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PKIDelirium
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
 
2020-07-23, 04:12

There were two failed droneship landings earlier this year, both on Starlink launches. One was the one I used before to describe the safety trajectory for booster landings, which lost the center engine late in ascent, was unable to carry out the entry burn properly and subsequently disintegrated, and the other was similar to CRS-16's landing abort just off the Cape from the ground LZ, which experienced a problem and automatically steered away from the ship during the landing burn, performing a "soft landing" in the ocean. That one, like CRS-16 remained almost entirely intact but was too far offshore to tow back, so they brought in a ship-mounted crane from the Morehead City port (generally the closest port to the landing areas) to scrap it where it was.

Other than that, I don't even remember when the last droneship landing failure was. Two Falcon Heavy center cores missed but those involved the first two flights ever of Falcon Heavy and it was questionable if they'd be able to land them. The third Falcon Heavy center core landed successfully, but unfortunately the "roomba" robot carried on the drone ship to come out and anchor the booster to the deck hadn't yet been fitted to be compatible with Falcon Heavy, and it fell over in rough seas. They made some limited edition souvenirs for employees out of the landing legs and lower engine/fuel line section that was left on the deck after the rest broke off and fell off the platform.
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