SpaceX Launches 60 Starlink Satellites; First Stage Lost During Landing Attempt
CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION, Fla. — On Monday, February 15 at 10:59 p.m. EST, SpaceX launched 60 Starlink satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
SpaceX has now launched 1,145 Starlink satellites, with 1081 still in orbit. The company has received approval to launch nearly 12,000 satellites to provide broadband services around the globe.
This was the sixth launch of this Falcon 9 booster, which previously supported Dragon’s 19th and 20th cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station, SAOCOM 1B, NROL-108, and a Starlink mission.
The Falcon 9’s first stage crashed into the ocean near the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship. There appeared to be an anomaly during the entry burn. It was SpaceX’s first failure to land a Falcon 9 first stage since March 2020.
61 responses to “SpaceX Launches 60 Starlink Satellites; First Stage Lost During Landing Attempt”
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No doubt the loss of the booster will help the regeneration and re flight program. The benefits of reuse are manifold.
Well…the benefits of crashing instead of landing are not so manifold. It has been theorized that 5 to 10 landings are needed to break even (spacex is not saying). Because it has so many engines and such a small payload I would go with the 10 landings to break even. If the F9 is blowing up or crashing after a lower number of flights on average then the other stages have to make up for that quickly pushing the number of flights needed much higher. They are rocket engines and it is a lightweight highly stressed airframe so the maintenance requirements likely go way up after a certain number of flights increasing the number of flights to make up for that even more. I do not believe any of them have landed 10 times yet. See how that works?
What is needed is a much larger vehicle with much fewer engines…and I am not talking about the shiny starship which is just another version of the space shuttle and has far too many engines in the first stage.
SpaceX is a typical American corporation and its value is based on faith and fluff, not predicated on real income or manufacturing of real product. We’re just lucky that Elon Musk has a manufacturing and flying ethos to act as a candle to attract the moths of the marketplace. The irrational exuberance could easily have been directed elsewhere. We don’t know how Space X makes money, or how they balance their books. They’re an American corporation run by the product of American business school, so likely they don’t. We we do know is Space X makes excellent product that flies better than anything else off this planet. That’s all we know.
That’s all you know. Great advert. And I am sure Elon appreciates your praise. Reminds me of Trump’s cabinet taking turns thanking him and telling him how lucky they were to be serving his greatness.
Wow, I considered my post to be criticism of the American corporate system of finance and accounting. I guess unless you’re grinding your boot heel into someone’s eye socket, you’re not giving any negative feedback at all. I’ll bet you’re a joy to be around in real life.
Wow, I guess your adulation is an attempt to balance your scathing critique? You are trying to play it both ways….your hero as NOT part of that corporate system you seem to be damning? It is the Musk Cult boot heel in my eye socket for years that informs me so you might want to quit playing that righteous indignation card. No joy with your fan club.
Because SpaceX practices standard American corporate practice which I consider questionable to the long term health of the country means they don’t make excellent flying machines? Look, they make excellent rockets. The best. It’s as simple as that. Does my admiration of the R7 or the Proton mean I advocate for Soviet Communism? Good product is good product.
Why do you think 9 small engines based on a 1960’s NASA design is “the best”? It is not….not even close. The benchmark for rocket engines has always been the F-1, which in it’s developed version put out 1.8 million pounds of thrust. 8 or 9 of those engines was the original Moon rocket until John Houbolt found a way to use only 5. It would have been better to just go with the biggest launch vehicle possible. They went cheap.
Just like SpaceX has set space exploration back decades by promoting smaller rockets. The worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. What good they have done by using 1990’s Delta Clipper technology for landing back is one step forward while taking three steps back with their only-for-profit libertarian garbage ideology.
There is no cheap.
I think your criteria are not germane, and even if they were you’re wrong even within the point of view you spin, and your conclusions are so flawed they’re just plain wrong. I disagree with just about every statements you made above and the premises upon which they are based. We just disagree that’s all. It’s not the end of the world.
Certainly not the end of my world. I have seen NewSpace endlessly corrupt and dupe people for going on a decade now. It is just sad.
