How SpaceX Lands Rockets with Astonishing Accuracy 

Starship Hopper tests and hopefully the first deployments of Star Link.

Dragon 2 and Starship Hopper Tests

Demo Mission 1

Crewed Dragon to the Space Station. Great PR and big $$$ maker for Space X to back up and finance BFR / Starship development.

Bfr

Just like a Mavic Air 2 with RTH, magic! 😎

Would dating Kim Kardashian blow your mind ????

NASA has always been on the bleeding edge. They show it again here in this compilation of technologies.

I like how they drop smoothly down.

Harpoon_Bakery my nigga you watching a space x video

Who are you?

guy

This guy from blue origin

It's how Elon says it was he did recently with SN8.

this guy used to hunt for his food

Agree. that's totally amazing.... and the competition with Boeing OMG..... a few team with less money thatn Boeing and they can do that beautiful rocket!!! Elon is a genius but he have a genius team and a very young people in his team. That's great for the generations to come.

Even though the company has many smart people its actually only Elon.

i hope we both make it to see a mars landing. good luck!

scientist has said this before many times. "Currently, humanity are at least 25 years behind evolution" humanity has engulfed itself into other things such as hatred & other nonsense, that humanity lost their way in evolving. Humanity are more involved in world wars and killing each other, than evolving ourselves... And we ALL lost out way. We are suppose to be 25 years ahead of our current time in evolution, but for some reason humans got really fucking slow in evolution, and now we are 25 years behind and its increasing rapidly. Can you imagine ALL the things we are missing because we have slowed down so much in our evolution...?? Think about that for a second.........

@@TwstedTV I'm 68 now, and I hope to be around when they land on Mars, but humanity will always be trying to wipe each other off the face of the earth, they've been doing it since the dawn of time, and if the beings that planted life on this piece of dirt ever come back, I hope they're well armed because fleas on this ball will try to wipe them out too.

Brava, also, as there are many female engineers working on this feat

Waste of money

@@jamiejones8424 what's a waste of money ? Reusable rockets save loads of money. Like 90% of the cost. Research that goes on in orbit will probably save your life one day and if we access the resources found off planet as Musk intends to man's energy requirements for the foreseeable future will easily be met. There's also the possibility for clean development of advanced technologies in orbit without harm to those on the surface but we still get all the rewards. Big picture thinking. So again, where's this waste of money you refer to?

tristan hann your deluded unfortunately theres lives that could be saved now! today! with all the money they waste!! Can you name me something useful that they have discovered up or out there in the dark void they call space ? 😂

@@jamiejones8424 yes I can name loads ball bag. Sadly whilst you can lead a horse to water you can't make it drink.

Dude, you can't write it like that, there's not 6 minutes' worth of fluff to read before part 1, and step 2 is simplified way too far. You have to spend 5 minutes explaining how you solve the problem and then have to find a pencil to slowly etch a small portion of the graphite into a circular pattern that corresponds to both the correct answer and the originally allocated number for the problem in the exam.

I think you're missing a step, there... What should happen between studying and passing the exam? Please help!

I actually don't study at all and somehow ace them oh and I don't cheat xd

@@staitz2728 You're not being challenged then.

Green M yeah i’m bored as hell in school smh

Most excellent engineering has those traits, simple and effective.

The Soviets back in the 60s.

You were right. First several times IT WAS animation. CGI

Menuvior? No.

Game changer? I seem to recall NASA landing some vehicles under rocket power on land in the 60s. I think one was called the LEM, and it managed to land, and takeoff again on the Moon.

