SpaceX first stage landing video released

[SpottedKitty]

Not up on the SpaceX site yet. There's a short clip on BBC News of the attempted soft landing of the Falcon 9 first stage from last week's ISS resupply flight.

Very nearly. Looks like it lost attitude control in the very last part of landing manoeuvres.

[Jub]

The speed looked wonderful and it obviously made it to within meters of touching down so I can only presume the rest of the descent went to plan. I wonder what threw off the attitude control so much in the last moments before touch down?

[sarevok2]

loss of hydrolic fluids was the reason given, apparently next flight will carry 50 percent more.

[Jub]

That would do it. If your control surfaces seize up due to lack of hydrolic fluid you aren't exactly in control anymore. Do you have a link to the story where the loss of hydrolic fluid was mentioned? I'm curious as to how the fluid was lost.

[Adam Reynolds]

The source is Elon Musk's Twitter feed. Apparently it simply ran out of hydraulic fuel.

[SpottedKitty]

I'm curious as to how the fluid was lost.

Apparently the fluid isn't recirculated, it's just run from the tank straight into the pressurised lines and out again. Considering the numbers used in a rocket engine (high pressure, temperature, vibration etc.) I suspect bolting on a recirculation system without too much of a performance hit would be a non-trivial problem. (When it comes to space engineering, everything is a non-trivial problem.)