Is he right?

Jesus, this fucking guy.

it wasn't the first launch it was literally 3 falcon 9's strapped together

Didn't even bother to get his facts right.
That should tell you all you need to know about The Thunderfoot's scientific approach.

that would mean that they have to make the suicide burn closer to the barge, and if for some reason it fails, the rocket would slam directly into the barge, rather than hitting th ocean.

I liked this guy back when he stuck to clearing up misconceptions regarding his field of expertise instead of opining on shit that's way outside his comfort zone

I remember this fucking retard trying to melt a golden coin with a burning diamond or something and then "confusing" over why it didnt work.
> what is heat transfer

This. He is not trying to yield the truth though, he is chasing those sweet youtube views.

Why?
Are they running on such a slim fuel amount they can't afford a 0.5sec ignition test reading before slapping the fuel valves closed too six engines?
I'm pretty sure they're not completely dry when the legs touch the pad.

>first launch
Was a test launch.. That was the whole point of putting a Tesla roadster in it instead of actual scientific equipment. It was expected to fail.

The only thing that failed was the final reignition of the center core (after the core already reignited twice successfully). So the problems isn't that the core can't reliably reignite. But that it ran out of reigniter. Add more and problem solved.

That's akin to pressing the self destruct button.
Those are 'tough' rockets compared to disposable ones, but there's no way they would withstand that much Gs.

Thunderf00t is the king of brainlets. If he's so smart, then why does he make edgy popsci youtube videos with his graduate degree instead of working an actual job? Not to mention that his tweet is factually incorrect.

Why?
Are they igniting at 100% throttle?

The slim fuel amount has little to do with how much more complicated of a process igniting all 9 up again during a suicide burn would be

The engines don´t work like on ksp. they can´t be turned on and off at a whim; they need some time to turn on and they need some time to turn off. ¨Testing¨ them would basically move the trajectory and the place they would land, which means they can´t do it.

Can't be sure about that one, but the single fact you would ignite 9 would mean you need to (ie, you need the thrust)
Although I'm confident ignition has to happen at least at a significant percentage of max thrust.
If you watch the landing footage carefully, you can actually see how hard those boosters brake on only 3 engines, for only a couple seconds.
Igniting 9 would send it back up in less than a second.
Also, having a 1 engine landing is nice for error correction, because it gives you time to do it.

did he stop working?

> I am wrong, but I am still right anyway!

It is just Kerosene (RP-1) and LOx though, it should be easy to ignite it in the pre-combustion chamber.... OH, after looking up the Merlin-1D; I know see why this would be a pain in the ass.
Loose pintle injection that can only be operated at 40% thrust or higher, no pre-combustion chamber.
They need to make a better engine.

when it goes up at launch it weighs 300 tons and only fights gravity
when it goes down it weighs 30 tons and it's, you know... falling from fucking space

He's right in that one launch doesn't prove anything in terms of long range economics. But that was not the purpose of the launch.

Yeah, I see the issue now (). Merlin was designed to be robust and land in the water, not the fancy stuff they're doing with it now.

>Are they igniting at 100% throttle?
Short answer, Yes.
Long answer: they can´t go under a certain % because then the engines would turn off and the rocket would crash.

>They need to make a better engine.
That's what they're doing.
Merlin 1-D was never meant to be the best engine.
It was just meant to be cheap as fuck to produce, and just strap whatever number fits the rocket.
It's inefficient as fuck, but it's robust, because it's 'simple'.
You have to understand, SpaceX was running on a dime while conceiving them.
And they had no clue if they would ever be recovering them.

Now that they've mastered vertical landings, they can throw more moneyz at their engines, and that's Raptor for you.

>Looks up Raptor
•Spark ignition
•two stage combustion
•subcooled Methane & LOx just above their freezing points
•tight throttle control with proper atomization of fuel
•over 2x the TWR compared to Merlin
Oh baby.. this can't come soon enough

>no reused parts
>both side cores reused previously
>brand new modified central core didn't make it the first time on a test flight
>implies it's not economically viable based off of this

christ. I've been agnostic on musk but now I want him to succeed just to piss this disingenuous goober off.

This is just embarassing

The thing I can't stand about Tf00t is he cannot admit to being wrong.

To be quite honest, SpaceX still has to make an argument for their reusability advantage.
Rocket is still pretty much as costly to satellite operators, and there's only so much things to throw into space a a given time.
Better cadence and reactivity will win them launches, but I fear there's just not gonna be anything left to launch in the next 2 years.
Sure, by this time, SpaceX will easily win contracts, by lowering cost, and they will be the most able operator to do so.
But 2 years of dominance is not enough to fund the BFR.
My only hope is an SLS blow up.

wtf why isn't this experimental technology perfect

Is a man who is never right, right this time?

Odds are, no.

>he cannot admit to being wrong.
Neither can any human being, most of the time.
Welcome to Earth.

Rockets blowing up is practically an impossibility in this day and age. Unless you're SpaceX that is.

>I fear there's just not gonna be anything left to launch in the next 2 years

you better elaborate on that

The only reason that SX is launching so much now is that they have a huge backlog from when they floundering around. Once that backlog is spent up they will go back to normal amount of launches like ULA or Ariane.

