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.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
“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.