SpaceX Successfully Lands Its Rocket On A Floating Drone Ship For The First Time (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: SpaceX has finally landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship at sea, after launching the vehicle into space this afternoon. It's the first time the company has been able to pull off an ocean landing, after four previous attempts ended in failure. This is the second time SpaceX has successfully landed one of its rockets post-launch; the first time was in December, when the company's Falcon 9 rocket touched down at a ground-based landing site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, after putting a satellite into space. Now that SpaceX has demonstrated it can do both types of landings, the company can potentially recover and reuse even more rockets in the future. And that could mean much greater cost savings for SpaceX.

Comments

Re: Economics of that stunt are dodgy

[Megane]

Blue Origin has been mocking them in the other way. "Hey, look at what we just did! What took you so long?" Sure, you had a sub-orbital launch profile (almost no horizontal velocity), popping off a tin can that came straight back down. Boy Scouts recover their Estes rockets all the time. SpaceX already did the landing thing with their Grasshopper rocket (and DC-X long before either of them), and the only reason they didn't take it higher was because they didn't have clearance to go higher at McGregor.

Falcon 9 has been on an orbital launch profile every time, sometimes even GTO, which is a lot harder to come back from. Even hitting the drone ship and falling over was harder than what Blue Origin did. A side-effect of having an actual useful launch profile is engines that can't throttle down to hover (Blue Origin can), so they have to do the much harder "hoverslam" maneuver. (zero vertical velocity at the same moment as zero altitude)

I will, however, give Blue Origin a few points for doing quick turnarounds. Their short-term objective is space tourism, and they're doing exactly what they need. It's just not nearly as hard as what SpaceX is trying to do.