The mission is fine. The Dragon capsule is in orbit and should dock with the ISS in a couple of days.
Here is the official launch. The problem occurs at 26 minutes.
Update on Musk's twitter feed. This communication all happened with impressive speed.
Engines stabilized rocket spin just in time, enabling an intact landing in water! Ships en route to rescue Falcon. pic.twitter.com/O3h8eCgGJ7— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 5, 2018
Musk's twitter is worth reading. Below this update video on this thread other people uploaded videos of moonwalks and other amusing things like good natured joking about the failure involving a dancing owl and the like.
1 comment:
Recovery won't be easy. The tanks are pressurized with some residual fuel. The equipment to depressurize isn't so mobile, but I'm sure they can figure out of way. The last time this happened, they ended up scuttling the booster.
This is what we used to call "a successful failure". The software is designed to detect a malfunction, and rather than continue towards land and population, it goes for a water landing. As Musk notes, the engines stabilized and allowed for an intact landing. An intact landing allows for a full investigation of hardware to figure out exactly what caused the pumps to fail, so that you can fix it to not happen again. This shortens the time from failure to next successful launch.
If NASA had designed it; it would be in thousands of pieces and would take months, maybe years, to determine the root cause after hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were spent in recovery and investigation.
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