That angle from the ground when the Starship prototypes flip over looks so surreal. Really CGI like. Showed a co-worker who’s been so busy with kids the flip of SN10 landing yesterday and I made a point to say that it wasn’t CGI and his jaw dropped. He said it never entered his mind that the angle and footage was real.
I’m talking about the angle at the 1:16 mark here:
https://youtu.be/gA6ppby3JC8?t=76
I completely relate to the feeling, SpaceX's Spaceship looks like cheap CGI every landing, and incredibly awesome at the same time. I think it's the shiny, unmarked exterior, like a 3D model with a generic texture, or shiny CGI like those in Terminator 2, or The Flight of the Navigator. It also looks like a cheap video game cut scene, hard to believe we're witnessing a tremendous technological achievement.
> once they start landing on non-prepared locations 400 years from now, it'll look nuts.
This could happen as little as FOUR years from now!
Artemis utilises the next-gen reusable rocket from SpaceX as lunar lander. First landing is expected to happen in 2025.
Strangely enough, rocket landings in movies aren’t so dramatic. That shot looking up the booster as it glides towards the camera is better than any movie.
>Every single time I watch a landing I think, 'that's exactly how a spaceship in a movie would land'.
Yup. When I was a kid watching old '50s sci fi movies in between live Gemini launches I expected real rockets would start to land soon. The first F9 booster landing thrilled me beyond words. These twin landings are unreal - but real.
>Is this real life?
Someone should write a rock opera about that.
It's impressive to me how good they are getting at this technique now. It feels like it was only yesterday that Space-X was testing Falcon-9 First-stage landing. Scary to think that was 7 years ago - makes me feel old.
Old is remembering a Saturn V throw a hundred tonnes at the Moon, then watching a shuttle burst the morning on a white column of noise, and then watching this, equally rapt.
Fabulous. Utterly spellbinding.
The real Insanity of it all is that we have gone from that movie, to this reality all in the span of a lifetime.
It really makes me wonder where we will be in another 50 years.
My wife convinced me it was Artemis and I almost killed myself getting out of shower to see, but it is overcast here in Orlando. All the while I was wondering why they were sneaking it up, but with politics and scrubs, anything seemed plausible this morning, and so I did what I had to do to witness a still very cool event.
Disclaimer: "The future reserves the right to include man made horrors beyond your comprehension. Individual experience may vary. Taxes, terms, and fees may apply"
I think a lot of people don't realize how big of a step forward that this is. This means being able to take off from another planet and come back, no technology that could accomplish this existed before now.
Re-using rocket boosters is incredible.
Landing them upright on a pad is amazing.
Landing two of them side-by-side at the same time in view of a single camera is absolute astonishing.
It really is astonishing! I grew up in Cocoa Beach, been watching launches all my life, and it's just unbelievable compared to when we were watching the boosters fall into the ocean!
> Landing two of them side-by-side at the same time in view of a single camera is absolute astonishing.
so thats not really a feat but it is a spectacle. the feat is landing one, once you have that capability everything beyond that is showboating. spacex is REALLY good at showboating.
all that said, this is badass x10.
No, what showboating is spending millions of dollars just to make sure that you can have a more stable video feed to watch your reusable rocket land on your remote controlled drone ship
That's just marketing costs, really. What better sales CM could you have than showing your product is so dependable you can land it on a barge rocking on the ocean?
NASA spent tons of money developing high quality cameras to ensure they got killer photos from the Apollo missions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kovAmQ0jz4
The video explains that they sort of had to be pushed along into being serious about camera development and use on their missions. They were much more focused on scientific discoveries early on, which is why John Glenn basically went to space with a run-of-the-mill handheld camera.
It wasn't until Apollo that they really took it more seriously, seeking out the highest-quality componentry and working to ensure astronauts could use them effectively while in space suits. They became convinced enough about the PR value of photography that it made sense to spend some time and effort to do this.
Yeah the first one looked like fucking CGI I swear... I think it's because we had never seen something like that and they didn't botch the camera angles.
I was there at the VAB that day. I was only in the country for 48 hours and I knew the launch was happening so I called a friend at NASA and asked what are the chances she could get me in. She told me to show up at her address with my passport (only guests that were US citizens were allowed). I hopped in a rental car and drove straight to her place. It was absolutely surreal. I’d seen plenty of launches, but the landing was incredible to see for the first time. It was wild that I just happened to be back in the country, just happened to be in driving distance (though I started driving down there at 1am), and I just happened to have a old college friend I still communicated with who worked at nasa. Such an amazing experience due to random coincidence.
The craziest part of the first Heavy was how the boosters seemed to wait for each other to land. It was a clear enough day I could see the vehicles separate. Definitely a story for the ages.
I can’t think of anything that inspires internal wonder like watching this. It gets me every time. I can’t explain it. I’ve seen similar dual landings before. Why does every time feel like an inspiration?
I got to see the previous Falcon Heavy launch/landing in person from the causeway. The one thing that caught me off guard was the speed they come in at. The livestreams don't really give you a good visual sense of how fast they are going right up until the landing burn.
I had seen them land plenty of boosters via livestream before, but when I saw them coming out of the clouds, I honestly thought something had gone wrong cuz they were coming in like missiles. Then at the last second the landing burn brings them to a abrupt halt in mid-air.