@@AP-qs2zf Probably because it isn't as novel as you think it is, nor is it as big of a deal. The space shuttle was reusable, including the first stage. Yes it was expensive. It was also far more capable. Soyuz has been using rockets for the final capsule ground touchdown for 50 years (on Earth). You young folks seem to think Spaceflight began with Elon. They have no concept of all the technologies that hadn't even been created for the Apollo program to be successful. Falcon nine's magic comes courtesy of computers that Elon simply buys off the shelf and uses development tools that someone else wrote. NASA had to invent the first IC based portable computer - the Apollo Guidance Computer. Nothing ran an operating system, it was all custom. The software for the Apollo Guidance Computers in the command module and LEM were hand woven bit by bit by running wires through magnetic cores. A software update meant reweaving all the cores. The designs for the hardware and the calculations for the orbits on the ground were done primarily by hand by people, not by computers in the early days. The astronauts had to know how to do navigation with sliderules and sextants in case the computers failed. THOSE were game changers. They invented spaceflight out of nothing.

@@stargazer7644 stfu kid.. crawl back to your mum's basement..

Good one

It's either that, or Elon's high score on 'Lunar Lander' must be insane.

no its called the "probe core" its an auto landing for reuseble tech

@@Beerbottles123 You remember Atari Lunar Lander? Wow.

This thread is gold

How about today? May 2020

Yeah but elon is a genius

@@Cwg. he also really wants to live on mars

What about NASA? They have been in Space tech for much longer.

@@jacoblawson5243 Well, for NASA reusability was never a concern as they get billions in funding for every mission, whereas the entire point of SpaceX is reusability to make space less expensive for humanity.

@@harikumarv4658 they tried with the space shuttle program though

Now think about the piloting skills that allowed the moon landings half a century before the advent of Elon Musk!

Agreed. In the future, you very well might be seeing boosters land constantly.

That's what they count on, simpleton.

@@111utoobmetoob111 Hey BOOB, you showing your infinite ignorance on this thread too? Way to go bud!!!

@@sailorman8668 Why did you put a question mark on a statement? Infinite ignorance?

@@111utoobmetoob111 its amazing how many times he's watched the landing and still didn't figure out that its fake, just look at it, they cut to the smoke after, looked like the take off in reverse...so funny

Billybob You’re one of the biggest idiots I’ve seen on this video.

and the other great minds at spacex!

If the landing is just the launch played backwards where is the gantry etc?

@@fernleystephens2436 whooshh

@@fernleystephens2436 r/woooosh

I believe the film is played in reverse

Most of the YT videos... same story...

Doesn't matter, you clicked.

how much more detail do you want? Schematics? Detailed drawings? computer program printouts? how long would you be willing to watch?

the answers were in the video, it just went over your head..

@Arvils Zeipins Did you saw numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6?

Could you please post a link to this?

How do they not burn up in the atmosphere during re-entry?

@@Angry.General1461 That's what the "re-entry burn" is for(duh), things only burn up during re-entry if they're going very fast, and the re-entry burn slows down the rocket to prevent that.

@@WhyPee24 you would think the temperature of the re-entry burn would make the fuel inside the rockets explode.

@@WhyPee24 I dont think we needed the (duh) but the rest of your explanation was informative cheers :o) I was hoping to see your knowledgeable response to The Angry General when asking about exploding fuel, is the slow re-entry not at all hot then?

@Miguel Jeffrey Ah, cool, never even considered that.. Who would have thought rocket science could be so hard 😋

I take it you mean the manned launch

Me

Me

me

Operative word " fiction"

@@karltite128 Fiction helps you imagine what sometimes is possible. There are videos of rocket amateurs doing upright landings on RU-vid. Nothing at all fictional about them.

That projection of reality could mean one thing, that we're late for about 60-70 years when counted from the 1950s.

And again today, May 30-31, 2020

I was so thankful the lift off went well, but when I saw that booster rocket land... I was blown away.

Yes ..hhhhhh..actually I came here because I have been surprised from the landing mechanism,,

Pacific Landing brought me here.

Ooooh my family and I watched it in awe..... amazing indeed!!!

