Except for the second-stage of the rocket, which they now just fire out of orbit, apparently.
Nice to know that we're not just littering our planet but the rest of the solar system too.
NASA’s TESS spacecraft is in orbit following a successful launch from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 left the launch pad at 22:51 UTC after a delay to deal with unspecified issues with the rocket’s guidance systems. The first stage engines shut down just over two minutes later as planned. The …
What should they do with the second stage other than throw it away ?
One idea: park it in orbit and put it up for sale. The cost of taking it up X hundred miles has been paid, so sometime it might be of interest to someone who is building something large upstairs and who needs a lot of metal. I'm assuming that it could be melted/reformed into something else.
If you had the first clue about orbital mechanics you’d realise the above is wrong. The second stage is de-orbited and burns up rather than leaving junk up there. It would be far too expensive in fuel to fling it beyond earth orbit, and there’s far too much junk to allow adding to the pile.
> If you had the first clue about orbital mechanics you’d realise the above is wrong.
Actually, I hate to break this to you, but the second stage for TESS did indeed go into heliocentric orbit. The remaining fuel in the second stage was only enough to do one of two things, burn at apogee to lower perigee into the atmosphere, or burn after deployment to reach a hyperbolic orbit.
Since the second stage doesn't have the endurance to coast the 6 hours to apogee (batteries, lox boil-off etc) the decision was made to burn to earth escape and enter a heliocentric orbit.
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/04/tess-launch-mission-search-near-earth-exoplanets/
However, I will agree, a majority of second stages are intentionally deorbited :)
I did actually research THIS LAUNCH specifically before writing this post(*)... and they just pushed the second-stage out of orbit. Apologies will be accepted in the form of cash, credit card, Bitcoin or Paypal... no cheques please.
Same as the Tesla-in-orbit. Great gimmick. Now where's it going to end up. It's hard enough to launch through the space junk now without encountering 100-year-old space junk returning on a huge chaotic orbit because a private firm just shoved it away from Earth with no way to tell where it would end up.
(*) The reason... because ALMOST EVERY LAUNCH they do that claims to "land back" in some fashion actually fails - even if it's only one rocket, one stage, or that they have to abort the landing, the "we re-use rockets" thing is only technically correct.
More often than you might think they destroy the drone-ships that they are landing on. They don't publicise it much because they can just say "Hey, we re-used a booster from flight A" and everyone just goes "cool" without checking facts... *cough*.
Here, in these politically-charged forums? Where people approve or condemn based solely on whether something aligns with their ideological beliefs? Yep, it was the first thing he thought of!
Nasty old exploiter Tesla (owned by a Rich Guy so it's evil) can't be allowed credit for anything good. So they land and re-use first stages that NOBODY ever did before? They're still an awful company because they didn't clean up the second stages that nobody ever has. Evil Tesla! Bad! Bad!
Gah...
On the off chance that you're serious here:
Our littering habits are a serious problem in low-earth orbit, and somewhat so in the geosynch belt. Something really ought to be done about this (not having ASAT tests make more shrapnel would be a nice start). Danger at other altitudes is minimal, because Space Is Big.
The second stage will be in an heliocentric orbit, just inside that of the earth (but touching it at aphelion). Its orbital period should be roughly 8/9 of a year, meaning there's a chance we'll see it in eight years and mistake it for a near-earth asteroid (that sort of thing has happened several times already, once with the SIV-B stage from Apollo 12, which came back to earth's neighborhood for a bit in 2003.)
But compared to the amount of rocks already in heliocentric orbit, we're in no danger of having things get cluttered up there.
That's the aim with BFR.
But to give you an idea of the cost of recovering the 2nd stage, current estimates put BFR Reusable payload at 150t to LEO, Expendable is 300t+.
More than 1/2 the payload capability is lost for reusability of the rocket.
Given about 1/3 is lost for stage 1, based on F9.
The current F9 GTO reusable payload is about 5.5t, if they were to reuse the 2nd stage that may drop to 4t or less.
But this obviously depends on the target orbit of the payload.
"Such landings are in danger of becoming routine, a tribute to the engineering involved."
Some things should NEVER be considered routine, at least while using small numbers of slightly tamed giant fireworks as launch vehicles. We've lost too many pioneers and had too many near-misses due to complacency over 'routine' operations.
Wait until we have a reliable means to get 'em out and bring 'em back (in a hurry or earlier than planned, if/when necessary) before saying it's routine, please.
They didn't attempt it on this launch. Don't know why.
The main reason is that Mr Steven is based in California, and can only realistically be deployed for Vandenberg launches.
Apparently though, they did still do the whole parachute thing to recover the fairing, albeit with a wet landing. I don't believe that they can reuse a fairing once it's got wet, so presumably they did this in order to get more data about how the parachutes perform, in order to help with the catching next time.
As far as I know, they haven't released any information about how it all went so far this time. But there's a reasonable chance that someone will photograph the boat coming home over the next few days with the fairings on board.
The James Webb is supposed to be launched on an Ariane 5, although that is supposed to be replaced by the Ariane 6 in 2022 or so. It's possible it might end up on a SpaceX rocket.
Who knows basically. At the current rate of progress we'll be able to just drag it up a space elevator and give it a shove.
I am continually astonished by engineers who turn the daft idea created down the pub on a friday night into something that actually works.
You can imagine the converation
Eng1 how we gonna save money ?
Eng2 re use 1st stage
Eng1 how
Eng3 land it back
Eng1 in the ocean
Eng4 howabout on a barge
Eng1 Fall back from space do a 180 and land on a postage stamp in the sea
Pause....
Eng1 tell you what if by next friday you can show how, I'll buy the beers
Chorus DONE.....
That's pretty much how SpaceX actually works... there's a series of web vids by a NASA bloke assigned to SpaceX to transfer the PICA heatshield tech to them. It's on the NASA YouTube channel.
It was quite the culture shock for him. Whereas NASA would have done months of studies detailing every possible alternative, then months of meetings to decide between the alternatives, SpaceX looks at everything and as soon as they're "51% sure something will work" then Musk holds a meeting of everyone involved, they make a decision, then they run with that.
Imagine that, a top level meeting where decisions are actually made and followed through.
If it doesn't work, they go "whelp... didn't work" and back off and try something else.
The NASA guy was just left standing with his mouth open going "wow"
In the 1970s senior members of the O/S development team used to go to a local pub for a few pints at lunchtime. It was not unknown for them to discuss a "go faster" feature - possibly sketch it on the back of a table mat - then code it into the master source when they returned to the office.
In one case it then took 18 months of troubleshooting customer systems to get the bugs out of the code's side-effects.