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SpaceX Releases Video of Falcon Rocket's Splashdown
First time accepted submitter cowdung (702933) writes In spite of Elon Musk's characterization of the landing as a KABOOM event. Judging by this video SpaceX has managed to land the first stage rocket booster nicely on the ocean after their Orbcomm launch on July 14th. It seems we're one step closer to a landing on dry land. Both this and the previous landing seem to have gone well.
Hopefully the next landing test camera has something to deice the camera lens.
It's really hard to do this kind of landing burn (nicknamed 'suicide burn' as you run out of fuel as the landing feet touch the ground at 0 velocity, and miscalculation and splat or a nice bounce (elon called it the hover slam)) with a solid rocket booster, which we keep buying/making to prop up the ICBM industry with civilian dollars. The shuttle ended up with SRBs instead of L(iquid)RBs purely due to political reasons.
Actually, for the Saturn V, blueprint drawings do exist made by NASA of a cockpit on the side of the main booster tank with glider wings, to take it the 300 miles back to a safe landing site. Obviously that complication got scrapped in the mad rush to get to the moon in a decade.
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"At this point, we are highly confident of being able to land successfully on a floating launch pad or back at the launch site and refly the rocket with no required refurbishment. However, our next couple launches are for very high velocity geostationary satellite missions, which don’t allow enough residual propellant for landing. In the longer term, missions like that will fly on Falcon Heavy, but until then Falcon 9 will need to fly in expendable mode."
Landing on a floating platform would be so crazy-awesome I can't even stand it! NASA should really stop wasting its time with its outdated SRB shiz.