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It still blows my mind how the landings are more exciting than the launches.
What cameras do they have that can look at something 30 KM up in the air that well?
I turned 50 yesterday and it feels a bit like the future I dreamed of as a child.
I'm just so happy to see this level of progress. This another big step for opening up space. To think that one day this will be considered normal. 150 Metric tons sent on a fully reusable rocket. Thats like a 747 to space.
So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?
a. Cheaper, more durable material (stainless steel).
b. Cheaper, easier to manufacture engines.
c. Easier to use fuel (methane is much "tamer" than hydrogen).
d. Standardized heat shield with much smaller requirements for manual work.
Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.
Watched several times, amazing stuff. Had flashbacks to playing Jupiter Landing on the C64! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Lander Edit: SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.
there is, it was discussed in the FAA thread.
Stage 1 sucessfully caught. That was pretty incredible. I remember watching the Falcony Heavy launch when both boosters landed in sync. It's hanging pretty high in the air, I assume so the engines do less damage to the pad. One wonders how they're going to get it down. Do the chopsticks lower on the tower?
They'll lower it to the launch mount... the catch arms are effectively a crane. But I wonder if it's more "toasty" than they were expecting? There were some fires going at catch (those look out, at least on external camera views) and the engines are still a bit.... smokey. Don't know if that's normal... or if they were expecting it. My hunch is that they don't put it down for awhile. If there's still an issue were th…