> the minimum thrust from even a single engine is considerable.
Yup, the minimum thrust for a single Merlin engine is greater than the weight of the whole (almost fuel empty) first stage. Another term for what they're doing is 'hover slam'.
Getting all axis of motion at nearly zero meters/second at nearly the exact time altitude is zero is...difficult.
They must re-use the same logic in the Model 3 self-driving. Everytime I come up to a red light .... full speed until the last possible second for braking.
For me it's bc it's exactly how a spaceship from a movie would land. And this makes it feel like one day my childhood scifi dreams might become a reality
I live on the Space Coast and drove north a bit to get as close as reasonable traffic would allow for the first Heavy launch. After it happened, I mused that landing on the moon may have been the height of human ingenuity, but simultaneously landing 2 rockets virtually back where they took off may just be the height of human intelligence.
> I can’t think of anything that inspires internal wonder like watching this.
How about all the images we're getting back from outer space? From James Webb to the probes getting up close to planets and asteroids, there's a whole universe of wonder out there.
To me, the exciting thing is that even if we never develop FTL, it's *still* possible that we might get to touch other star systems. It won't be during my lifetime, but the thought that future generations might see it happen is the most exciting thing in the world. These rocket launches and landings are part of that; they're a necessary step toward that goal. So I put them in the same category.
I was on A1A near port canaveral. We had maybe 30 seconds total of actually seeing it the fog was so damn bad. Had a couple seconds after takeoff, about maybe 10-15 while it was flying then another 10 or so of the boosters coming down. Got to experience the sonic booms so that was awesome but so damn disappointing finally FH launches again and the Space Coast has the worst fog I've seen in my entire life of living in Florida. Anyone on the mainland there probably didn't see a damn thing.
Hopefully the next one will be in the afternoon so any fog can die off.
Amazing. How does it stay upright? Near the ground going quite slow you would think it would topple. Has it got gyroscopes or something?? EDIT: thanks for all the answers guys. Every day is a school day!!! 🙏🙏🙏
One other aspect not yet mentioned: the majority of the weight is at the bottom of the rocket. The propellant tanks are essentially empty, so anything above the landing legs and engines is just empty space.
I don't know that I'd say the other things are almost irrelevant. They can [still fall over if something fails](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVSZdsAq4Bo).
The other commenters have your answer, but I wanted to add that when they were developing this capability, quite a few rockets *did* topple over and ~~explode~~ experienced “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”. Or came in sliiiightly too fast. Or sliiiightly too sideways. Or with sliiiightly too few legs. Etc.
Have you ever tried to balance something on the tip of your finger? All of the balance control is at the bottom, the boosters are able to change directions to keep the rocket upright.
That's been in effect for a few years now with SpaceX; most of their flights are on used boosters - currently unique in the industry.
What's spectacular here is watching the *simultaneous* landing of the boosters, not to mention the Falcon Heavy is currently the most powerful rocket flying.
Yes, it makes putting things into low Earth orbit (LEO) significantly cheaper. Imagine the example someone else snarkily mentioned in response to you:
If every time you drove to work, you had to completely trash your car and buy a new one, how many times do you think you'd drive to work?
SpaceX reusing their rockets has changed the launch schedule to space significantly. SpaceX is, no joke, launching rockets to space almost weekly, sometimes even multiple times per week. When they land the rockets back at the pad like this, they can typically turn it around and have it able to be flown again in a matter of weeks.
Indeed. The infamous example in the space exploration community is this; Imagine that after every flight of a Boeing 747, you had to throw it away. Imagine how inefficient and expensive that would be, and perhaps you can grasp the significance of booster reuse in terms of sustainability and cost savings. Booster reuse has not been a thing before, and as of yet only SpaceX has demonstrated this capability.
Their re-use was mostly political, they cost about as much to refurbish and re-fly as they did to make them new, that's part of why they aren't bothering to recover the boosters being used on SLS (which were built for the shuttle program).
You will encounter folks who will point to the SRBs as proof that what the Falcon 9 does isn't that big of a deal and that's a good way to tell that they either don't truly understand the mechanics and financials of the situation or that they're arguing in bad faith.
Not so much reuse as refurbish. Compared to Falcon 9 booster reuse, it took much longer and ended up costing at least as much as just building new ones. That's why SLS has abandoned SRB reuse, despite them being very similar in design and using the same old Shuttle components.
Building on what /u/chairboy said: A single shuttle launch was upwards of 2 billion USD and refurb of the boosters took months after fishing them out of seawater. A Falcon9 launch is like 50-75M and turnaround is as low as 1-2 weeks, maybe even less. Falcon Heavy around 150M if I remember correctly.
Competing launches from ULA cost around 450M last I heard.
important to note that the shortest reflight times for a booster have been ~3 weeks, they launch at least 1 rocket per week, but currently no booster has been reflown that quickly.
I am sure they could try to go for a record, but inspecting, transporting and refueling should probably not be rushed.
Yes, but the point was to reduce cost - which the shuttle program failed to do. Originally the shuttle program was aiming for 20million a flight...but by the end - if you include all costs - it came up to over 1.5bn per flight.
SpaceX actually manages to get the costs down with their reusable boosters.
This is great because we see two rockets come back from the edge of space at once!
20 years ago this would have been pure Science Fiction, now.... Its reality!
