SpaceX First Re-Flight
On March 30, 2017, SpaceX achieved the world’s
first re-flight of an orbital class rocket.
Following delivery of the payload, the Falcon
9 first stage returned to Earth for the second
time.
Curious to learn more about the first ever
recycled rocket?
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In a milestone for the private spaceflight
company, SpaceX successfully launched a reused
Falcon 9 rocket booster into space, the same
first stage that carried a bouncy house into
space in 2016.
The rocket booster had previously stuck a
spectacular landing on a drone ship floating
off the Florida coast, playfully named “Of
Course I Still Love You.”
That reused booster stuck its landing again
on Thursday 30 March, 2017. and on the same
drone ship no less, after blasting off from
Cape Canaveral, Florida.
This time, the rocket wasn’t carrying an
inflatable space pod, but was instead delivering
a communications satellite to orbit for a
company called SES.
The rocket’s vertical touchdown marks the
ninth successful SpaceX landing in 14 tries.
six of which have been on ships floating offshore.
In April, 2016, SpaceX launched an inflatable
habitat to the International Space Station—and
then successfully turned the first stage of
its Falcon 9 rocket around, flew it back to
Earth, and parked it on a drone ship floating
185 miles off the U.S. East Coast.
“The rocket landed instead of putting a
hole in the ship, or tipping over, so we’re
really excited about that,” said SpaceX
founder Elon Musk at a press conference after
the landing.
After launching from Cape Canaveral, the SpaceX
rocket rocket boosted its payload-carrying
Dragon capsule toward low-Earth orbit, then
turned around and headed for home about 4.5
minutes after launch.
As it approached the drone ship, the Falcon
9 righted itself, slowed down, and landed
perfectly.
“The 1st stage of the Falcon 9 just landed
on our ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ droneship.
Dragon in good orbit,” SpaceX tweeted, in
what must be the most understated announcement
of the successful landing to cross our feed.
To space and back, in less than nine minutes?
Hello, future.
In 2015, the company successfully set a rocket
back down on the ground, but landing at sea
is much trickier than landing on … land
… because the ocean is a moving beast.
Previous attempts failed when earlier rockets
toppled over and experienced a “rapid unscheduled
disassembly” (i.e., they exploded).
Musk said that before that April launch, company
members were placing the odds of success at
2:1.
“We thought it was more likely than not
that this mission would work, but still probably
have a 1/3 chance of failure,” Musk said.
“It’s still quite tricky to land on a
ship … it’s quite a tiny target.”
The name of the game here is making spaceflight
cheaper by developing reusable rockets that
can ferry people and cargo into orbit, instead
of spending millions of dollars building new
launch rockets.
Blue Origins, a company owned by Jeff Bezos,
is also working on reusable rocket systems,
and has successfully landed its New Shepard
rocket on the ground multiple times.
Musk and his team hope that once reusable
rockets become more than a mere curiosity,
they’ll help reduce the often prohibitive
costs of space travel, which is crucial for
Musk’s ambitious plan to populate Mars within
a few decades.
His next goals include two successful launches
of the same booster within 24 hours.
The Re-flight mission made Falcon 9 the second
orbit capable rocket after the space shuttle,
to achieve partial reusability.
The Falcon 9 flew from launch complex 39A
at the Kennedy Space Center, the same pad
from which the Shuttle began eighty-two of
its missions, including its first and final
flights.
Reusability has long been a key objective
for SpaceX.
Making the company’s first launch in March
2006, the small Falcon 1 vehicle carried a
parachute system intended to bring its spent
first stage back to Earth.
SpaceX attempted to recover the first stages
of four Falcon 1 vehicles.
However, the rocket’s first launch failed
early in the mission and its third launch
failed at stage separation, leaving the first
stage unrecoverable.
During the second and fourth launches, recovery
attempts were unsuccessful.
Following three failures, SpaceX achieved
its first successful launch in September 2008,
with the fourth Falcon 1 successfully placing
the demonstration payload RatSat into low
Earth orbit.
The rocket made its fifth and final flight
in July 2009, successfully placing Malaysia’s
RazakSAT satellite into orbit.
For the RazakSAT launch, the Falcon flew without
a recovery system.
SpaceX originally planned a family of Falcon
rockets, with the smaller single Falcon 1,
a five-engine Falcon 5 and a nine-engine Falcon
9.
Two heavier vehicles, the Falcon 9S5 and 9S9,
would have used two additional cores strapped
to the first stage, with the 9S5 using Falcon
5 cores and the 9S9 Falcon 9 cores.
The first five Falcon 9 launches used a version
of the rocket which has retrospectively become
known as the Falcon 9 v1.0.
Following the rocket’s original design the
first stage was powered by nine Merlin-1C
engines arranged in a square three-by-three
grid.
The second stage used a single Merlin Vacuum
engine, derived from the Merlin-1C.
Both stages of the two-stage vehicle are fuelled
by RP-1 kerosene propellant, oxidized by liquid
oxygen.
Following its maiden flight, the Falcon 9
v1.0 made four more launches, all carrying
Dragon spacecraft.
The first of these launches, in December 2010,
carried Dragon C1.
Dragon’s maiden flight, C1 completed two
revolutions around the Earth before the capsule
reentered the atmosphere and splashed down
in the Pacific Ocean.
