SpaceX News

[Skipjack]

Indeed. This one touched down a bit hard and the crush core in one of the leg actuators got to do its job. Not a big deal and it can easily be replaced, the stage is now a bit wobbly on the barge because one leg is folded up more than the others. Elon Musk seemed a bit concerned that the stage might tip over because of that during transport to the harbor. Lets hope all goes well.

[paperburn1]

It would seem to me that this is something one could plan for and easily repair or just shim up

[Skipjack]

It would seem to me that this is something one could plan for and easily repair or just shim up

According to Musk, the crush core can be replaced easily.

[D Tibbets]

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[D Tibbets]

It would seem to me that this is something one could plan for and easily repair or just shim up

According to Musk, the crush core can be replaced easily.

Indeed replacement back at the Cape is probably trivial. A temporary fix while at sea might utilize jacks and shims. Probably easy with calm seas, but with rough seas and wind such may be involve significant human risk. Cable tie downs might also support the stage, even with only three remaining legs( if the fourth fails completely later)- provided they were welded to the deck.

Dan Tibbets

[paperburn1]

I listed earlier that with four legs the falcon should take 20 degree rolls just fine. (but scary) but with only three legs this number drops by at least 30 percent in the direction of the bad leg maybe even more. Sunday and I don't want to do math .

[ladajo]

Any bets on when they re-fly a recovered booster sports fans?

[Giorgio]

If memory serves me well they should attempt to re-fly the booster that landed in April within end of this year.

[paperburn1]

July is where my money is on. They have a "low value" launch of cube sats scheduled that they have been delaying for some time now.
All the other launches scheduled are for large commercial users and the ISS so I would bet that they would not want to botch that one.

"" Formosat 5 for Taiwan’s National Space Organization (NSPO) and the Sherpa deployer from Spaceflight Industries carrying 87 small payloads and CubeSats for a variety of scientific and commercial customers. Delayed from May and June""

[JoeP]

I'm all for SpaceX success and 1 launch a day, but that make it even sooner we have to are going to have to clean up all this junk cheaply or it will just pulverize itself into a cloud of crap and all good orbits are going to be worthless. Need some robotic clean-up sats and maybe some powerful ground based lasers to de-orbit the small stuff. But who is going to pay for them.

[Giorgio]

July is where my money is on.

That would be amazing feat, but I think the time window of about 2 month to check and re-qualify the vector for flight is just too tight for the first time....
But if they actually did it and it worked fine it would indeed be another awesome result.

[ladajo]

I am not sure they will fly a commercial cargo on the first re-cycle flight.
It would make more sense not too.
Maybe on the recycle recycle flight.

[hanelyp]

The first few recovered boosters they need to go over EVERYTHING to see where the wear and tear are, what needs to be reinforced, and what they can shave some weight from. And overall to characterize what needs to be inspected each time and figure an efficient approach to the inspection. Then they can start ramping up the turn-around speed for a recovered booster. Until they had a recovered booster to inspect they only had engineering models to tell them how much wear to expect, and no sensible engineer puts too much trust in the models until validated.

[Tom Ligon]

At one point there was some discussion of using more experimental flights to launch relatively low-value payloads to the ISS. Grocery flights or water, for example, rather than satellites or scientific payloads. Stuff a Dragon with expendables.

[ladajo]

The first few recovered boosters they need to go over EVERYTHING to see where the wear and tear are, what needs to be reinforced, and what they can shave some weight from. And overall to characterize what needs to be inspected each time and figure an efficient approach to the inspection. Then they can start ramping up the turn-around speed for a recovered booster. Until they had a recovered booster to inspect they only had engineering models to tell them how much wear to expect, and no sensible engineer puts too much trust in the models until validated.

They will get some real data on recovered recycles. The deeper they go with reflight, the more informative the high stress / wear point data will be.
I agree that prior to the first recycle flight, they need to have an idea what to instrument and where.
I would not make design changes until I had flown several builds several times. Then we would see some good redesign info.
Not that they wouldn't learn from a single recovery, I am sure they are. I am thinking that there is more to learn before making significant changes to the booster design seeking to improve economy of scale and long term performance.