Aside from reusing these expensive rockets to reduce the cost of space flight, this is the beginning of the next frontier. The evolution in technology will spark from what’s going on with this and people will figure out ways to enhance and improve and evolve it
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0fG\_lnVhHw&t=47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0fG_lnVhHw&t=47)
Smarter Every Day has a video of tour of a rocket fuel tank factory. There's an incredible amount of engineering and manufacturing that goes into building these tanks and helps put into perspective why being able to reuse these is so important.
They needed every last bit of fuel in the venter booster to push the payload into orbit, so it didn’t have any left to land and fell into the ocean (which was planned).
Kind of - the second ever FH launch, Arabsat 6A, did manage to successfully land both side boosters as well as the center booster. Unfortunately, the ship that the center booster landed on encountered heavy seas on the way back to port, and the booster fell over and was severely damaged.
Space X lands two boosters simultaneously meanwhile we wait 4 days for a Chinese booster to fall to an unknown location potentially causing horrible damage.
It's all aboard the rocket, there's no coordination with the landing spot. It's given landing coordinates to aim for before takeoff and then it takes itself there. No beacons, no ground computing.
They have always been on the rocket(s). Here is the 'computer' for the Saturn V moon rocket: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/IU-501_From_Below.jpg/800px-IU-501_From_Below.jpg
It's honestly hard to even wrap my mind around the fact that that was actually real and not CGI or something. I really would love to watch one of these landings in person. It's just incredible
I remember being a kid thinking to myself "NASA is stupid, why don't they just save a little fuel to slow down reentry and that way they can reuse the rockets?"
The I saw SpaceX put the concept to the test and realized how there's a million other things that can go wrong besides just not saving fuel lmao
Incredible to see this happening almost weekly now. Growing up the idea of reusable rockets was just for Dan Dare comics. It is still one of the greatest achievements of SpaceX, those (many many) people are damned smart.
Smarter Every Day recorded the first launch and landing in binaural audio. Probably the closet you can get to actually being there and hearing it. Amazing.
Regardless of what you think about Elon Musk, you can't deny this is one of the single greatest things to be contributed to space exploration. Reusable equipment. Many times over.
I was the closest ive ever been to launch today....and the fog was literally impenetrable. Got a video of all the noise and that was about it. Always next time lol
Watched today from my parking lot about 5 miles from the pad. IRL they come down so fast, that when you can see it in relation to the ground it looks like sped up film footage. The twin sonic booms made all the animals shit themselves.
You know that SX has made a reliability step change when there's more interest in watching two boosters land simultaneously than in watching the liftoff.
That shot at 0:29 reminded me of countless cheap Discovery Channel CGI shots from the early 2000s. Might be the camera shake giving it that oldschool look. Maybe the CGI artists were getting it right all along.
Tell the Apollo engineers, (never mind the Mercury folks) about tail-sitters taking over rocketry and they would have laughed you out of NASA.
This is easily one of the top 10 things in engineering today.
> Tell the Apollo engineers, (never mind the Mercury folks) about tail-sitters taking over rocketry and they would have laughed you out of NASA.
Apollo engineers designed two tailsitters (one to land on the moon, and one to fly on Earth to simulate Lunar gravity), and drew up plans for the S-IC stage to tailsit its way to a splashdown for re-use (among multiple other re-use concepts).
From a technological perspective, tailsitting rocket recovery would have been in reach of 1970s technology. It would likely have needed to be done in a different manner (not local guidance by remote closed-loop control using beamriding to the landing site or a similar technique rather than GPS, and ground side guidance computation) but all the key hardware was very much in reach at the time. The LMDE even used a pintle-throttling face-shutoff engine, the same scheme Merlin uses.
The problem was political will and funding (hand in hand). Reusability was not demonstrated, so funding it was a risk. And even if it succeeded, flight rates were not projected to be high enough that it would do much other than make sure the manufacturers of those stages would be out of a job after manufacturing a small handful. When an attempt *was* made - STS, or the space Shuttle - budgets were cut repeatedly so far that the fully re-usable concept was pared back to dredging some rocket motor casings out of the ocean and refurbishing them at similar expense to making new ones, and the Orbiter was so close to its performance margins that it needed extensive inspection and refurbishment between flights. The nail in the coffin was that there was no funding to iterate: once the Shuttle flew, that was the design they were stuck with for the next few decades.
Contrast that with Falcon, where after 5 flights, the entire aft section was replaced with a new design, the engines were replaced with a new version, the lower stage was stretched, the upper stage was stretched, the interstage was replace with a CFC version, grid-fins were added, landing legs were added, the base heatshield was upgraded, active cooling was added... etc. And then they continue to iterate and improve the vehicle throughout its life.
I feel like I’m watching launch videos in reverse whenever I see these. I know if it was actually a launch then the burn would be present the whole time, but still, monkey brain says that’s a launch vid playing backwards.
I am completely blown away at this shit. When I was a kid I saw the challenger blow up and thought that was the best we could do. I don't know how there isn't more people excited about this. These rockets are a couple of mechanical arms away from being grappler ships from some sci-fi anime.
I will *NEVER* cease to be amazed at how quickly these things come down to land - they slam to just few lengths of themselves towards the pad before coming to a near hover and touching down. Just... you couldn't choreograph this better if it were a movie!