So bad cgi omg i can’t believe people believe this shit

When you look at the comments you can tell they deleted the ones that don't believe this Bs. I'm not unimaginative or proud of this accomplishment but can't help but see the edit prior to landing. All shots do this. Reason why is it's in reverse then cgi. Hope that helps the science explanation. Peace

@Scott Carter Wow calling me a dick head instead of making an actual point makes your side of it sooo much more convincincing.

​@Scott Carter Brilliant retort. You only make yoruself look like more of a simple minded fool by your juvenile name calling rather than provided actual evidence in support of your claim.It's sad really becaue it tells me you're either a troll or you have no actual cogent arguments for it. Either way it doesn't bode well for your side of the debate.

@Scott Carter Obviously not. Otherwise you'd be able to do more than just call me names like a 12 year old with no real point to back up what he's saying. Rather than explaining your point view in a mature and respectful way like an adult would. But you seem utterly incapable of something that simple. Much less understanding it. All you seem capable of is coming up with lame insults that nobody finds amusing other than you. While to everybody else you just look like a child.

For a heavy launch yes, although now the recent FH can expend a centre core and reuse the boosters for most if not all payloads. They just did a 9 ton launch to gto

Yeah, Apollo and the Moon landing was nothing, right?

@@stargazer7644 Lot easier to land on the moon then on Earth. Also this is major stuff in terms of the space industry.

@@thecyanadon Before I ban you for being utterly clueless, i’ll point out that Apollo landed on both the Moon and Earth. I’ll also point out if it is so easy to land on the Moon, why hasn’t spacex done it already?

@@stargazer7644 When did you say any of that??? All you said was that Apollo was harder than making a reusable rocket. If it was then NASA would have reusable rockets but they don't.

@@thecyanadon When did I say any of what? What I just said? I just said it. See, the way this works, is you say something stupid, and then you get called out for it. You act like SpaceX managing to land a rocket on its tail on their 20th attempt is somehow anywhere near as difficult or as big a deal as building an entire space program for the first time from nothing and putting a man on the moon 50+ years ago. You have no clue.

I don't think it's fair to criticize the video if you only watched the first half. The first half provides an introduction and context, while the second half covers the design elements that make the landings possible.

@@ArtofEngineering Ok sorry, i allways feel bad, when i criticise people on youtube and they actually respond. I dont know how much work it was and you are right, in the 2nd half you do explain how they land the rockets, with nice explainations and video. Thank you for that! Still i watched the whole video and i think you could make your introduction a bit shorter with less, but more relevant information, OR change the titel of the video, so people know, its not entirely about landing accuracy, but the entire history of spaceX landings etc. - i think thats a youtube/modern age thing, that people want quick and well packaged information, and dont want to sit through loads of time and information they arent interested in, to get to the relevant part, even if its only 5.5 minutes - as far as youtube videos go, thats alot of watch time. At least thats how i felt (i knew everything about the history already), and ive seen some other comments, that went along those lines - so maybe you can take it as constructive criticism. Also i think my point still stands, that saying someone achieved something, by doing it "well", is not a meaningfull analysis. Ofc the rockets would be well engineered (by definition, because they achieved their objective). - That doesnt explain how its done. Maybe if you said: "by equipping the rocket with several means, to guide and correct its descend" - or something like that, you would at least add the notion, that it is a guided and corrected process or so, and it wouldnt be as trivial as "by having well engineered rockets". I dont want to be a smartass, im sure you know much more about engineering, than i do, and also about making youtube videos. Still i hope u can take something positive from my comments, and make your videos even better. I will subscribe too! Take care.

Still nothing about guidance. GPS is the sole outside contact the entire Booster has during launch and fly-back? No radar altimetry, no IR frequency beacons to tell it anything?

@@JFrazer4303 If you're interested in the detail of how the guidance system works, look at the following paper by Lars Blackmore, one of the GNC leads at SpaceX. "Autonomous Precision Landing of Space Rockets." Lars Blackmore. National Academy of Engineering 'The Bridge on Frontiers of Engineering', Volume 4, Number 46, pages 15-20 (2016).

