"Following stage separation, the first stage of Falcon 9 will attempt an experimental landing
on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship. As with other GTO missions, the first-stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing difficult."
Apparently the broadband out there is great. The issue isn't lack of satellites or speed.
The issue is that when you have a Merlin 1D (or 3) firing directly at a mobile platform, it's going to shake violently. And when you have sensitive equipment on that platform shaking, you're going to have a satellite misalignment and signal cut outs while the lock is reacquired.
Considering this is a pretty unique scenario (I would imagine 99% of satellite internet connections don't have rockets landing on them), I doubt it's a high priority to resolve somehow.
Another successful satellite launch and more experimental data (aka they have a new failure mode for landing things). It is really awesome that they can be collecting the expertise to land the first stage "for free"[1] like this and every failure has improved the lander in some key way.
I can't wait to see the reconstructed footage of this event. From what we got initially it seemed a bit off to the left of screen and generating a lot of smoke.
[1] I realize it costs them time and money to operate the barge and recover the stages, but the cost of building those stages and launching them is covered by the launch contract so this work has extremely low marginal cost for rocket research.
If you are wondering, the video feed from the barge got cut off during the landing, but it didn't appear that it was very good. Lot of smoke. But I'm no pro. For now, we (the viewers) don't know if the landing was OK or KO.
O well - better luck next time. Hopefully they got some more good data...would rather they have this issue now than when landing Red Dragon on Mars..!!
It's awesome that this is just an "oh well" rather than the huge disaster it would have been with any past reusable system. It would be better if it had worked, but I love how they've set it up so that their program can tolerate failures like this.
Well, they (the people at spacex) probably have everything, but I don't have access to this information :) Just watching the webcast, nothing indicated if the landing was ok or not. The people presenting the cast didn't know either.
The boats are quite a distance away. During the JCSAT-14 mission, there was actually video on the webcast from one of the boats, and the barge was over the horizon. It was night, so it's hard to get a feel for just how far away, though.
Looks to me like they may have stuck the "landing" but it was hard, broke something and the vehicle was on fire. Listen to the crowd and I think you can hear when the RUD went down.
Am I the only one who thought the landings are already starting to be boring? Smoke, rocket is there, cheers from the engineers...I remember Musk expected a few months ago to be able to save 10-20% of the Stage 1 this year (while the ratio increasing over time). But I guess they already can achieve 70-80% success rate, which is a cost saving that is already enough to kill competition.
Yeah, this is the critical part. We still don't know what kind of reliability to expect from the used stages, and we don't know how much it's going to cost.
Right now it is, but as they built the rocket, they are able to repair it and save money for sure. From what Elon said, landing was the tougher part. He was much more sure about being able to relaunch some of the stage 1s (except 1) than about being able to land (which took a lot of effort)
"Following stage separation, the first stage of Falcon 9 will attempt an experimental landing on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship. As with other GTO missions, the first-stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing difficult."
Mission Press Kit : http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/spacex_eutelsat_abs...
EDIT: Sounds like they lost the first stage, still not very clear on the details.
EDIT2: Confirmed loss of first stage by Elon Musk.
"Ascent phase & satellites look good, but booster rocket had a RUD on droneship"
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/743096769001578498