Cape Canaveral, Florida. – Another SpaceX Starlink launch on a Falcon 9. One difference for this launch was the initial deployment of the Starlink satellites. It was To put them into a slightly eccentric orbit, so instead of performing their long 45-minute coast so they could circularize the orbit, They decided to drop the satellites off and then let them do their circularization in orbit. The reason that made the webcast was a little bit shorter.
50th launch of a Falcon 9 booster
But what didn’t go according to plan it was the first stage booster, which we had all expected to land. It would be the 50th launch of a Falcon 9 booster, which was pretty cool. This Falcon 9 booster is number 1056, which had flown three times previously. The last time was on the 17th of December 2019. which meant they’ve turned this booster around in just under nine weeks.
Lost Video Downlink
While watching live, the entry burn, we lost a video down link with the booster and not recovered. Instead, we cut to the Camera on the barge, we hear a call out the landing legs have deployed, and then on the right side of the barge Camera, you see a cloud that’s forming. That cloud looked me like it was consistent with the Falcon 9 engines firing. It had that kind of characteristic pulsing look, and there’s nothing, no rocket appears, but a few seconds later, there’s a splash somewhere on the right side of the video, which throws water onto the Camera lens on the barge and then the shot is cut away. SpaceX later confirmed it during the live stream that the booster made a soft landing next to the barge.
Falcon 9 booster water landing
Which meant that it then fell over. We also heard a call out for the “FTS being disarmed.” So they would have depressurized booster. Most likely means that they are probably going to be able to tow it back to shore, so that was it landed, and then it took a few seconds to fall over, and when it did, it created a splash that deposited the water on the Camera lands.
The successful mission for SpaceX
Missed booster landing aside, This is a successful mission for SpaceX. They deployed all 60 of their Starlink satellites to their target orbits, and the fact that we’re talking about a failed booster landing is pretty much a testament to how routine these have become. SpaceX does want to sell the fact that they’re reusing boosters. They’ve talked about reusing boosters ten times. this was the 4th flight for this Falcon 9 booster, and I guess it’s good to see that it did fail to land on the landing rather than failed during the launch.
Starlink launches
These Starlink launches, the Falcon 9 boosters, are loaded up to the absolute max, and they’re traveling about 400 Miles downrange before they land. This means they come in quite hard and hot, and therefore yet it’s not surprising that they are experiencing more stresses than average. But SpaceX is going to have a lot more Starlink launches this year to figure out how hard they can push these boosters. How many launches they can seriously get out of them so that they can give their commercial customers more confidence that the reused booster, or a flight-proven booster, as they say, is right for their precious payload. We have to stress that this is something that would have seemed miraculous a decade ago, this would have been something from science fiction. The fact that the landing failure is fascinating to us is really uh really a testament to how routine that SpaceX has made booster landings