Falcon 9 launch rescheduled for Saturday
SpaceX and NASA have now rescheduled the Falcon 9/Dragon launch to ISS for Saturday morning at 4:47 am Eastern.
I am wondering if lack of light is going to effect the effort to vertically land the first stage.
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SpaceX and NASA have now rescheduled the Falcon 9/Dragon launch to ISS for Saturday morning at 4:47 am Eastern.
I am wondering if lack of light is going to effect the effort to vertically land the first stage.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
“I am wondering if lack of light is going to effect the effort to vertically land the first stage”
‘We choose to do these things; not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’
If the landing barge to the east is a few time zones away, there should be plenty of light. How far downrange is the recovery?
I saw a graphic earlier this week that placed the barge about 200 to 300 miles north-east of the launch site. Probably not enough to make much difference regarding daylight. However, I suspect the rocket doesn’t rely on visual localization to determine it’s position with respect to the barge. Or, if it does, the barge should have its own floodlights to light up the landing area.
I wasn’t aware that the rocket has eyes.
One thing that *will* be made more difficult is aircraft making visual records of the first stage descent. Even though this descent has been done several times, this is the first time with those hypersonic “paddles”. If there is an at altitude “anomaly” that destroys the vehicle after those paddles deploy, then having visual records would be highly desirable.
Perhaps those portions of the flight will be high enough that light will be available. At 30 kilometers you can see a *long* way to the horizon. Can that be calculated by anyone here? I would be surprised if no one at SpaceX had done that calculation.
Having done motion control algorithms (nothing like this though), telemetry data from the gyroscopes, accelerometers and GPS receivers would very likely be far more useful to the engineers than any visual data from cameras. Cameras are most useful for PR and from an engineering standpoint to confirm that items such as the fins deployed as expected, but provide very limited data useful for guiding the rocket to a small patch on the surface of the ocean. High quality telemetry data will confirm and refine the physicals models used to design the control algorithms. The data can also be used to dissect the flight in great detail and understand what happened should something go wrong.
Given this is the first attempt to use the fins in this fashion, I would be pleasantly surprised if the SpaceX engineers have good enough models and other information to successfully guide the stage down to a 10 meter patch of sea. Instead, I see them getting within a few kilometers on the first attempt, 100’s of meters on the next few attempts and then finally sticking it. That’s typically how the engineering process works. The first few flights of the Falcon 1 are a perfect example of this.