Author Topic: SpaceX's Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship Updates and Discussion Thread 3  (Read 1420909 times)

Offline cscott

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In the Vandenberg "marine mammal harassment" waiver, they states that the recovery fleet was the asds, the tug, and one support ship.  So Go Searcher's role must always have been experimental (ie, fairing recovery or other experiments).

Tesla/SolarCity is doing big deployments of solar + powerwalls to assist in the Puerto Rico recovery, it's possible that Tesla borrowed Go Searcher for assistance.  Don't know exactly what it's role would be, although maybe cargo shipping a deck full of powerwalls would still be helpful, given the Jones Act.

Online catdlr

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Tesla/SolarCity is doing big deployments of solar + powerwalls to assist in the Puerto Rico recovery, it's possible that Tesla borrowed Go Searcher for assistance.  Don't know exactly what it's role would be, although maybe cargo shipping a deck full of powerwalls would still be helpful, given the Jones Act.

Tesla has built a solar farm to power a storm-damaged children's hospital in Puerto Rico

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tesla-puerto-rico-20171025-story.html

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Tesla Inc. said it has assembled a solar panel installation and battery storage project at hurricane-battered children’s hospital in Puerto Rico in a humanitarian effort that also illustrates the company’s ability to deliver power quickly.

The Palo Alto electric carmaker and solar energy company tweeted photos of the project showing rows of solar panels being installed in what appears to be a parking lot adjacent to the Hospital del Niño in San Juan.
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Offline ChrisC

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Cross posting two posts from the public KoreaSat thread last night:

There’s video attached to this tweet:

Quote
Heading out to sea #OCISLY to position for the Falcon return. #KoreaSat5A #OCISLY #SpaceX

https://twitter.com/spacenews360/status/923689120567824384

OCISLY appears to be heading out. HAWK (the tug boat) has left the port.

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:430027/zoom:10
« Last Edit: 10/27/2017 01:23 pm by ChrisC »
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Offline Raul

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Mr. Stephen High Speed Craft (20kn), who left Port Canaveral yesterday at 11:14 UTC is heading to the area of fairing recovery, where previously Go Searcher was operating.

Offline rsdavis9

That boat looks like the ideal size to put the bouncy castle on the aft deck and be able to maneuver under the returning fairing. Does anybody know the horizontal velocity of a parachute wing. Whats the right name of this parachute type? Anyways maybe about 20 knots?
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Offline cscott

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That boat looks like the ideal size to put the bouncy castle on the aft deck and be able to maneuver under the returning fairing. Does anybody know the horizontal velocity of a parachute wing. Whats the right name of this parachute type? Anyways maybe about 20 knots?
On the contrary, the quick replacement of Go Searcher indicates (to me) that there is no fairing-recovery-specific equipment installed on the fairing support ship, and its job is only to visually track the fairing and fish pieces out of the water if possible, which any ship with a crane can do.

Offline Alastor

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There has been a lot of ships switching happening recently !
Is there something going on ?

Offline Lar

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contract expirations? high priority jobs that took them elsewhere?
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"We're a little bit like the dog who caught the bus" - Musk after CRS-8 S1 successfully landed on ASDS OCISLY

Offline vanoord

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Mr.Steven is an interesting bit of kit.

It's technically a crew transfer vessel, presumably designed for gulf oil rigs. Seemingly nothing special. However, it's capable of 32 knots, which is pretty impressive and at 205ft it's hardly small.

It's not dissimilar to the Go 'twins' but has a much larger aft deck and is significantly faster.

If I harboured any desired to land a fairing with a parafoil on the back of a ship, Mr.Steven would be pretty much the sort of thing I'd want to use - there's a good deck area and if you wanted to try tricks with a moving ship catching a fairing to reduce impact speeds, it's just right.

(I'll defer to the better-informed as to whether the intention is to land fairings on something stationary or something moving).

Offline vanoord

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That boat looks like the ideal size to put the bouncy castle on the aft deck and be able to maneuver under the returning fairing. Does anybody know the horizontal velocity of a parachute wing. Whats the right name of this parachute type? Anyways maybe about 20 knots?

Mr.Steven is the right sort of craft to try that sort of trick.

Whether or not that's the intention is another question, but the ability to cruise at 20+ knots would scrub off a lot of the horizontal relative speed of the descending fairing and make it a lot easier to catch with a smaller 'baseball glove'.

