- Hi It's me Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut.
Space X just experienced the first failure
of landing a Falcon 9 in almost two and half years.
We've gotten so used to them just nailing these
first aid landings that we forget
that they've actually failed ever.
The last time the Falcon 9 itself failed
was June 15th 2016 on the Eutelsat 117 mission.
But they also had, of course the center stage of
the Falcon Heavy failed to land.
But this is the first time we've seen
a landing failure in a long time.
Now the important thing is of course this mission
was actually successful because this was CRS-16
which is a resupply mission for
the international space station for NASA.
And the primary mission getting that into orbit
and getting it on its way to the international space station
is and still has been successful.
So, that's the important part before we dive into this.
Don't forget that, that's the primary mission.
Now, before we go any further let's explain
how this is supposed to happen, what systems control
the Falcon 9 to get it down on to the ground safely and then
we are going to dive down into what exactly went wrong.
So, this is a Falcon 9 Rocket.
A really high detailed model from Buzzspacemodels.com.
Now, you'll notice of course after a
good two and a half minutes or so of burning,
the first stage is about down to 30% fuel left
and it lets go onto the second stage.
So, the second stage fully fueled pops off into orbit
and sends this dragon capsule up to
the international space station.
That's how rockets just generally work.
The first stage typically depletes itself
and falls into the ocean and crashes for ever going bye-bye.
Space X though, has different plans
and they've done this successfully so many times
we've forget how hard it actually is.
But here's what happens, so this is a booster
that's approximately 45 meters tall, around 150 feet tall.
And what it does its that first it does a flip maneuver
using some cold nitrogen gas thrusters
in the inner stage of the vehicle.
Then, it lights three of its nine Merlin engines
and performs a boost back burn meaning it cancels out
its horizontal velocity and begins to
point itself back towards its landing pattern.
This case was LC-1 at Cape Canaveral air force station.
Then, after it does that boost back burner
it begins to open up its grid fins and
it has four of these things on the inner stage.
And what these are, they're titanium grid fins
they've used titanium on these block five boosters
that's the newest variant of the Falcon 9.
And these grid fins open up like this
and the camera you see is looking from on the inner stage
looking down the rocket, you see there's
you can see a pair of them opened up, they pop out
and then, what happens is the grid fins still
don't really do much in the vacuum of space.
So, the cold nitrogen gas thrusters
still continue to do their thing.
Then, once it gets near the atmosphere
as it approaches the atmosphere the vehicle does
what it's called a re-entry turn or an entry burn
and it lights up three of those nine Merlin engines again
and it slows itself down about half way before
it really hits the thick part of the atmosphere.
This is so that the atmosphere
doesn't tear the vehicle apart, cause that'd be bad.
So, then the vehicle's now beginning to enter thicker
and thicker and thicker atmosphere
and that's when the grid fins have more and more control.
And really quickly we can see in the video
That as its beginning to use those grid fins more and more
it starts to wobble and isolate out of control
pretty violently and they cut
the feed supposedly by accident but Space X
isn't too ashamed to show their failures.
So of course within an hour Elon gave us the full cut.
And here's a shot from my friend Das Valdez who was
out there on the Cape, he was live streaming this on
Twitch on his Kerbal Space Academy, K Space Academy page.
So he actually was watching this live along with again
thousands of people who tuned in
and witnessed this down in Florida.
I wish I was down there for this one.
But yes he actually has footage of it and
you can see it doing this roll here and it's amazing
that the vehicle was still able to control himself.
I mean look at, even though it looks like
it's going completely out of control.
It gets itself under control pretty darn quickly.
This is amazing, this is impressive.
It's amazing that even though the grid fins failed
the vehicle was still able to
control itself to the same degree.
So, great footage from Das Valdez,
make sure you check him out on K Space Academy
or Kerbal Space Academy as well on Twitch.
Awesome footage Das, you nailed it.
Okay so now it's time to actually talk about
what went wrong and luckily almost immediately
we got the answers from Mr. Elon Musk itself.
"The grid fin hydraulic pump stalled,
so falcon landed just out to sea.
