Crash and Burn

..."SpaceX founder Elon Musk then tweeted that during landing a leg lockout didn't latch, so it tipped over."

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/historic-spacex-rocket-launches-california-attempt-land-barge/story?id=36345851

Seems to me if the tips of the landing arms were wired together they would provide a steadier support...

That guy is like holding an enormous parker sign pen refill. Never came to my mind, to use a pen that big.

Maybe a visit to Unalakleet would help.

How could bearded seals help?

Musk oxen (or oxes.)

A chunk of video footage made it to the BBC television news this morning.

The high centre-of-gravity couldn't have helped.

• It brings into focus the achievements of the Apollo programme in the 1960s/70s. Before Armstrong and Aldrin had done it for real, no-one had landed a lunar lander in lunar gravity before except in a simulator. To do it for real with any help being a quarter of a million miles away was quite fantastic. Remembering watching it live still brings the same excitement as actually watching it live, and 45 years have elapsed since then.

It makes me wonder whether landing like that would be harder or easier in the lower gravity of the moon. Tough to say since the tipping over would be slower but the gravity wouldn't help as much when you get it oriented correctly.

Also, I don't understand why SpaceX is still landing on barges when they've demonstrated a 1st stage recovery on land.

As others have pointed out, it's a bad shape, high center of gravity with force applied at the bottom. It's like trying to balance a pencil on a finger tip. Possibly in lower gravity the thing could be corrected before the CG got too far out of line. And possibly no atmosphere might remove other destabilizing variables (e.g., wind).

Perhaps, if you wish to land Buck Rogers style, you need a platform similar to the common quad rotor drones, but with rockets in place of the rotors. The supporting structure would have to have a small frontal profile (like wing sections) to not offer excessive drag on launch.

OK, to be fair, it was not a control problem. According to the story, probably ice build up on launch caused one of the legs to not lock in place, which caused the rocket to topple over after it landed.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/spacex-rocket-landing-wrong/story?id=36356608

Landing tail first is very tricky and I wonder how long it would be before it is safe enough for manned flight. To my mind, landing with wings (ala shuttle) is much safer and more reliable.

I think they can do it with stages (1st or 2nd stages of rockets) but I don't think they should do it with anybody on board for a few decades at least!

"Also, I don't understand why SpaceX is still landing on barges when they've demonstrated a 1st stage recovery on land."

I believe it's a contract requirement before NASA will let them do test landings at NASA facilities. "To prove you can land these things without endangering the facility, you must successfully make three landings on a barge out in the water. That way, if there are any failures, the flaming debris will land harmlessly in the ocean. We want to see three successes, because anyone can get lucky once, and we're not going to risk the lives of our staff and the resources of a multi-billion dollar facility on a design that 'didn't blow up that one time;' anyone can get lucky once." Or something like that.

Remember, with the Republicans trying to defund NASA (as well as every other government agency that actually does GOOD things for the American People) and Obama ordering NASA to 'cut back on that space stuff, and focus on how we can stop Global Warming,' (a laudable goal, but it's been exploring 'that space stuff' that has lead to so many advancements in science and technology; there are other agencies that can focus on Earth weather and Climate. NASA puts up the weather satellites, but it's NOAA that operates the satellites and collects the data from them.) NASA barely has the funds to keep up with the 'regular maintenance' on all their buildings, if a multi-million dollar launch pad gets destroyed by a bad 'self-recovery landing,' that launch pad is effectively gone forever.

I see what you're saying. It does make sense that it would be in their contract. I guess if you can consistently land it on a barge in the ocean, landing it on land should be no problem.

The added challenge does help with gaining experience in 'bad weather' style landings, but the mane thrust of the argument is "If I'm going to let you use my expensive and fragile landing pad, I want to know you won't break it out of sheer incompetence."

To provide another analogy, Roger: Knowing what you know about my driving record (nothing at all, or even if I have a valid license), would you be comfortable tossing me your car keys and letting me drive off unsupervised?

...uuuuhh which picture do you fit in best..?

video

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/watch-spacexs-falcon-9-rocket-032415161.html

Why is it, spacex seem to have bad lack/luck on water? I remember Fredski posted the same scene last 2015.

99.9% probability is still not that perfect.

Landing on a floating barge is tricky, it's not as stable as solid ground (for obvious reasons). All this practice will help SpaceX iron out all the problems so that when they finally DO get to launch/land from a NASA facility, they won't accidentally break anything expensive. (The launch facility is orders of magnitude more expensive than a 'mere' multi-million dollar rocket.)

99.9%. If the vision systems here stopped 99.9% of the defective parts, that would still leave 1 in 1,000 bad parts through, which would mean 2.5 bad parts per box, 75 bad parts per palette load, and our clients don't want that.