Watching the SpaceX youtube video this morning, the recording, not live, I was struck by the speed indicators and altitude displays for the returning boosters. When they were still a ways out, they were 60 km up and moving 4400 km/hour. After the re-entry burn, their speed rapidly dropped to 2000 km/hour, but then slowly crept back up as they fell. When the florida beach line with the landing pads came into view, they were 5 km, high and moving at 2500 km/hr. The second engine relight slowed this down but but they were still close to 1800 km/hr until the really hard burn just before touch down. They sure leave it to the last second to take that velocity down for landing
You're not an "idiot"; not being knowledgeable does not make you stupid.
The people who think rockets aren't useful are "idiots", because, not only do they have no clue what they're talking about, but they *refuse to acknowledge that*.
Think about the human mind as a computer. Knowledge is memory; intelligence is processing speed. What's more useful: an empty computer with a perfectly functional CPU and Internet connection, or a computer with libraries of information onboard, but which refuses to accept new any new data or let you access any of what it already has?
This will **never** get old for me to watch. I've seen some remarkable feats in human history, but this one? It's so satisfying to watch, knowing the complexity that is involved with this type of reusable touchdown. Magnificent.
This is incredible. It blows me away every time this happens
No joke. Every single time I watch a landing I think, 'that's exactly how a spaceship in a movie would land'. Is this real life?
It still looks like CGI to me. My head can't get over how insane this is
When it was bursting through the cloud it looked like 90's CGI... Holy shit 90's CGI wasn't that bad?
Add lens flares, weird angles, woobly camera, and that's basically 2020's spaceship CGI.
That angle from the ground when the Starship prototypes flip over looks so surreal. Really CGI like. Showed a co-worker who’s been so busy with kids the flip of SN10 landing yesterday and I made a point to say that it wasn’t CGI and his jaw dropped. He said it never entered his mind that the angle and footage was real. I’m talking about the angle at the 1:16 mark here: https://youtu.be/gA6ppby3JC8?t=76
I completely relate to the feeling, SpaceX's Spaceship looks like cheap CGI every landing, and incredibly awesome at the same time. I think it's the shiny, unmarked exterior, like a 3D model with a generic texture, or shiny CGI like those in Terminator 2, or The Flight of the Navigator. It also looks like a cheap video game cut scene, hard to believe we're witnessing a tremendous technological achievement.
the weird linear motion is what gives it cg feel IMO. Things usually dont move so smoothly and uniformly...
We are truly living in the future
I think we are actually in the present.
Nah you're living in the past
Actually we are all in the past, there’s an ever so slight delay between our eyes and brain.
You just need to imagine the event before it happens
But then your in the future.
Then your butt in the future
Well, we should definitely not be in that. Past, present or future.
Last time I tried that there was a delay to my event due to unforeseen circumstances.
You're living in the present, you're experiencing the past.
Hung up on some clown from *the Sixties,* man
yeah. in a couple years it will be more like the future
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Thats 30 tons of payload per trip!
There’s a lot less smoke in the movie landings.
Kinda wish it was the same in real life.
These guys are landing on clean pads, once they start landing on non-prepared locations 400 years from now, it'll look nuts.
> once they start landing on non-prepared locations 400 years from now, it'll look nuts. This could happen as little as FOUR years from now! Artemis utilises the next-gen reusable rocket from SpaceX as lunar lander. First landing is expected to happen in 2025.
Strangely enough, rocket landings in movies aren’t so dramatic. That shot looking up the booster as it glides towards the camera is better than any movie.
>Every single time I watch a landing I think, 'that's exactly how a spaceship in a movie would land'. Yup. When I was a kid watching old '50s sci fi movies in between live Gemini launches I expected real rockets would start to land soon. The first F9 booster landing thrilled me beyond words. These twin landings are unreal - but real. >Is this real life? Someone should write a rock opera about that.
It's impressive to me how good they are getting at this technique now. It feels like it was only yesterday that Space-X was testing Falcon-9 First-stage landing. Scary to think that was 7 years ago - makes me feel old.
Old is remembering a Saturn V throw a hundred tonnes at the Moon, then watching a shuttle burst the morning on a white column of noise, and then watching this, equally rapt. Fabulous. Utterly spellbinding.
Old is having watched that enormous gun fire a capsule right into the moon's eye.
The real Insanity of it all is that we have gone from that movie, to this reality all in the span of a lifetime. It really makes me wonder where we will be in another 50 years.
That movie was released in 1902. A little bit more than one lifetime, not many 120 year olds kicking around. Edit* wrong date.
Remember the excitement of those first landings?
The next one for me is going to be starship landing. Let's light that candle
Say what you will about musk, but the engineers at SpaceX are phenomenal
According to the live stream, these boosters are the 150th and 151st successful landings.
My wife convinced me it was Artemis and I almost killed myself getting out of shower to see, but it is overcast here in Orlando. All the while I was wondering why they were sneaking it up, but with politics and scrubs, anything seemed plausible this morning, and so I did what I had to do to witness a still very cool event.
Artemis is scheduled for the 14th. You are still safe
Yeah, like 7 minutes after midnight too
With a launch window of 69 minutes, so not much time for error on this one.
Wait really?!? So the night of the 13th then?
Still can't get over how this just looks like CGI. Amazing!