America went from Gerard K. O’Neill and a bright future to the Reagan Revolution and downhill from there. And here we are with an insurrection and a hundred thousand pieces of space junk on the way up to beam cat videos to a dumbed down population. Perhaps the Green New Deal will turn things around. It is on the way. https://iceonthemoon.org/20…
I’m sorry Mr Seaton, but you are comparing fantasy to real life systems building. We were spinning a lot yarns and fantasies back then and did not back much of it up with real hardware and working systems. The systems we have today actually operate as systems back then were promised to operate. But these are real world systems, with real world compromises, and real world capabilities and limitations. I can’t stop you from comparing the reality of today to the fantasy of the past, but you have to know much of the rest of us can see right thru that and recognize it for what it is.
we are, if Biden can fix the virus and the economy on the brink of the roaring 20’s including in human spaceflight
Given America’s schizophrenic business sector obsession with shunning the public sector here at home while at the same time working their way into Communist China’s 5 year plans, space may be the only hope the US has of a home grown economic renewal.
Decarbonizing the energy sector is now primed with the poster child of the most privatized energy system collapsing under stress. Seems as if everyone is surprised that the minimum viable product can’t survive real world stress tests. We had a similar breakdown here in Southern Az winter 2011. Temperatures plummeted and our NG pipeline nearly collapsed under the load. The local AFB and the university had to shut down and set the thermostats at like 50 deg to save gas for homes.
The Trump administration produced the vaccines. All Root Vegetable Joe has to do is is get them distributed and, as usual, he’s screwing that up.
The 2020s aren’t going to roar like the 1920s if Root Vegetable Joe continues his war on blue collar employment and treats us to a third term of Great Depression 2.0.
the trump world only paid money, private industry did the vac
we will see, but ditching reagonomics with revitalize the country
The problem is you are stuck on this rock, or want to be stuck on another rock with Elon. People with the imagination of a brick are all too common. It is the people who are open to new ideas that form the future. Spacex and it’s founder have done almost nothing new…while people like Gerard K. O’Neill, Stanislaw Ulam, Peter Glaser, John Desmond Bernal, Freeman Dyson, and the list goes on…
You are confusing ‘thought about’, or theorized, or did some 1st order engineering for ‘having done it’. Not true at all. There’s a large gap between ‘thinking something up’ and refining the idea to the point where it’s ready to be made out of raw metal placed on a machine tool. Let alone the gap between thinking it up and testing a working article at full scale.
You know what? I don’t like Elon’s exploitative labor practice either. I don’t like how he looks at people as tools to be used to execute his will. But guess what? He’s pushing a lot of good things forward. Spacefliht, solar power, power grid operations, and automotive engineering. The world is filled with people who don’t agree with you, yet have a lot of good things to bring to the table. We as mature adults learn to compromise and live with the differences around us.
These aren’t new ideas, they’re a half-century old. That said, the only realistic road to ever implementing those ideas runs through Boca Chica – not Huntsville.
I am not sure what your point is. Fantasys are easy to construct but as Reagan showed difficult to implement. its hard to see that ONeill’s were any more likely to come true.
But Musk is going to be king of Mars. Funny you mention Reagan because his directed energy research for star wars likely makes Nuclear Pulse Propulsion a system with an Isp in the tens of thousands or higher. But because nothing can come true except what is on the spacex website….
The Merlin 1-D has better sea-level and vacuum Isp than the F-1. It also has a much better thrust-to-weight ratio.
I would like to make the point that small business doesn’t operate the way you paint corporate practice. It can’t because employees and customers can go down the street quickly. Not that there are a lot that try funny business, just that they usually don’t make it. The few that do succeed in “getting over” do tend to inspire the next set of get rich quick wannabes. Buy Here Pay Here car lots the shining example of horrible, and they are dependent on people that almost never think beyond the next paycheck.
I don’t understand corporate finance either. One of the reasons my business stalled at a handful of employees. While I consider some of the corporate practices questionable as you do, I am very much against penalizing companies only because they have become large and powerful. As opposed to my feeling about nailing them for illegal practices. Gather up and study ten medical bills from people you know and tell me that some people shouldn’t be leaving their offices in bracelets that connect.