The final three launches of the original Falcon
9 carried Dragon missions to the International
Space Station; the first the Dragon C2+ COTS
demonstration mission, followed by the first
two operational flights under the commercial
resupply services program.
The earliest Falcon 9 launches carried parachutes
which were to have been used to recover the
first stage.
However, this was abandoned due to the stage
disintegrating during reentry, before the
parachutes could be deployed.
Instead, SpaceX began to investigate using
the stage’s engines to make a powered descent
and landing.
Alongside this, an improved Falcon 9 vehicle,
the Falcon 9 v1.1, was developed.
In order to help with the reusability development
program, SpaceX constructed a test vehicle
named Grasshopper which is a single-engine
Falcon 9 v1.0 first stage with fixed landing
gear.
In 2012 and 2013 Grasshopper made a series
of test flights from SpaceX’s facility at
McGregor, Texas.
After eight successful low-altitude flights,
Grasshopper was replaced with a new three-engine
development vehicle using the stretched first
stage of the Falcon 9 v1.1.
This new test vehicle introduced the retractable
landing legs and later grid fins that would
fly with operational Falcon 9 rockets, making
four successful flights in 2014 before a sensor
issue led to its failure during the fifth
mission.
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The Falcon 9 v1.1 stretched both the first
and second stages of the rocket and upgraded
from Merlin 1C to Merlin 1D engines.
The first stage engines were rearranged into
the octagonal – or OctaWeb – configuration
that is now familiar.
The upgrades increased the rocket’s payload
capacity, giving it sufficient margin on some
missions for powered recovery tests following
first stage separation.
The first few Falcon 9 v1.1 launches tested
restarting the first stage engines after separation,
attempting to achieve a controlled descent
into the ocean.
The rocket first flew with legs in April 2014,
and grid fins to provide additional control
were added ahead of January 2015’s launch
of the CRS-5 Dragon mission.
During the CRS-5 launch, SpaceX deployed its
first ASDS “Just Read the Instructions”
into the Atlantic Ocean to provide the returning
stage with a landing platform.
A converted barge, the ASDS was positioned
downrange and left unmanned for the landing
attempt.
Although the first stage reached the drone
ship, it depleted its hydraulic fluid during
descent resulting in a hard and uncontrolled
landing and explosion.
The next Dragon launch CRS-6 made another
landing attempt using “Just Read the Instructions”
three months later.
The stage toppled over on touchdown, before
again exploding.
The final mission for which Just Read the
Instructions was deployed was the CRS-7 launch
in June 2015.
Towards the end of first stage flight, a composite-overwrapped
pressure vessel (COPV) broke loose inside
the second stage oxidizer tank.
The tank over pressurized, resulting in structural
failure and the disintegration of the Falcon.
Just Read the Instructions was subsequently
converted back to a regular barge; however
her name was reused for a new drone ship commissioned
for launches out of Vandenberg Air Force Base.
A replacement East Coast ASDS was also introduced,
named “Of Course I Still Love You”.
The two vessels are named after ships in the
works of science fiction author Iain M. Banks.
When Falcon returned to flight after the CRS-7
failure, it was in a new configuration which
has become known informally as the Falcon
9 v1.2 or Falcon 9 Full Thrust.
This version of the Falcon 9 has uprated engines
and uses super cold liquid oxygen to increase
oxidizer density, allowing a greater mass
to be carried relative to the volume of its
tanks.
The second stage was further stretched compared
to the Falcon 9 v1.1.
The Full Thrust configuration’s improved
performance allows for recovery attempts on
a greater range of missions, including geosynchronous
launches such as the reflight launch.
On missions that do not require the rocket’s
full performance the first stage can now return
to the launch site for a touchdown on dry
land.
In December 2015, the first flight of the
Falcon 9 v1.2 carried eleven Orbcomm communications
satellites into low Earth orbit, with the
first stage making its first attempt to fly
back to Cape Canaveral.
A landing pad, landing zone 1, was constructed
on the site of Launch Complex 13, a former
Atlas launch pad which was used between 1958
and 1978.
While the second stage continued to orbit,
successfully deploying its payload, the first
stage achieved a flawless landing at Landing
Zone 1 marking the first time SpaceX had successfully
brought the stage back to Earth.The Falcon
9 v1.1 made its final flight in January 2016
with an unsuccessful attempt to land on the
new “Just Read the Instructions” after
lifting off from Vandenberg Air Force Base
with the Jason 3 satellite.
One of the first stage’s legs failed to
lock into position and the stage toppled over
on landing.
In March 2016 SpaceX made its first recovery
attempt with Of Course I Still Love You, during
the launch of the SES-9 satellite.
The first attempt to recover the first stage
from a geosynchronous mission, the first stage
returned to the drone ship but did not have
sufficient fuel remaining to achieve a survivable
landing.
The next launch, the CRS-8 Dragon mission
achieved the first successful landing at sea.
Launched on 8 April 2016, the twenty-third
flight of the Falcon 9 and the third of the
v1.2 configuration lifted off from Space Launch
Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force
Station to send Dragon on its way to the International
Space Station.
After propelling the Falcon 9 for the first
two and a half minutes of her mission the
first stage – Core 1021 – separated.
Six minutes later, following boostback, reentry
and landing burns, the stage touched down
atop the drone ship.
A year later, following refurbishment and
testing, the same first stage was ready to
fly again.
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second stage of the Falcon 9 rockets?
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