@@hanznathanpo GNC is a bit funny, in that it's both simple in some respects (specifically, the dynamics of the system tend to be rather on the simplistic side) while the way you solve them is tricky. I'd suggest starting with some of Lars Blackmore's earlier work then moving on to some publications by Michael Szmuk. I'd suggest reading www.larsblackmore.com/AcikmeseAAS08.pdf arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2016-0378 arxiv.org/abs/1802.03827 Don't get too intimidated, I learned how most of it works by writing code and seeing how it failed miserably.

I came hear specifically looking for an explanation on the grid fins, Learned a hell of a lot more !

Thank You!

Yup Me too, I found the landing trajectory surprising :o)

Agreed, too much hatred in the comments. People should just learn to use 1.5x speed setting, it's very useful with 80% of the video's, saves loads of time. This vid was still great confirmation of information. And it never gets old seeing that thing land successfully (and the failed attempts are fun too since no human lives were lost).

teefkay2 teefkay2 well, strictly speaking fins change attitude, which change aerodynamic forces, which change acceleration of the vehicle, which integrated changes its velocity. So, what is said in the video on that is somehow true.

mar sag Nope. The key word is “control”. Yes, in aerodynamics, lots of variables interact. But you’ve only got 2 control inputs: the fin pair that controls yaw, and the fin pair that controls pitch of the booster. Yaw is used to control lateral deviation from the trajectory (i.e., landing left or landing right of the target). Pitch is used to control the range deviations (i.e., landing short or landing long of the target). In principle, the engineers COULD have used the pitch to control the velocity. But then you would have lost control of the range, which is a very, very bad thing. You really, Really, REALLY want the rocket coming down at the right location. To go a little deeper into “control systems theory“ ... I’ve seen control systems that attempt to control two outputs (in this case, range & velocity) with one input (pitch). It’s a prescription for disaster (i.e., instability) as the control system bounces back & forth between “range control state” & “velocity control state”. If you want to have a reliably stable control system (which is a very, very, very good thing), you use one control input to control one output. In this case the pitch fins control range. And you let the other outputs (e.g., velocity) “relax” to whatever the external variables decide it should be. Note also that the velocity merely has to stay “below a maximum value (at some air density) that will cause overheating damage to the rocket engine components”. “Getting below a max value“ is a fairly easy engineering task. The reentry burn sets an initial velocity condition outside the atmosphere. And then “grabbity”, the atmosphere’s air density profile & drag coefficients (all well predictable) determines the velocity (& heating) from that point to the ground.

Yeah you're good at physics man. You can make good meme.

They refilled the fuel and fly back to the land base. Maybe

They have an "Octograbber" robot on board the drone ships that comes out once it is safe, and it clamps the base of the booster.

@@CPlater1 Thanks. I didn't know about it. It would be dangerous under strong wind attack. Of course, they will choose a right time to do it.

A robot, officially named the Falcon 9 Securing Robot, but universally known as Octagrabber lives on the droneship and is deployed shortly after a booster landing. The robot is remotely driven from it's blast-proof shelter and positioned underneath the Falcon 9. Four arms then raise up and latch onto the Falcon 9 Octaweb, securing the booster.

Yes basicallt at the middle of the video i found a comment explaining everything and i didnt continue seeing the video animore

abit like MAGIC= TEC

Right. Kos: I got the velocity down to zero at landing just perfect. Unfortunately, I was a mile away from the droneship... Too bad you don't have the smarts to think in two dimensions let alone three.

We all read the comment of david ogawa in wich he gives like 100× more details than the vid...realising that it was a loss of time

But yea, people are overly mad at the author

Actually, no. You're falling for this shit. I'm gonna be real, most of his shit was obvious, and everyone has the RIGHTS to say whatever the fuck they want. And here, they are properly criticising his video.

Don’t worry you’re not alone

i agree, no doubts here! ;] your comment reminded me to sub too.