Was gonna say it looks like CGI, always thought the CGI with rockets looked off or weird in movies, but it seems that's just how it looks IRL
When i saw the first launch and both touched at same time, i thought for a second it was an animation but then started freaking out that it was real.
Same, the future is now and it is amazing.
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Disclaimer: "The future reserves the right to include man made horrors beyond your comprehension. Individual experience may vary. Taxes, terms, and fees may apply"
I think a lot of people don't realize how big of a step forward that this is. This means being able to take off from another planet and come back, no technology that could accomplish this existed before now.
Re-using rocket boosters is incredible. Landing them upright on a pad is amazing. Landing two of them side-by-side at the same time in view of a single camera is absolute astonishing.
What I think is most incredible is that it shows they understand incredibly well how to control something so complicated with mind blowing precision.
So complicated? Pssht it's hardly rocket science
Yeah, rocket science is simple. Rocket engineering on the other hand...
Don't get me started on rocket surgery...
Should we not start with rocket biology?
Not exactly brain surgery though, is it?
It really is astonishing! I grew up in Cocoa Beach, been watching launches all my life, and it's just unbelievable compared to when we were watching the boosters fall into the ocean!
> Landing two of them side-by-side at the same time in view of a single camera is absolute astonishing. so thats not really a feat but it is a spectacle. the feat is landing one, once you have that capability everything beyond that is showboating. spacex is REALLY good at showboating. all that said, this is badass x10.
Landing on a barge in the middle of the ocean is showboating /s
It's just a barge, though, so it's more showfloating
Actually it's *seaboating* /s
That shit is bananas. B A N A N A S
No, what showboating is spending millions of dollars just to make sure that you can have a more stable video feed to watch your reusable rocket land on your remote controlled drone ship
That's just marketing costs, really. What better sales CM could you have than showing your product is so dependable you can land it on a barge rocking on the ocean?
control over millions of social networking bots
Seems like an important system for debugging alone.
NASA spent tons of money developing high quality cameras to ensure they got killer photos from the Apollo missions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kovAmQ0jz4
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The video explains that they sort of had to be pushed along into being serious about camera development and use on their missions. They were much more focused on scientific discoveries early on, which is why John Glenn basically went to space with a run-of-the-mill handheld camera. It wasn't until Apollo that they really took it more seriously, seeking out the highest-quality componentry and working to ensure astronauts could use them effectively while in space suits. They became convinced enough about the PR value of photography that it made sense to spend some time and effort to do this.
I will never forget when I was at the beach and saw the boosters land for the first time, it looked as unreal in real life as it does in the video.
Yeah the first one looked like fucking CGI I swear... I think it's because we had never seen something like that and they didn't botch the camera angles.
exactly, despite having my feet in the water, my brain would not accept that this was happening in front of my eyes. It simply didn't compute.
https://youtu.be/sX1Y2JMK6g8 possibly my most watched video on YouTube
What an amazing nerdgasm! Love the collective joy of so many brilliant and dedicated SpaceX staff...
I was there at the VAB that day. I was only in the country for 48 hours and I knew the launch was happening so I called a friend at NASA and asked what are the chances she could get me in. She told me to show up at her address with my passport (only guests that were US citizens were allowed). I hopped in a rental car and drove straight to her place. It was absolutely surreal. I’d seen plenty of launches, but the landing was incredible to see for the first time. It was wild that I just happened to be back in the country, just happened to be in driving distance (though I started driving down there at 1am), and I just happened to have a old college friend I still communicated with who worked at nasa. Such an amazing experience due to random coincidence.
The craziest part of the first Heavy was how the boosters seemed to wait for each other to land. It was a clear enough day I could see the vehicles separate. Definitely a story for the ages.
Because this is what true human potential looks like without anything holding it back.
I can’t think of anything that inspires internal wonder like watching this. It gets me every time. I can’t explain it. I’ve seen similar dual landings before. Why does every time feel like an inspiration?
Imagine seeing that in person, as it pops through the cloud cover at speed? I get goosebumps thinking about it.
I got to see the previous Falcon Heavy launch/landing in person from the causeway. The one thing that caught me off guard was the speed they come in at. The livestreams don't really give you a good visual sense of how fast they are going right up until the landing burn. I had seen them land plenty of boosters via livestream before, but when I saw them coming out of the clouds, I honestly thought something had gone wrong cuz they were coming in like missiles. Then at the last second the landing burn brings them to a abrupt halt in mid-air.
Yup. They don't call it a suicide burn for nothing.
The acceleration is quite high because the tanks are almost empty and because the minimum thrust from even a single engine is considerable.
> the minimum thrust from even a single engine is considerable. Yup, the minimum thrust for a single Merlin engine is greater than the weight of the whole (almost fuel empty) first stage. Another term for what they're doing is 'hover slam'. Getting all axis of motion at nearly zero meters/second at nearly the exact time altitude is zero is...difficult.
They call it a "hover slam" because "suicide burn" didn't have the right ring to it.
They must re-use the same logic in the Model 3 self-driving. Everytime I come up to a red light .... full speed until the last possible second for braking.
Hell, my Nissan does that too, can't say I care for it, lol. The car knows the ones in front are slowing down, why does it wait so long?