How does if feel to be lumped in with the rest of us
reactionariesconservatives?The root cause is that too many CEOs are worried about the quarterly earnings their bonuses/stock options are linked to and not the long term success. Short term profit maximization often hurts long term sustainability of a business. Investors too have a short term horizon which is made worst by Internet investing.
Well, we know how much of a killjoy he is in virtual life.
Reading comprehension has never been Gary’s strong suit. Your comment began with the word “SpaceX.” That’s all Gary needs to see and he’s off to the races.
I hear you brother, I hear you.
There is nothing “typical” about SpaceX.
Thanks to some document thievery four years ago by a source for WSJ, we know a good deal more than nothing. Like the fact that SpaceX has been profitable for about a decade except for the two years in which there were F9 RUDs. With Starlink ramping up, SpaceX is in the process of getting a lot more profitable.
The thing about private placement investments is that the investors get to see the books. Apparently they like what they see.
Narrator: That’s now how it works at all. That is not how any of this works.
Not in your Cult infected Kool-Aid impaired brain anyway.
That actually is how it works. You build a rocket in a factory, you take it to the pad, fuel and launch it with a few technicians- it is gone and that is it.
When you have it return, which lowers the profit margin because it lowers the mass you can orbit due to fuel and landing gear and the ship and the people doing this transiting operating heavy equipment, and the most expensive part being the technicians that inspect it and repair whatever is wrong…that adds up to a great deal of money. That “standing army” the NewSpace fans incessantly damned NASA for.
“It has been theorized that 5 to 10 landings are needed to break even”
Yeah theorized by SpaceX competitor who got whipped so bad they are scrapping both operational launch vehicles for a new one to even hope to compete (which they still won’t). Someone who takes a spreadsheet with admittedly made up numbers and turns that into “See how that works?” is a joke of a person.
“Because it has so many engines”
Dollars per newton/pound-force thrust is unit of merit for the cost effectiveness of the propulsion, not the number of engine you moron. The entire F9 booster complement costs significantly less than an RD-180. And way less than an RS-68A. And in both cases the 9 Merlins put out combined more thrust than those engines. Smaller engines are actually associated with less operational cost as moving them, accessing them for maintenance, testing is all easier and cheaper than larger engines. Increasing the manufacturing rate of the engine also gives one economies of scale that low run large enjoys can’t enjoy. You are economically twisted to think the opposite.
They recently turned a core around in 27 days including transport time. Basically two weeks in the shop for the service between flights. This is will be the exception not the norm as more stages go deeper into flight count and the experience database grows. Half a decade ago you were saying if the stage comes back it will be useless. Then it was, they won’b be able to fly more than few times, now it’s the magic number 10. When they get to 10 it will some other goal post.
In summary if reused cores weren’t cheeper then new cores they wouldn’t be using them for the internally funded Starlink missions. It’s that simple. Nobody is going to purposely use more expensive launches when they need to fly many dozens of missions to complete the project.
“Smaller engines are actually associated with less operational cost as moving them, accessing them for maintenance, testing is all easier and cheaper than larger engines. Increasing the manufacturing rate of the engine also gives one economies of scale that low run large enjoys can’t enjoy.”
Not really, or airliners would all still be using four engines instead of two. Ships would use dozens of smaller powerplants instead of a couple. As for smaller being easier, they are not, they are just more work when there are more of them. As for making fewer large things not enjoying economies of scale….what the F are you babbling about?
Much of what you are saying is just wishful thinking, like that guy “a half a decade ago” you always talk about…as if that means anything. He was wishing spacex would go out of business and you are wishing the opposite…see how that works? They might be trying to break even with this reuse scheme and succeeding, but then they would have no problem with telling the truth with real numbers; since they won’t do that it almost certainly means they are NOT breaking even.
In summary the joke of a person is you making stuff up.
“Not really, or airliners would all still be using 4 engines instead of two.”
