Spacex has 15th successful rocket stage landing in a row and another successful launch

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SpaceX successfully launched and landed another Falcon 9 rocket Monday. It launched South Korean communications satellite. This is Spacex’s third launch in October and their 16th so far in 2017.

The rocket’s first stage landed on the droneship “Of Course I Still Love You”. This is Spacex’s nineteenth successful booster recovery in 24 attempts.

It is 15 good recovery landing in a row.

19 thoughts on “Spacex has 15th successful rocket stage landing in a row and another successful launch”

      • Every time Brian changes the site, every d*mn time, it gets worse. I’m on the verge of giving up on it.

        • The site desperately needs a better comment system, or people would do just that, give up.

          SolidOpinion was worse than Disqus but it had its not-that-bad aspects. Like allowing us to remain logged-in and be certain that something appearing to our name was actually typed by us, and tracking the comments we did and the answers we got from others in a more or less convenient way.

          In fact I miss it, now that I have seen how bad WordPress is.

          The worse aspect of WordPress is that we can impersonate any other user without a Gravatar, and the lack of self-moderation features, like having upvotes/downvotes with a real impact on the comment’s visibility. Trolling should be buried in downvotes and easily removed from sight.

          If the level of noise and trolling gets too high, I’d also consider no longer posting.

    • Just imagine when it’s BFRs or BFSs going up and down in a repeated, mundane cycle.

      150 tons of cargo going up or several tens of tons coming back to the ground from space very often, probably every day, landing vertically as god and Heinlein intended.

      It will become boring and mundane, but still awesome for those of us sill alive and remembering the times before that.

      And it won’t be SpaceX alone. Blue Origin and others are going the same route, with various degrees of payload ambition and reuse. Simply amazing.

      The golden age of space travel and utilization really is ahead of us.

      • Just imagine when the inevitable and tragic spaceX accident(s) let(s) all the air out your fantasy like Fukushima did for the “nuclear renaissance”.

        • And I’m sure you, or people like you, will be there, cheering the explosion and the fall of the debris all the way down to the ground.

        • When the inevitable accidents happen, it won’t so much as slow the expansion down.

          Mostly because pathological skeptics won’t be participating, so they won’t be calling any shots.

        • Like what? A crash? SpaceX rockets crashed more often than not when attempting landings before. Or do you mean a crash of a rocket with a load of people on it? Er, you mean like, .. a plane crash? Of which, history is full of. And car accidents and ships sinking and more. A single accident or crash is not going to derail this progress.

        • It really all comes down to whether, when it happens, (Because it will happen.) we have sane regulatory agencies, or regulatory agencies that are captured by Luddites who don’t want man in space. Because that’s nuclear power’s real problem: To most people it’s just another source of energy, it doesn’t really have a big fan base. But it does have a very motivated base of enemies who want it killed off. And they managed to capture the regulatory agencies.

          I really don’t think there’s a large contingent of people who want access to space shut down. Further, what little risk there was to nuclear, (Tiny compared to most sources of power.) was risk to third parties. The risk in rocketry is to the people who’ve signed up for the risk. That makes a big, big difference.

          In short, I don’t think your scenario works, the preconditions aren’t there for it.

          Now, human gene line genetic engineering, that faces the same sort of risk as nuclear…

          • I’m sorry Brett, sometimes they talk about putting 500 paying passengers on the BFR. I just can’t really take it when these guys talk about spaceflight on chemical rockets becoming routine. Isn’t there a quote that only a heartless person isn’t a liberal when they’re young and only an idiot isn’t conservative when they’re older? This is in the same vein. I’ve spent my career working for jet engine manufacturers, nuclear power plant manufacturers and nuclear power plant operators. In all cases the public must be protected. In all cases the tolerance for risk is nil. These Believers should go get a job at SpaceX; I’m sure it wouldn’t be difficult. I’m sure I could get a job there by the end of the month. What I’d find there is either a sane, pragmatic design bureau with a giant talking head at the top or one that will not be around in 10 years. I’ve seen these talking heads renege on their promises. I’ve seen them waste good money and years of people’s careers.

            • Scary, you have to distinguish between people who’ve signed up to take a risk, and everybody else. The public is much more accepting of people dying, if they volunteered for a risky activity. Which was what made NASA’s reaction to the Challenger accident so stupid: The public understood that space exploration was dangerous, they weren’t going to freak out.

              SpaceX protects the public by launching over the sea, so that nobody gets hit by the rocket if it crashes.

              Now, they better build up a pretty solid safety record before they put 500 people on a rocket at once. But if they’ve been launching people for years, and one rocket crashes, sorry, you did sign the waiver…

            • ” I’ve seen these talking heads renege on their promises. I’ve seen them waste good money and years of people’s careers.”

              And the more government hierarchy is involved, with its unacknowledged agency cost, the more you will see of them. That is what produces such people. Being at the top of a hierarchy makes it painless for them to fuck up. When the person is down on the shop floor working with the engineering team, the pain comes through, and they change what they are doing to get to their goal, just as Musk has.

        • “Just imagine when the inevitable and tragic spaceX accident(s)…….”

          Like Komarov’s Soyuz 1 did for the USSR? Like the ongoing problem of Tiangong 1 is doing for China?

          Naw, ….I didn’t think they stopped either.

          Robert Heinlein: “Pioneering is not only a way to find new and wonderful things, but a way to find new and horrible ways to die.”

          That’s never stopped us before, why should it now? Or did you think you were talking to a bunch of academics?

      • I remember reading Robert Heinlein novels as a child, after reading all the Tom Swift adventure series. Elon Musk bring both to mind – I feel like I’m a kid again. As much as I admire Musk, I hope that even newer players will disrupt him with even more potent technological innovations. Also, we need AI to conquer outer space, because it can function where humans cannot, it will patiently do the dirty work and the drudgery, while humans can do the more interesting stuff.

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