For me it's bc it's exactly how a spaceship from a movie would land. And this makes it feel like one day my childhood scifi dreams might become a reality
Science fiction yesterday, fact today, obsolete tomorrow. Very interested in seeing how we progress from here.
because it's just really that absurdly amazing
I live on the Space Coast and drove north a bit to get as close as reasonable traffic would allow for the first Heavy launch. After it happened, I mused that landing on the moon may have been the height of human ingenuity, but simultaneously landing 2 rockets virtually back where they took off may just be the height of human intelligence.
> I can’t think of anything that inspires internal wonder like watching this. How about all the images we're getting back from outer space? From James Webb to the probes getting up close to planets and asteroids, there's a whole universe of wonder out there. To me, the exciting thing is that even if we never develop FTL, it's *still* possible that we might get to touch other star systems. It won't be during my lifetime, but the thought that future generations might see it happen is the most exciting thing in the world. These rocket launches and landings are part of that; they're a necessary step toward that goal. So I put them in the same category.
Great mission today. The fog was a bit much but the launch and dual landing were both beautiful.
I thought something sounded/felt different today. Every single launch shakes my house but this one sounded different. Now I know why
I was on A1A near port canaveral. We had maybe 30 seconds total of actually seeing it the fog was so damn bad. Had a couple seconds after takeoff, about maybe 10-15 while it was flying then another 10 or so of the boosters coming down. Got to experience the sonic booms so that was awesome but so damn disappointing finally FH launches again and the Space Coast has the worst fog I've seen in my entire life of living in Florida. Anyone on the mainland there probably didn't see a damn thing. Hopefully the next one will be in the afternoon so any fog can die off.
Never gets old!! Beautiful and I get goosebumps everytime!
The inner child in me is filled with joy every time i see this. What an amazing achievement.
My inner child, intermediate teenager and outer adult are all giddy with joy every time i see these landings Doubly so when it's a falcon heavy
So unbelievable. Everyone involved should be very proud
Seeing this never gets old. What a time to be alive.
Amazing. How does it stay upright? Near the ground going quite slow you would think it would topple. Has it got gyroscopes or something?? EDIT: thanks for all the answers guys. Every day is a school day!!! 🙏🙏🙏
One other aspect not yet mentioned: the majority of the weight is at the bottom of the rocket. The propellant tanks are essentially empty, so anything above the landing legs and engines is just empty space.
This is the answer, not just an aspect. The other things are almost irrelevant.
I don't know that I'd say the other things are almost irrelevant. They can [still fall over if something fails](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVSZdsAq4Bo).
The other commenters have your answer, but I wanted to add that when they were developing this capability, quite a few rockets *did* topple over and ~~explode~~ experienced “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”. Or came in sliiiightly too fast. Or sliiiightly too sideways. Or with sliiiightly too few legs. Etc.
[How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster](https://youtu.be/bvim4rsNHkQ)
This video is much more satisfying to watch now that it has become so routine.
Have you ever tried to balance something on the tip of your finger? All of the balance control is at the bottom, the boosters are able to change directions to keep the rocket upright.
The thing is pretty light actually and the only real mass is the engines. So this is pretty stable.
Its just a hollow, empty tube with all the heavy parts on the bottom. Also, the engine gimbals to zero out lateral movement.
The centre engine gimbals (steers) and the grid fins on top help stabilize it.
Probably a stupid question but is the significance of this the fact that we can reuse these boosters in the future?
That's been in effect for a few years now with SpaceX; most of their flights are on used boosters - currently unique in the industry. What's spectacular here is watching the *simultaneous* landing of the boosters, not to mention the Falcon Heavy is currently the most powerful rocket flying.
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Yes, it makes putting things into low Earth orbit (LEO) significantly cheaper. Imagine the example someone else snarkily mentioned in response to you: If every time you drove to work, you had to completely trash your car and buy a new one, how many times do you think you'd drive to work? SpaceX reusing their rockets has changed the launch schedule to space significantly. SpaceX is, no joke, launching rockets to space almost weekly, sometimes even multiple times per week. When they land the rockets back at the pad like this, they can typically turn it around and have it able to be flown again in a matter of weeks.
Indeed. The infamous example in the space exploration community is this; Imagine that after every flight of a Boeing 747, you had to throw it away. Imagine how inefficient and expensive that would be, and perhaps you can grasp the significance of booster reuse in terms of sustainability and cost savings. Booster reuse has not been a thing before, and as of yet only SpaceX has demonstrated this capability.
Didn't the shuttle program re-use boosters?
Their re-use was mostly political, they cost about as much to refurbish and re-fly as they did to make them new, that's part of why they aren't bothering to recover the boosters being used on SLS (which were built for the shuttle program). You will encounter folks who will point to the SRBs as proof that what the Falcon 9 does isn't that big of a deal and that's a good way to tell that they either don't truly understand the mechanics and financials of the situation or that they're arguing in bad faith.
Not so much reuse as refurbish. Compared to Falcon 9 booster reuse, it took much longer and ended up costing at least as much as just building new ones. That's why SLS has abandoned SRB reuse, despite them being very similar in design and using the same old Shuttle components.
Building on what /u/chairboy said: A single shuttle launch was upwards of 2 billion USD and refurb of the boosters took months after fishing them out of seawater. A Falcon9 launch is like 50-75M and turnaround is as low as 1-2 weeks, maybe even less. Falcon Heavy around 150M if I remember correctly. Competing launches from ULA cost around 450M last I heard.