Apples to hand grenades. The install base of commercial jet engines is huge whether 4 or 2 are used per airframe. Every vehicle type has a sweet spot depending on the economics of that industry.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Not a sweet spot, no matter how many times you drool over it.
The NewSpace dogma that contaminated the public spaces a decade ago has not gone away- Mars as the second home of humankind, the small reusable rocket taking everything up a loaf of bread and a gallon of gas at a time, the fuel depot miracle allowing cheap spacecraft to go anywhere like gassing up your car, the idea that NASA is the problem; everything too expensive and wasting tax dollars- This has all been a disaster for space exploration. And now these smallsat constellations going up in the tens of thousands. The worst feature of it all is the toxic libertarian cyberthugs that have completely hijacked all public discourse. Like Nazi’s beating up people at the polls…it really deserves that card. Disgusting.
Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Problem is, you are afraid to try it because it may prove your entire worldview, not to mention endless gallons of virtual ink, a giant waste. It’s not like you arrived at your position over a giant spreadsheet and a whiteboard full of differential equations weighing the systems engineering outcome. It’s your faith.
And I hear NASA LSP is impressed with progress in Boca. A lot of the old guard was burned (like you) calling the end at CRS-7, then AMOS-6 , then FH and reuse. Finally Dragon2 utterly destroying Boeing performance nailed them hard. Like you, doubling down again and again only to grab another box of ziti on margin.
What are you blathering about now.
You just described yourself and the fifty-odd other creeps that infest this and a half a dozen other forums. Not me. I am the one your gang cannot tolerate. Like all bullies you blame the victim. Always blame the ones you attack as deserving it. Classic.
I more than tolerate, I enjoy watching you double down and lose. Upside to Spudis’ departure is your free agency
You POS
Gary Michael Church aka Richard Seaton aka Conway Costigan went down this thread downvote all but this one with another sock puppet account Bilgamesh (of Spudis fame among others) in an poor attempt to fool people into thinking someone else actually follows him. These sock puppets are well known, it isn’t hard. Get a new shtick.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c… https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
You an se jones sockpuppet? Sociopath. Dishonoring the dead.
You POS
Wrong again, would you like to try again and go for double?
You are a POS dishonoring the dead. I emailed Doug about it.
Even when that engine was economized for the Delta IV, it was expensive. 🙂
off tobed, watched the video a few times probably the engine Rudded and that destroyed the aerodynamics of hte booster…it crashes some distance from the boat, the seaguls dont move
Scott Manly agrees with you. He shows the engine RUD in the data.
not really sure what the message is here…would have to have more data points to figure if we are seeing a one of RUD which is to be expect ed in new powerplants or a trend
Or maybe the pandemic is having an impact on quality control at Hawthorne where both the Merlins and Raptors are built.
Thomas…or maybe we are simply learning as in jets and piston engines what the “mean time between failure” is…this would be something novel for space equipment since well its never been found in terms of operational use
At least the Sea Gulls were saved. Need to find a way to scatter them before landings or the birdwatchers will get angry.
the Sea gulls did not move because they were not startled by the noise of the booster coming down, which tells me (no red glow on the drone ship) that it crashed some distance away from the ship…
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Andy Beal could take some notes here.
Yes.?
Sorry Gary I don’t go that way.
I wish you would just go away.
Sorry, I can’t oblige
Don’t be sorry…be a man and leave me alone you cowardly little creep.
SFN has a good story on this. Something about a streamer of fire going down the side of the rocket after the reentry burn. They may have seen this in person as it was dark. Spacex seems to have stopped launches until they have a cause of this.
I think you summed up the gap between youand me with this.
“If I have learned one thing it is that “compromise” is the most suspect
term ever borne. Everything is a “trade-off”, nothing is perfect, etc.
and this is almost always, except in very particular circumstances, a
corruption of what is ideal.”
I’m my view everything is a compromise. Unless set in nature, “Ideal” is usually used as a cover story for vanity.
I believe you are using the word differently than the troll. To you it means finding a workable situation out of a multitude of options, therefore as good as can be expected under a given set of circumstances. To troll, it means any disagreement whatsoever and is therefore evil.
Impossible to correct for error when error is inadmissible.