IIRC the idea was to catch the fairings on some sort of 'bouncy castle' to stop them getting wet - but that was long enough ago (18 months?) for SpaceX to be several major revisions down the road by now.

(I'd opt for parafoil, but given there are no images of it in known public existence that's merely conjecture)

Offline Lar

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On the SpaceX facebook page there is a very good discussion of how one can, with a parafoil, land at essentially zero horizontal and vertical velocity at the same time. With very good accuracy. The recovery vessel need not necessarily be doing a Blue (moving at a fixed rate in a fixed direction)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/spacexgroup/?multi_permalinks=10155970476171318

(find the comment thread with Ted Dasher's post in it)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/spacexgroup/?multi_permalinks=10155970476171318&comment_id=10155970885381318 (gets you to a reply I made in that subthread, closer)
"I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact." -Elon Musk
"We're a little bit like the dog who caught the bus" - Musk after CRS-8 S1 successfully landed on ASDS OCISLY

Offline anield

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Spacex live webcast did accidentally call OCISLY the fairing recovery boat before correcting himself.

Offline vanoord

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According to the AIS data, Mr.Steven (the fast transfer vessel that's standing in for Go Searcher) returned to Port Canaveral around 2300 UCT yesterday (1900 local, I think?)

It (very) briefly visited the 'SpaceX berth' and then moved across to the 'Fishlips' side of the basin, where it's now moored alongside... Go Searcher, which is back from Puerto Rico.

Presumably it didn't have fairings onboard as there wasn't the time to unload them.



EDIT: now that the Port Canaveral webcam is moving again, it's possible to see Mr.Steven tied up alongside Go Searcher pretty clearly - they're just to the west of the webcam at Fishlips.

There's something on the rear deck of Mr. Steven which looks like it's covered in a grey tarpaulin; and is about the right size to be a piece of fairing (judging by the RIB on the deck in front of it).

That said, IIRC any bits of fairing that have been recovered in the past have been offloaded pretty much as soon as the ship got back into port, even if it was the middle of the night - so it doesn't make a lot of sense for there to be a big piece of fairing still sat on the ship in a very visible position.
« Last Edit: 11/01/2017 11:41 am by vanoord »

Offline cscott

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OTOH, Mr Steven beat Go Quest and OCISLY to port, so it's possible some of the spacex crew is still at sea. They might be waiting to offload until the gang's all home. Or else the usual transport truck is still scheduled to arrive on "port day" so Mr Steven is stuck waiting for it.  IOW standard procedures might be altered given the unusual speed of Mr Steven.
« Last Edit: 11/01/2017 12:54 pm by cscott »

Offline leetdan

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OTOH, Mr Steven beat Go Quest and OCISLY to port, so it's possible some of the spacex crew is still at sea. They might be waiting to offload until the gang's all home. Or else the usual transport truck is still scheduled to arrive on "port day" so Mr Steven is stuck waiting for it.  IOW standard procedures might be altered given the unusual speed of Mr Steven.

This would suggest the fairing was still sitting on the deck of Mr Steven.  I just checked an unmentionable video source, and sure enough there appears to be a clam-shaped something covered with a tarp.

Offline LastStarFighter

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I have a friend down at the Port tonight... will it be pulling into port tonight? What time do they normally bring her into port?

Offline cscott

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If you look back upthread you can find links to marine trackers and you can track go quest directly as she approaches port.  They do tend to wait until low tide IIRC.

But even if your friend beats the ASDS back to port, I'm sure we'd love daylight pictures of the tarped fairing-thing on Mr Steven's deck.  You should be able to get quite close from the parking lot next to fishlips.

Offline leetdan

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The fairing-looking thing was unloaded yesterday, chances are it's been moved to the SpaceX building on Magellan Rd.  Their first recovered fairing was still there as of a week ago.

Offline FutureSpaceTourist

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Cross posting:

Quote
@NASASpaceflight 17:30 at the buoys Hawk just told Port Canaveral 😍😆😝🤓

https://twitter.com/murphypak/status/926177142483881993

Booster return is being covered on the Koreasat 5 UPDATES thread.

Offline vaporcobra

Great view of Roomba, cropped from a photo from Twitter user @NASANate. Intriguingly, below the roasted Roomba there appears to be something the exact dimensions of Roomba taking a similar octagonal shape.

New Roomba, maybe? ;)

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