Iridium OneWeb first stage landing on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship featuring the shortened Vacuum Merlin nozzle
Iridium OneWeb first stage landing on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship featuring the shortened Vacuum Merlin nozzle
by u/Logancf1 in SpaceXLounge
14 replies on “Iridium OneWeb first stage landing on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship featuring the shortened Vacuum Merlin nozzle”
This is the 11th landing for B1063
What are the benefits of doing that?
Just announced “LOS Antarctica” and I’m thinking to myself, that really says something about the progress that Starlink has made in improving Antarctic communications, that they can act as a receiving station, even in the depths of Antarctic winter.
Mind you, not much else to do there.
Be interesting to know if they can see the 2nd stage in orbit from the ground though.
That looks so strange 😆 Nice to see some modifications of the second stage though.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|——-|———|—|
|[Isp](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/13ms3fx/stub/jkwl5t1 “Last usage”)|Specific impulse (as explained by [Scott Manley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnisTeYLLgs) on YouTube)|
| |Internet Service Provider|
|[LOS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/13ms3fx/stub/jkwl2a5 “Last usage”)|Loss of Signal
| |Line of Sight|
|[M1dVac](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/13ms3fx/stub/jkx81dm “Last usage”)|Merlin 1 kerolox rocket engine, revision D (2013), vacuum optimized, 934kN|
|[NSF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/13ms3fx/stub/jkx1s42 “Last usage”)|[NasaSpaceFlight forum](http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com)|
| |National Science Foundation|
|[RTLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/13ms3fx/stub/jkxawdz “Last usage”)|Return to Launch Site|
|Jargon|Definition|
|——-|———|—|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/13ms3fx/stub/jkxd9rs “Last usage”)|SpaceX’s world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[ablative](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/13ms3fx/stub/jkx7lr6 “Last usage”)|Material which is intentionally destroyed in use (for example, heatshields which burn away to dissipate heat)|
|kerolox|Portmanteau: kerosene fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
—————-
^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj)
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It’s not the size of the nozzle that matters, it’s the DeltaV
Good to see that auto-abort turned around in day. Did they say what caused it?
So still looking good for a 80 F9/FH launch year?
In any case it will be hoot when they launch east out of VSFB.
Somewhere in the SpaceX factory an engineer realised they could get away with a shorter 2nd stage nozzle.
If they’re anything like me when it comes to developing software, they’re probably sitting in front of their computer repeating, “I can’t believe it worked.”
I love that landings are so routine. I remember scrambling to watch these happen live. But now if the landing wasn’t successful, that would be shocking
The shorter nozzle is pretty clever. If you gotta throw the second stage away anyway why build more nozzle than is needed for the mission. I’m honestly surprised they haven’t designed a version of merlin vacuumed with an ablative nozzle or something of that nature. Nonetheless it’s cool to see all the coaking getting spit out of the short nozzle.
I don’t recall seeing so much of the MVac exhaust on the Transporter 7 mission. Am I just getting old?
I hope the engineer that figured this shorter nozzle option out is getting some sort of reward.
And to shortstop the “anticompetitive practices” lawsuits that the EU would like to file, SpaceX adds capacity to OneWeb and additional backups to Iridium.
Why not do the longer nozzle and use the extra payload for fuel for rtls?
Question: Shorter nozzle because performance not needed, but still droneship landing instead of RTLS. I guess that means not enough performance for RTLS but still enough for short nozzle — and hence the short nozzle delta-v hit is less than the difference droneship vs RTLS?