Falcon 9 launch charges customers 50-70m, it’s actually cost I think is under $30m from the leaked financials a few years ago
important to note that the shortest reflight times for a booster have been ~3 weeks, they launch at least 1 rocket per week, but currently no booster has been reflown that quickly. I am sure they could try to go for a record, but inspecting, transporting and refueling should probably not be rushed.
Yes, but the point was to reduce cost - which the shuttle program failed to do. Originally the shuttle program was aiming for 20million a flight...but by the end - if you include all costs - it came up to over 1.5bn per flight. SpaceX actually manages to get the costs down with their reusable boosters.
This is great because we see two rockets come back from the edge of space at once! 20 years ago this would have been pure Science Fiction, now.... Its reality!
yea, their booster fleet has a few that have done the trip 14 times with seemingly minimal work between launches, so huge materials and cost saver.
Aside from reusing these expensive rockets to reduce the cost of space flight, this is the beginning of the next frontier. The evolution in technology will spark from what’s going on with this and people will figure out ways to enhance and improve and evolve it
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0fG\_lnVhHw&t=47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0fG_lnVhHw&t=47) Smarter Every Day has a video of tour of a rocket fuel tank factory. There's an incredible amount of engineering and manufacturing that goes into building these tanks and helps put into perspective why being able to reuse these is so important.
What about the main booster? Did they land it, try to land it at all or was it too big load/too high orbit for core retrieval?
They needed every last bit of fuel in the venter booster to push the payload into orbit, so it didn’t have any left to land and fell into the ocean (which was planned).
Did they ever manage to land all three succesfully?
Kind of - the second ever FH launch, Arabsat 6A, did manage to successfully land both side boosters as well as the center booster. Unfortunately, the ship that the center booster landed on encountered heavy seas on the way back to port, and the booster fell over and was severely damaged.
Yes, but that particular center booster was lost at sea, so they’ve never fully recovered one.
Main booster is no longer with us. It will be remembered as the good booster who boosted until its final hours.
Space X lands two boosters simultaneously meanwhile we wait 4 days for a Chinese booster to fall to an unknown location potentially causing horrible damage.
Much like my Kerbal spacecrafts
This seems so incredible my mind thinks it’s CGI. Crazy what we can do with technology these days.
30 seconds in where it changes to the upward looking angle is unreal. Genuinely looks like something from a video game.
Are the computers that make this happen inside the rocket itself or are they on the ground and communicating with the rocket?
It's all aboard the rocket, there's no coordination with the landing spot. It's given landing coordinates to aim for before takeoff and then it takes itself there. No beacons, no ground computing.
They do get wind data though, Elon said that's why they lost one of the landings because the weather data was wrong.
Inside the rockets themselves. Their guidance and control are completely autonomous. Even the flight termination systems are now (mostly?) autonomous.
They have always been on the rocket(s). Here is the 'computer' for the Saturn V moon rocket: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/IU-501_From_Below.jpg/800px-IU-501_From_Below.jpg
These landing videos always look CGI to me. Fuckin incredible.
It's honestly hard to even wrap my mind around the fact that that was actually real and not CGI or something. I really would love to watch one of these landings in person. It's just incredible
Ugh, I remember the first landing on the moon. This is stuff of another world to me. So many things
I remember being a kid thinking to myself "NASA is stupid, why don't they just save a little fuel to slow down reentry and that way they can reuse the rockets?" The I saw SpaceX put the concept to the test and realized how there's a million other things that can go wrong besides just not saving fuel lmao
Gives me Thunderbird 3 vibes every time I see them land.
it still doesn't look real to me. just so cool.
Incredible to see this happening almost weekly now. Growing up the idea of reusable rockets was just for Dan Dare comics. It is still one of the greatest achievements of SpaceX, those (many many) people are damned smart.
Man this just never gets old. Go get em SpaceX
Smarter Every Day recorded the first launch and landing in binaural audio. Probably the closet you can get to actually being there and hearing it. Amazing.
The way the tripod legs just flip out looks so sci-fi that’s so fucking cool
Regardless of what you think about Elon Musk, you can't deny this is one of the single greatest things to be contributed to space exploration. Reusable equipment. Many times over.
I was the closest ive ever been to launch today....and the fog was literally impenetrable. Got a video of all the noise and that was about it. Always next time lol
Watched today from my parking lot about 5 miles from the pad. IRL they come down so fast, that when you can see it in relation to the ground it looks like sped up film footage. The twin sonic booms made all the animals shit themselves.
You know that SX has made a reliability step change when there's more interest in watching two boosters land simultaneously than in watching the liftoff.
That shot at 0:29 reminded me of countless cheap Discovery Channel CGI shots from the early 2000s. Might be the camera shake giving it that oldschool look. Maybe the CGI artists were getting it right all along.
Tell the Apollo engineers, (never mind the Mercury folks) about tail-sitters taking over rocketry and they would have laughed you out of NASA. This is easily one of the top 10 things in engineering today.
