Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

They announced a no-go while it was still boosting towards space, so it won’t be a relight issue.

> They announced a no-go while it was still boosting towards space,

False. The booster was already coming back when the landing abort came through.

Indeed. It had just finished the boostback burn and jettisoned the hot staging ring when the divert was announced. I wonder if after the boostback burn they determined that there was insufficient fuel for a good safely margin when trying a tower catch.

The catch attempt is actually a divert - IIRC both Super Heavy and regular Falcon 9 first stage target empty space by default and only divert for landing once all checks out. :-)

  > target empty space by default

Well, water.

I see that you're a glass-half-empty guy ))

Shoot, I re-watched and you're right. Memory's a fickle thing.

https://www.youtube.com/live/l7cM90N-CDc?feature=shared&t=23...

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-... does say this now, though:

> During this phase, automated health checks of critical hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered an abort of the catch attempt.

I wonder whether doing a catch without the catcher (rapid scheduled crash landing) would be feasible. Data is data.

> Data is data.

This is one of those cases where technically correct is not the best kind of correct.

Not all data is useful.

A billion rows of sensor output is data but without a timestamp it’s useless. Maybe you need more or less resolution, or additional dimensions.

If the duty cycle is stable enough, you can reconstruct the timestamps in many cases based on the data. ;-)

“If” is doing a lot of work there.

That is what happened. It performs the maneuvers at a primary target site with no catcher, or terrain, or ground-based feedback; the Gulf; switching to an alternate site; the launch tower; if and only if all factors allow for a real catch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com