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Arm chair rocket science is fun.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Complete destruction is obviously expensive. Finding a way to prevent an explosion if it falls over after landing seems worthwhile. If it hovered for 5 seconds at .5 meters, for example, could it burn off enough extra fuel?
> If it hovered for 5 seconds at .5 meters, for example, could it burn off enough extra fuel? The Falcon 9 cannot hover. The thrust of the single landing engine, even when throttled down to minimum, will provide significant lift to the empty rocket. That's part of what makes this maneuver so difficult and so awesome: it's called the hoverslam, where you achieve 0m altitude and 0m/s velocity at time = 0. For reference…
Also known as making a "suicide burn", at least in the KSP world.
Non-engineers see this as a failure. Engineers and scientists see this as an awe-inspiring success from which to learn, iterate and try again. I don't fault reporters for exagerated headlined focusing on failure. They don't know any better. That is not what their lives are about and most might be challenged to understand that nothing in that video constitutes failure in the context of evolving a design. In fact, fail…
I don't agree that failure is absolutely necessary. I think success is generally more informative, because it gives you data about something that works end to end. If your rocket blows up on the launch pad, you just learned that you shouldn't overpressure your fuel tank (or w/e). But if your rocket lifts off, goes to space, and lands, you learn thousands of things that work that you can use again.
I have seen a company be destroyed because they got things almost right, from the beginning. This "success" informed their every decision and created an enormous resistance to trying anything new and in the end it turned out almost simply wasn't good enough. The initial success destroyed them.
I almost think it would be easier to let it do what this video shows, and build a giant metal net to just prevent it from sinking. Or is that harder than landing on a small platform?
I wonder what happened there. Looks at 4 seconds the guidance system figured it needed to pull an ultra manoeuvre to slow the the horizontal speed(was drifting left) but ended up with a solution putting the rocket upright again at nearly 0m. If it would have left some altitude for stabilizing I think they would have had it. Arm chair rocket science is fun.
this footage give a real sense of how close they are to getting it right
I wonder what happened there. Looks at 4 seconds the guidance system figured it needed to pull an ultra manoeuvre to slow the the horizontal speed(was drifting left) but ended up with a solution putting the rocket upright again at nearly 0m. If it would have left some altitude for stabilizing I think they would have had it. Arm chair rocket science is fun.
According to Elon's tweet that seems to have disappeared by now, they had static friction in bipropellant valves introduce a lag that the control system couldn't handle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their eventual goal is for every rocket to land and not have problems. Providing enough fuel for five seconds of hovering is a waste of valuable fuel (see how they're already so low that they run out in the process). Also, falling over almost certainly also leads to a writeoff, as otherwise they'd just fly the rocket into a big pit of fire retardant foam blocks. I'd imagine that the lateral stresses involved in a cra…
Of course, their plan is to not have problems. That's everyone's plan. It's planning for when things don't go right that makes the difference.