Quote:
Originally Posted by DaFace
At the risk of giving you more detail than you really care about...
This booster took more stress than any they've tried to land thus far. (There have been some lately, including the next one, that are flown in "expendable" mode and no attempt is made to land due to the extreme flight profile.) Because it came in so hot, the friction coming through the atmosphere was so severe that it actually ripped part of the grid fins apart.
Either related or unrelated to that, the stage came in very awkwardly. We're still hoping we get video, but as Donger noted above, it looked like it was coming down off the ship, but somehow ended up landing successfully on the other side of the ship.
We don't know how it got there, but it's no surprise that it came down hard on one leg more than the others. They're designed for this and have a "crush core" that is meant to compress in the case of a severe impact and take as much of the remaining force as it can. That happened here, which results in one leg being much shorter than the others. The leg is destroyed, but they're replacing those each time anyway, so no big deal.
The core itself looks generally intact, but I'm going to guess they don't fly this one again. It was its second time already, and the two they've re-flown so far have been on pretty easy missions in terms of load on the rocket. In theory, future iterations of the F9 will include improvements that should make them better able to handle extreme forces like this.
The end.
|
Perfect. That's about the level of technical info I can understand.
It landed hard and probably shouldn't be used again, but considering the stress of the load this time they might not have been counting on a successful landing anyways. Probably a lot of good data to be gleaned from the semi successful landing anyways.