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Most cameras on a rocket launch are there for a sound engineering reason. They look down at the engines of the rocket, or up to the second stage, or out to the solar panels, or down inside the propellant tanks. The reason they look at these things is to evaluate performance, observe if anything goes wrong, and to serve as a tool in analyzing what went wrong ...

7

Say a Falcon 9 experiences an in-flight failure where four core engines shut down prematurely. Would it still be feasible to jettison the upper stage and attempt to reach orbit, while trying to land the booster? It's unclear to me, given the phrase "attempt to reach orbit", if you mean discard the upper stage or separate it as usual. As Jörg W ...

3

Dynamic pressure is straightforward to calculate: $$q = \tfrac12\, \rho\, v^{2}$$ Where $\rho$ is the density of the air and $v$ is velocity. Using the available onscreen velocity and altitude figures, and assuming an atmospheric scale height of 8.5km and sea level density of 1.225 kg/m^3, I get a max Q of about 17 KPa at T+2:11, at 530 m/s and 19 km. ...

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