How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster

Musk has 10+ years of history we can go by that says: Nobody has to follow anything closely to know that he will just say whatever he wants to say and you should give a rats ass about it timeline wise. Now, do not get me wrong: I got frickin' goose bumps when I saw the first Falcon touchdown. Goose bumps again when they did the first landing out in the open ocean. Of course I still love you! The pincers catching a starship booster were super awesome. Did I mention goose bumps? I am getting them as I write this, thinking back to those moments and now I want to re-watch all of those on youtube after I finish typing this. But believing a single timeline prediction by Musk? No, forget it. EDIT: haha, and yeah I did go re-watch and this is so super awesome when I got reminded of it: ▶ this video No this is not meant as a jab btw. I love that they have this up. This is what many of us do in software development. Just we don't blow up actual frickin' spaceships to do it "It's just a rapid unscheduled disassembly!" ;)

That's probably the first step on the path to stagnation. There's a lot more eyes on them now a days, and Musk is much more well known, so it creates a lot more drama - but they've done the exact same process with everything. They even published a montage of failures [1] on the way to their first successful landing 'back in the day.' It was fiery, but mostly peaceful. They didn't even hit a shark! [1] - ▶ this video

Failure is part of the process and they're quite open about it and have a wonderful sense of humor: ▶ this video Every launch is a learning experience and leads toward success.

This method has already been proven to be infinitely better than the old school approach. Falcon is the most reliable rocket in the world and capable of landing its booster back safely to earth, something which thought impossible by basically everyone in the industry. It took years of physical iteration to iron out all the problems though, see this video from SpaceX of all their years of failed attempts: ▶ this video Anyone who has ever built a physical product will tell you that theory and good engineering are important, but once you start to actually build something you enter "integration hell", which means you need to physically exercise your product end-to-end many MANY times, and iron out all of the edge cases that reality presents. It has nothing to do with "better engineering" and everything to do with complex systems interacting with physical reality. Stuff Made Here (YouTuber) made a video where he built a disc launcher, which is a great example of what the process is like. He put quite a lot of engineering and design work into the project, but eventually entered integration hell at some point and just had to iterate and problem solve by repeatedly firing test disks until all the kinks were worked out. link

The rest of the industry is being wholly outcompeted by SpaceX so not sure if their assessment is anything to go by today. Or just take a look at "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster". ▶ this video

Seemed worth pointing out. See also, the explosions from the Falcon 9 landing days ("How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster "): ▶ this video

SpaceX themselves made a failure montage for Falcon 9 ▶ this video It's easy to forget how many failures that had, but look how far it has come, at this point I don't think they've had any major failures in 5+ years. Maybe a couple sea drone ship booster landing issues but zero mission failures in a very long time.

If you happen not to have seen it, "How Not To Land an Orbital Rocket Booster": ▶ this video from SpaceX.

If you look back at how they learned about landing Falcon 9 first stage - they failed many times before succeeding : ▶ this video

Kinda hoping that we get an updated "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" video [0] covering Starship development eventually... [0] ▶ this video

Someone made a video how the flight might look like if everything goes well: link The model is pretty current (except for the tank strapped on the side that is downwind during the drop phase) and the flight phases look reasonable as well (phases: launch, horizontal drop with flaps correcting the position and a turn to land vertically again). If it does not... well, then this instead: link (refers to: ▶ this video )

Everyone is commenting saying how mundane it has become to see the landings. Hence you might enjoy this official SpaceX Blooper reel from 2017 that shows the numerous spectacular failures that they worked through. Innovation is a type of gamble. People forget that. "SpaceX: How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" ▶ this video (and regular reminder that these things are 12-storey high explosive tubes)

>Use it in a manner that SpaceX disagrees with and you can expect lawyers. You wont see the failure footage from SpaceX ever used as nasa footage was used by countless scifi productions. SpaceX literally uploaded a video of all their crashes spliced together in a comedic montage. It's called How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster. ▶ this video Even crash footage is good PR for them. There are still millions of Americans who do not know what SpaceX is or what it does.

Reference 1 is nearly 20 years old, much has changed in those 20 years. Reference 2 is non sequitur; nobody is suggesting that there are zero errors/failures in agile, simply that Boeing may benefit from taking a more agile approach. Here's how iteration works: ▶ this video

I mean, seems pretty hard to be honest. They got the trajectory down pretty close for the vast majority of these (otherwise would be too far away to see with cameras). But so much extremely expensive space hardware destroyed in the pursuit of this goal. They earned it: ▶ this video

Possibly booster landings were judged much less reliable than parachute landings when they originated the concept. Nobody had propulsively landed a booster that had been to space until Blue and SpaceX did it at around the same time. Before that things didn't always go so well: ▶ this video SpaceX were going to land Dragon 2 with rockets and it looks like NASA wasn't interested. Parachutes are still the safe, proven option. With orbital class boosters potentially being landed every couple of weeks and Blue having flown their vehicle multiple times I would guess future vehicle generations will benefit from that experience. SpaceX's BFS is going to combine a second stage and crew/cargo vehicle. If successful, competition might be pushed in the same direction.

It's not like SpaceX didn't break things either: ▶ this video . The real trick is knowing when it's OK to break things in experimentation and the acquisition of knowledge, and when everything needs to run smoothly.

Take a look at all of the failed landings[1], even after they land on the barge they still go boom(or RUD if you prefer that term) when the structural integrity is lost. [1] ▶ this video

Agree it is strange. I love their "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" film. ▶ this video Watching the countdown net it seemed plausible that they didn't know whether it had successfully landed either.

Speaking of not being ashamed of failures, I've always liked their compilation of them (with sound it's even better): ▶ this video