watched Thunderbirds as a kid, never thought I would actually see it for real