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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.
After a couple hundred tries (yes, I suck), I finally got a strike! Now that I did it, I can go on to win all the bowling trophies ever!... said no sane person ever.
Sure, that's pretty impressive already, I'm not knocking them. SpaceX is awesome - I really want to see leaving earth becoming reasonably affordable in my lifetime, and SpaceX is doing a huge amount to make that a reality... but just landing a rocket once (after failing a few times), while news enough already, isn't really going to *change* anything until they can prove they can do it *consistently*. Did they actually change the *process* they use, such that they'll be able to pull it off every time by following that new process? Or are they just getting better at the process they already had, due to practice?