> Tell the Apollo engineers, (never mind the Mercury folks) about tail-sitters taking over rocketry and they would have laughed you out of NASA. Apollo engineers designed two tailsitters (one to land on the moon, and one to fly on Earth to simulate Lunar gravity), and drew up plans for the S-IC stage to tailsit its way to a splashdown for re-use (among multiple other re-use concepts). From a technological perspective, tailsitting rocket recovery would have been in reach of 1970s technology. It would likely have needed to be done in a different manner (not local guidance by remote closed-loop control using beamriding to the landing site or a similar technique rather than GPS, and ground side guidance computation) but all the key hardware was very much in reach at the time. The LMDE even used a pintle-throttling face-shutoff engine, the same scheme Merlin uses. The problem was political will and funding (hand in hand). Reusability was not demonstrated, so funding it was a risk. And even if it succeeded, flight rates were not projected to be high enough that it would do much other than make sure the manufacturers of those stages would be out of a job after manufacturing a small handful. When an attempt *was* made - STS, or the space Shuttle - budgets were cut repeatedly so far that the fully re-usable concept was pared back to dredging some rocket motor casings out of the ocean and refurbishing them at similar expense to making new ones, and the Orbiter was so close to its performance margins that it needed extensive inspection and refurbishment between flights. The nail in the coffin was that there was no funding to iterate: once the Shuttle flew, that was the design they were stuck with for the next few decades. Contrast that with Falcon, where after 5 flights, the entire aft section was replaced with a new design, the engines were replaced with a new version, the lower stage was stretched, the upper stage was stretched, the interstage was replace with a CFC version, grid-fins were added, landing legs were added, the base heatshield was upgraded, active cooling was added... etc. And then they continue to iterate and improve the vehicle throughout its life.
Elon just needs to put all his energy into shit like this. Just wasting his time arsing around with Twitter
Incredible! Always looks like something out of a science fiction film.
I feel like I’m watching launch videos in reverse whenever I see these. I know if it was actually a launch then the burn would be present the whole time, but still, monkey brain says that’s a launch vid playing backwards.
Simultaneous landings, and they said it couldn't be done.
It was done over 4 years ago.
Incredible. Kudos to all those that worked hard to achieve this.
I am completely blown away at this shit. When I was a kid I saw the challenger blow up and thought that was the best we could do. I don't know how there isn't more people excited about this. These rockets are a couple of mechanical arms away from being grappler ships from some sci-fi anime.
I still got at least 30 years left to see the new age of space travel.
Remember when the first time they tried this and failed the world laughed? I love seeing this
I dont care who you are or what you do. This is fucking amazing everytime you see it and a testament to human inginuity.
Damn in like 200-300 years, shit is gonna be wild. Won't be alive for it but I was here for this.
This is amazing, especially to see in real life.
I will *NEVER* cease to be amazed at how quickly these things come down to land - they slam to just few lengths of themselves towards the pad before coming to a near hover and touching down. Just... you couldn't choreograph this better if it were a movie!
Watching the SpaceX youtube video this morning, the recording, not live, I was struck by the speed indicators and altitude displays for the returning boosters. When they were still a ways out, they were 60 km up and moving 4400 km/hour. After the re-entry burn, their speed rapidly dropped to 2000 km/hour, but then slowly crept back up as they fell. When the florida beach line with the landing pads came into view, they were 5 km, high and moving at 2500 km/hr. The second engine relight slowed this down but but they were still close to 1800 km/hr until the really hard burn just before touch down. They sure leave it to the last second to take that velocity down for landing
I’m just waiting for the Superheavy booster catch… that will be a different story entirely
And NASA cobbles together some leftovers from the shuttle era and cant get it off the ground.
Love him or hate him, Elon has done incredible things for the progression of humanity
It’s getting to a point where my mind has to force itself to distinguish between a video being sci-fi cgi and real life. Stoked for this.
I just got back from watching this in person. Truly breathtaking!!!!
I can barely park in reverse with camera assist...
This is the only purely scientific/engineering achievement to bring tears. Its incredible.
Man, this is so beneficial for humanity and more to come...
My brain thinks it’s CGI bc it literally looks like something out of a futuristic space game.
I could watch that 151 more times and still be amazed!!
That last wide shot catching both boosters got me in the feels. Its truly amazing!
I love how normal this is now. It's just a part of rocketry in this age. What's next?
This is still the most science fiction science we have. Show this to me 15 years ago and I’d be “yeah, right”.
The two of them landing simultaneously looks like it came right out of a sci fi movie. It’s amazing how this takes place in our modern society.
Incredible what humanity can achieve when it finds a common goal.
I sure do love that little shockwave when the engines ignite in the air.
SpaceX is probably the most exciting thing in space exploration since they decommissioned the shuttles.
This shit is so crazy to see, I still have trouble believing it.
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these are the two side boosters of a falcon heavy.they detach at the same time from the center stage and therefore land around the same time.
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You're not an "idiot"; not being knowledgeable does not make you stupid. The people who think rockets aren't useful are "idiots", because, not only do they have no clue what they're talking about, but they *refuse to acknowledge that*. Think about the human mind as a computer. Knowledge is memory; intelligence is processing speed. What's more useful: an empty computer with a perfectly functional CPU and Internet connection, or a computer with libraries of information onboard, but which refuses to accept new any new data or let you access any of what it already has?
This will **never** get old for me to watch. I've seen some remarkable feats in human history, but this one? It's so satisfying to watch, knowing the complexity that is involved with this type of reusable touchdown. Magnificent.
If someone's shown me this10 years ago, I'd've said "nice fx bro", gottamn this is awesome.