Appears to be undamaged and is transmitting data.
Recovery ship dispatched" and then doubled down saying
"the cutaway was a mistake.
We will show all footage, good or bad."
Which they have now, then they said we may use
this booster for an internal mission because
someone asked if it could still be reused and he said yes.
Yes, it probably could still be reused for
an internal Space X mission which is crazy.
Space X apparently is getting a lot more comfortable
with reusing things that are in the ocean,
as Elon casually mentioned that they're
maybe going to reuse a fairing that they recovered
from the ocean recently, just two days ago.
Then now, here's the deeper explanation
here so the "pump is single string.
Some landing systems are not redundant,
as landing is considered ground safety critical,
but not mission critical."
So then he says, "Given this event,
we will likely add a backup pump and lines."
So here's what he is talking about here.
So previously, the grid fins used
to be on what's called an open loop system.
And that's where the hydraulic fluid which
is Helium pushed through the actuators
that control the grid fins and then it's bled out
into the atmosphere so it's wasted.
After, I believe after the CRS-5,
Space X changed to a closed loop system
because they had a failure when
it completely ran out of hydraulic fluid
and then closed it and made it into a circulating pump.
Now he's saying that this is single string,
meaning there's a single pump and that feeds
all four grid fins and now he is saying apparently
that they're going to just make it all redundant.
And add another pump and add another set of lines
so that it has some redundancy here.
And this is where we have the conclusion,
this is why failures are actually important
because some day, Space X is hoping to land purposively
with humans on board for their star ship.
It's only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.
So here we are this is a perfect engineering opportunity
to take a failure and learn something from it
and make a better rocket and the important things here are
guys, this was not at risk of falling on
anyone's house, or head, or car, or dog.
They purposefully missed the landing zone
at Cape Canaveral by a decent amount
and then the grid fins are there to actually steer it that
last little bit and dog leg over on to the landing pad.
So, no one was at any risk here
that's an important thing to note.
So, there's no humans involved, there's no safety things,
this vehicle flies itself, it's all autonomous
and it did an amazing, amazing job almost recovering
you can tell it begins to stabilize its spin
and does an incredible job of landing softly
despite having a pretty massive failure like this.
That just goes to show how robust these systems are
and the fact that it didn't just totally go crashing
out of control doing anything crazy.
It landed right where's its supposed to
considering the circumstances which is safely in the ocean
where no one is at the time and do note that
of course any launch, any rocket launch
there's a whole exclusion zone so if someone is
even kayaking near by they will scrub the launch.
So, you don't need to worry about people's life
at risk here this is totally all accounted for.
Although, this was a failure, it' a good failure.
People are going to learn from this,
Space X engineers are going to learn from this;
Make a better Falcon 9 rocket and the mission
of course, the important part is the mission
was still completely successful and if this was
three years ago today, Space X or any other company
would have been throwing away these boosters.
So, just to keep that in context, three years ago today
no one had ever landed purposively the first stage
of a liquid fueled orbital class rocket.
On Monday, they reused a booster for the second time
reusing using it making the third time its' flown.
So, don't forget just a few days ago we were celebrating
how awesome they are doing at this reuse thing.
So, just remember today's flight unfortunately
was a brand new booster and had never flown before.
But, hopefully we'll see it fly again
potentially which will just be crazy.
This will be one to watch, this booster's name is 1050.1.
If you need to know more about
that you can kind of keep track.
I'll let you know which booster cord
is that flies on my website and so
go to prelaunch previews on my website.
Everydayastronaut.com/prelaunch-previews
and you'll be able to keep track on which booster is flying.
So just kind of remember that in your head
if you see 1050 dot next if it
flies again it will be dot two.
Remember, this one had a little swim which is just crazy
I really hope it does get to fly again, that's be awesome.
So, that's what happened again
don't take this out of context.
Yes, it was a landing failure but everyone was safe.
It performed phenomenally despite the failure
the mission was still a success
and again Space X will just learn from this
and make a better, more robust system.
Thanks everybody, that's going to do it for me.
I'm Tim Dodd the every astronaut
bringing space down to earth for everyday people.