Ariane has now like 18 launches a year

Or, you're Orbital ATK, or Rokosmos, or fucking China.
Maybe I read this wrong, and you meant thing could go wrong with the timeline I described.
That's certainly a possibility, but Falcon 9 looks like it's an overall safe vehicle, and has gone through early design errors
Launch cadence has been up there for 2-3 years. Satellites operators just don't have use for more satellites.
Their life expectancy is 10 years or so.
When you see a launch, you have to understand, the payload is worth multiple times the rocket.
Now, they could adjust to easier space access and make them less durable and cheaper, but that's a big unknown.

There's a difference between failing to achieve orbit and quite literally exploding on the launch pad.

Statistics I remember reading for commercial launches is that the launch itself costs about 20% of the total satellites cost.

Do you mean like last Ariane 5 launch?
It's a fucking embarrassment, and the rocket is decades proven.

The last Ariane launch only had an anomaly because of human error regarding the launch crew. The rocket performed fine. Though it is rather embarrassing and kinda sad that the Ariane 5's 82 perfect launch streak was ruined by such a stupid mistake.

Ariane 5 was the most embarrassing engineering error on its first launch.
I'm saying they fucking failed too. As everyone did except the Saturn V.

I don't think he's ever been employed employed, has he?

The insanity of this.
What is wrong with him?

I guess we kinda know why it seems like he has no friends, or girlfriend or anything

I guess space junk is going to make it more difficult too

>Shuttle lands
>Have to rebuild the whole shuttle for it to be flight ready
>Falcon lands
>Engineering audit, repaint, refuel, ready to go
>Already cheaper to build than the shuttle ever was
I don't see the problem, also the shuttle killed people, mostly due to incompetent managers at NASA though.

>Falcon lands
>Engineering audit, repaint, refuel, ready to go
Pic related.
>>Already cheaper to build than the shuttle ever was
Man rating a rocket takes a lot of money. Where's that man rated Falcon I wonder?

>splitting hairs this much
it still would have exploded even if the explosion wasn't the ultimate cause of failure

Dunning–Kruger effect in action.

>Man rating a rocket takes a lot of money. Where's that man rated Falcon I wonder?
You have no idea how human-rating a spacecracft work,

False. Typically they use all/most engines for landing and this was the first test of a three engine landing on a barge. Two engines failed to ignite due to lack of the chemical ignitor. This will be solved by carrying more chemical ignitor.

Yes but it’s a little more complicated than that sweetie

Elaborate please

one thing to also keep in mind is that your engine-out capabilities are much greater when you have a high fuel margin. F9 can take 2 engine-out's (excluding center engine) with a recoverable mission and still insert the payload to the right orbit. It can do the same with expendable mission, but the 2nd stage will have to do a longer burn, and depending on the payload it will have to spend more time getting to the final destination whether it be GEO or whatever

same goes for BFR

it means spending five years being pissed on by NASA because NASA's awful MMOD requirements means you can't reach 1-270 LOC with THEIR models.

As far as I an aware, every single landing up to the GovSat-1 water landing has been with a single engine

yeah. the bigger changes are with the boost back burns and transonic burn

I wonder if they saw the benefits of a 3 engine burn and just pushed the updated control firmware to the custom FH center stick w/o doing enough checks... the Tesla was super light; the center core could have even returned to land if they had a 3rd pad

>return to land
Doubtful, velocity at MECO for core was like 1km/s faster than any other falcon 9 launch to date. That thing was booking it and was way further down range than any other launch. Also, I think I read it didn't have any grid fins, but haven't bothered confirming that yet.

it had grid fins, but not the titanium ones. Thus why Elon said he was happy that of the three, they lost the center core. Those titanium fins cost like 3 million apiece - they're the world's largest single-piece titanium forgings

Oic

They frequently use a 1-3-1 landing routine. Sometimes they shut down the two outer engines only a second or two before touchdown, so the three engine landing burn isn't that far out there from what they've been doing so far,

The problem with the Amos-6 failure is that it was something that nobody had ever seen before and it was a novel material interaction that would have been very difficult to predict. Their only other failure with a falcon 9 was due to a vendor lying about their product. That's hardly Spacex's fault.

not lying about their product, but having a shoddy product where struts sometimes were under-spec. There is a difference.

SpaceX had to test over a thousand other identical struts to find one which also failed at the specific load point.

Still cheaper than SLS even if it's expendable

That is the reentry burn, not the landing burn. Landing burn has been 1 engine all the way

>not so sure

Meaning he doesn't know anything good enough to even back up his own words. It invalidates anything a person says when they undermine themselves like that.

as a rule of thumb I just don't listen to anyone who writes with certain sentences being all caps

Can that site even do italics or any markup?

twitter? no, just standard characters

Then that may account for all caps stuff. That seems really limited for a website that's very purpose is for communication.

No, they use a 1-3-1 landing burn all the time, including in the falcon heavy boosters. The first successful use of this was in the JCSAT-14 mission

"However, patchy webcam coverage from the drone ship saw the stage start to light up the deck, before suddenly showing the stage sat in the middle of the “X” – marking another major milestone for SpaceX.

The success was also aided by the multi-engine landing burn option, with three – as opposed to one – Merlin 1D igniting for touchdown."

t. nasaspaceflight.com/2016/05/falcon-9-jcsat-14-launch/

Also you can see the switch from 3 to 1
youtube.com/watch?v=LHqLz9ni0Bo