(UPDATE: toppled, not sunk) SpaceX is a company of firsts, but this is one they probably wish they could have avoided.
As reported by Stephen Clark at SpaceFlightNow:
The core booster from the Falcon Heavy rocket that launched Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida tipped over in rough seas after landing on an offshore drone ship, SpaceX officials said Monday.
The Falcon Heavy’s core booster touched down around 10 minutes after the Falcon Heavy blasted off from Florida’s Space Coast, and moments after the rocket’s two side boosters returned to landing onshore at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
The on-target landings marked the first time SpaceX landed all three Falcon Heavy boosters on the same mission. The core stage crashed at sea near the drone ship after running out of igniter fluid on the Falcon Heavy’s inaugural flight in February 2018.
But ocean swells rocking the drone ship, which SpaceX has named “Of Course I Still Love You,” caused the rocket to topple before recovery crews could secure the booster to the vessel.
“Over the weekend, due to rough sea conditions, SpaceX’s recovery team was unable to secure the center core booster for its return trip to Port Canaveral,” said James Gleeson, a SpaceX spokesperson. “As conditions worsened with eight to ten foot swells, the booster began to shift and ultimately was unable to remain upright.
Given how important sea landings are for this company, you can bet somebody is reviving the plan to have robots secure the rocket, an idea that was scrapped a few years ago.
Honestly, “robots” shouldn’t be that difficult. Design a small crawler with a vision system that can locate an anchor bolt in the end of each landing leg, and attach it to a heavy cable that spools out from an anchor point. Use two for each leg, with anchor spools at eight compass points (thus allowing for any orientation at landing). It should be possible to lash down the stage within ten minutes or so. They should pop up out of the deck so as to be protected from the landing flame. Use magnetic treads to keep them held down and to give them traction to pull the cables.
Or, do it the way they currently do it: weld the legs to the deck. A robot crawler can do that, too. Here is a photo of workers welding it down on another flight, to give you a sense of the scale of the thing:
UPDATE: Apparently the core did not roll off the deck, it just tipped over. It looks to me as though the engines are undamaged. Since they are the majority of the mass (and cost) of the stage, this isn’t a complete loss.
14 replies on “Falcon Heavy center core “lost at sea””
They could also add railings to the sides of the platform, so that when it falls over in rough seas it won’t roll off. Probably have to make the platform bigger, and add computer-adjusted ballast.
Or, since they can land the thing on a dime, have it land either in a fitting low enough below the deck that it won’t capsize, and/or into a device that will lay it over on its side securely.
It didn’t roll off, it tipped over, which a railing wouldn’t help. It won’t roll because it has legs sticking out (at least that’s what it looked like in all the videos where they did not stick the landing at all, even).
I might imagine a large robotic arm that would swing up out of the deck, locate the tube, and grab onto it. But that risks doing damage to the relatively-fragile skin.
I trust they’ll figure it out. A robot crawler welder would be quick to implement, could probably have it working in a month. Most of the parts are off the shelf.
It would be very interesting to see the video of it. They may eventually release it, as Musk has been very transparent about failures.
I trust they’ll figure it out too. 🙂
A larger platform would help prevent it from tipping off. Heck, they could use a decommissioned oil rig. Not as cheap, perhaps, but it would give them elbow room while they iron out the kinks during these early stages of development.
As an aside, I think I read that the launch pad for these Falcons is 39A? Isn’t that the pad where Grissom and his team lost their lives?
It’s the one they used for the Apollo missions, and for shuttles. Not sure about the fire…no, wiki says it was air force launch complex 34 on Apollo 1.
Thanks for looking that up for me! I look these things up for myself usually, but I was tired last night. I visited 34 once as a teenager, and hope they leave it intact as a memorial. Not only is it a good memorial of the astronauts, but also of the Apollo mission itself; and being able to walk out onto the launch pad and experience the scale of it was meaningful. Usually you see them from so far away.
The scale is impressive. I don’t know if they still have the Saturn V lying on its side at the visitor’s center, but looking up at those engines was amazing.
Oh, that’s disappointing. But I guess it’s one step at a time…
I suspect somebody calculated the odds and decided to put the money into some other part of the show (probably Super Heavy/Starship). This is the first time this has bitten them.
When I saw that sitting there, I thought: “What keeps that rocket from pitching into the sea?”
I have my answer.
They normally have a crew board the ship and weld the legs down, but apparently the seas got too rough too quickly after the landing. (I wonder what the sea state was at time of landing…)
If they wind up with robots doing it, we really *will* be living in the future. Even more than we already are, I mean.
This kind of robot ain’t that hard. Literally, I could design and build them for them if they wanted. I built a similar robot for inspecting the insides of the Boeing 787 horizontal stabilizer.
And…we live in the future every morning we wake up 😉
The future according to the fiction of my childhood, then. 😉
Right there with ya. Things will catch my attention, and I’ll tell my wife, “There’s the 21st century again!”
And there are so many things we could do if we chose to. The hurdles are bureaucratic or legal, and often failures of imagination, but we know how to build flying cars and body parts, and extend life through genetics, and construct orbiting cities (or underwater cities), and humanoid robots. What passes for AI isn’t really artificial intelligence yet, but that’s probably coming also. Dick Tracy watches? Phhhht. A cheap smartphone outguns that toy a hundred times over.
Remarkable times, and we’re surfing on an exponential curve.