Falcon Heavy Sticks All Three Landings

SpaceX Flacon Heavy Lands Successfully But Fails to Swim

After more than a year since its debut on February 6th of 2018, SpaceX launched it’s Falcon Heavy again the 11th of this month. A lot of things set SpaceX apart from other companies in the space industry, but one of the most well-known reasons, is their ability to re-use rockets by safely landing them back on Earth once they have completed their objective. The Falcon Heavy (FH) is essentially two rocket boosters attached to a center core which is practically a modified falcon 9 rocket. You can refer to the model shown in Figure 1 below.

_{^{Figure 1: Comparison of Falcon9 with Dragon Capsule, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. Notice the similarity between the Flacon Heavy center core and Falcon 9 rocket. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/science/spacex-falcon-launch.html & SpaceX}}

On the Falcon Heavy’s debut last year, SpaceX had a successful landing of the two Falcon 9 boosters but lost the center core while trying to land on the drone ship used to land the rocket in the sea. This week things were different, SpaceX was able to land all three rocket components of the FH. The two boosters, made their graceful landing just as they did last time, and the center core landed safely at T+00:10:23 on the “Of course I still Love You” drone ship.

Disappointingly, the center core did not make it back to shore however, as the center core fell overboard after encountering choppy seas on the way back. SpaceX does have ways of securing rockets that land on the drone ship using a robot they call the “octograbber” shown in Figure 2. However, the octograbber is designed to grab on to the Falcon 9, and as mentioned before the FH’s center core is a modified version of the rocket, so the octograbber is not specifically designed for it. Due to this, the robot cannot secure it in the same manner, which exposes the successfully landed boost to some “choppy” vulnerabilities.

_{^{Figure 2: Snapshot of the Octograbber, captures in Cape Canaveral. Source: Spaceflight.com}}

Regardless, of the fate of the center core, this week’s landing was a total success. SpaceX has shown again that it can safely land and re-use a rocket’s components with a short turnaround time. In fact, the users which landed on the cement Cape Canaveral pads, will be used in an upcoming launch this summer. During that time, the company will probably spend some time making some updates to the octograbber to correctly secure the brand-new center core they will be using in the mission. Hopefully this time around, all three components of the Falcon Heavy can be re-united after a trip to space.