SpaceX rocket survived a fall into the water and did not even fall apart

On the evening of January 31, 2017, the Falcon 9 launch vehicle successfully launched the GovSat-1 satellite into geostationary orbit. Then the first step returned to Earth. Ilon Musk tweeted a photo of the rocket and a comment: “The rocket should have tested the landing on a very strong reversible thrust. Landing was carried out on the water, so as not to damage the floating platform, but surprisingly, she survived. " Although it was assumed that at such a high speed the rocket would be lost, but for some reason it did not even fall apart. “Let's try to tow it to the shore,” added Ilon Musk. It seems that SpaceX now has additional concerns because of the unforeseen reliability of the missiles.

“Strong reversible thrust” means that instead of one central engine, three were used at the same time, so instead of accelerating 2.92 g the rocket experienced a huge overload of 10.75 g, that is, more than 100 m / s² (according to one fan, Reddit ).

The result of this landing is quite unexpected. In September last year, SpaceX published a video compilation of its unsuccessful launches and landings. At the very first fragment, you can see how the first step tries to get on the water at high speed, but collides with water and explodes.



The rocket should not survive the collision, because it destroys the relatively thin aluminum-lithium containers, which separate the fuel and oxidizer, writes Ars Technica . And now it is not something that did not explode, but did not even fall apart.

Perhaps over time, the company SpaceX will publish video from surveillance cameras - and then it will become clear why the first stage did not explode.