Well, I subscribed. Seemed like a fair analysis. Much more tech-detail and it would have been too long and there is only so much RU-vid time in a day ;)

Are you an engineer? I am. And the video did not give me an answer to the question in the title of the video.

@@ReneAltena Then you need to watch the video again or even several times and google the definition of uncertain terms such as thrust vector control.

Sorry, but the only thing everybody asks is to answer the question in the title of the video.

@@ReneAltena The title of the video was clearly answered as recognised by myself and dozens of other commenters. You may have to watch the video a few timesb but is all there just not wrapped up in a simple little package like probably wanted. Gosh and whoever thought rocket science wasn't simple?!

You talking made in u.s.a. snoflakes or millenials, im confused?

@@michaelmulder1289 I'm talking about the people that made this happen. It seems obvious.

So snoflakes it is..?

@@michaelmulder1289 Did you ride the short bus Mikey?

@@michaelmulder1289 Just fucking with you dude, I'm just giving praise to the people that made this technology work. Whether it be made in the USA, by millennials, or snowflakes....it's still impressive.

Sometimes there is one, it alows the ship to be closer to the shore

That can be a little visually deceptive given the size of the rocket. 10m is only 1/7th the height of the first stage.

@@Reactordrone Closer to 1/4, since the booster is 43m tall.

How do they not burn up in the atmosphere during re-entry?

@@Angry.General1461 That's the purpose of the re-entry burn - to reduce heating on the rocket. Did you watch the video?

He briefed few basic principles which are really essential for understanding. As an engineer I get to know it. But he did well to make understand someone who doesn't know abcd of it.

What do you expect? "LEARN THIS ONE SIMPLE TRICK THAT MAKE SPACEX LANDING POSSIBLE !? NASA HATE THEM!" ?

This works because GPS exists.

True.

True, imagine if they quit thinking that this won't work,i think the important part is to learn from those mistakes unless you correct those mistakes you can't achieve success

we would still burn whale fat if Edison quit on the 2000 tungsten bulbs or bee wax for candle. failure is a virtue that makes this world turn.

The 'we' you're referring to is a very limited size club and are not in a cross section of the masses here or anywhere

@cass nortom Antarctica? You look up a travel agency that books such trips and book one. It's just that easy. 12,000 people do it per year. By ship, by plane, by dogsled and by ski. It's just that simple. What does MH370 have to do with anything?

@cass nortom Of course you can't cross it from north to south. You can only cross it north to north. Think about it dimwit. What makes you think you can't go there? The treaty doesn't say you can't, no matter what those frauds and charletans are telling you. 12,000 people per year can't be wrong. Messner and Fuchs walked it in 1989. In 1990 International Trans-Antarctica Expedition did it. Fiennes and Stroud in 1992. Ousland 1996. Arnesson and Bancroft 2001. felicity Aston all by herself in 2012. There are many more. Prove those are all fake. Come on, try. No you are not that rich. You're too stupid to have earned it, and too gullible to keep it. I've already proven you wrong, so you should give your imaginary money to me. Prove that MH370 didn't "crush". Come on, prove it. There's not a shred of evidence for that. And -plenty of evidence for saying it did *crash* moron.

having less than 10 meter accuracy must be both troublesome and an impressive show at the same time!

Try less beer.

Yes, as your Mother has frequently lamented.

Cgi

did you try turning your volume up?

do you think he was going to give away space x proprietary technology secrets?

why? he told everything... gps, internal sensors, fins, several thrusters, reignitable engine, main thruster vector control... for me the only breathtaking systems are the engine itself and the thrusters... all other stuff are also in millions of rc toys... but those engines are a revolution... how cn the thruster keep up with so much power?`how do they reignite the main engine in space?

Tell me then "spacex fans who are so intelligent" i want to know how they land it accurately.

Take any of 1-6 listed item and READ in more detail about it.

Let's face YOU just didn't understand the video. Don't feel bad because some other commenters were also confused.