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On Wednesday evening, a couple of hours after the Falcon 9 rocket had successfully deployed a satellite into geostationary transfer orbit, SpaceX founder Elon Musk shared a rather amazing photo on Twitter. "This rocket was meant to test very high retrothrust landing in water so it didn't hurt the droneship, but amazingly it has survived," he wrote. "We will try to tow it back to shore." In other words, a rocket that SpaceX had thought would be lost after it made an experimental, high-thrust landing somehow survived after hitting the ocean.
This was amazing for a couple of reasons. First of all, when the first stage of a rocket hits water after a launch, it typically explodes. (This can be seen in some of the early water landing attempts shown in a blooper reel released by the company). A rocket should not survive impact because it will rupture the relatively thin aluminum-lithium alloy tanks that separate fuel and oxidizer. These tanks are built to withstand the axial force of a vertical launch, but not a crash into the ocean.
[...] It is not clear how SpaceX will attempt to tow the rocket to shore. The company's Atlantic Ocean-based drone ship, "Of Course I Still Love You," will be in service during the next week to catch the central core of the Falcon Heavy launch, tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, February 6. Perhaps the company will take a page from the playbook of NASA, which recovered the space shuttle's larger solid-rocket boosters, with tugboats.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday February 02 2018, @06:42PM
It's not PR per se.
It was supposed to go Boom, because it won't get reused, so it should have ended at the bottom of the ocean.
Turns out that their experimental 3-engine burn was timed/mistimed such that it did not go Boom as expected, and it is buoyant, so now they have to waste money dealing with it (bad littering PR it they just tell the Navy to use it for target practice).
Elon and Co, know for a sense of humor and knowing what entertains the public, likely thought it would be fun to point out the quite unusual feat of accidentally properly landing on the ocean. Considering the fireworks likely to happen next week, it's not a badly timed reminder that things don't always go as planned.