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SpaceX Successfully Lands A Falcon 9 Rocket At Sea For The Third Time (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: SpaceX has successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean for the third time in a row. The Verge reports: "It was the third time in a row the company has landed a rocket booster at sea, and the fourth time overall. The landing occurred a few minutes before the second stage of the Falcon 9 delivered the THAICOM-8 satellite to space, where it will make its way to geostationary geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). GTO is a high-elliptical orbit that is popular for satellites, sitting more than 20,000 miles above the Earth. The 3,100-kilogram satellite will spend 15 years improving television and data signals across Southeast Asia." The company landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship for the second time earlier this month. UPDATE 5/27/15: Frank249 writes in a comment: "Elon Musk just tweeted: 'Rocket landing speed was close to design max and used up contingency crush core, hence back and forth motion. Prob ok, but some risk of tipping.'" He went on to tweet: "Crush core is aluminum honeycomb for energy absorption in the telescoping actuator. Easy to replace (if Falcon makes it back to port)."
Congratulations to everyone at Space X who contributed to this awesome achievement! You have made space flight exciting again!
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Why pay for an internet connection to bitch on slashdot when you could use that money to feed a starving child somewhere in the world? How dare we allow mindless entertainment like sports, movies, or video games to exist when the money from any one of those industries could pay to keep people fed across the globe?
The truth is, there are far more useless things out there than telecom satellites and research spacecraft, and in fact, the satellites you dislike so much contribute directly to solving those issues you complain about (like collecting data about icecaps to better inform climate scientists). You're either trolling or completely ignorant.
So good work, Spacex! Landing pencils is quite a trick, and yer doin' it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
He said, on the Internet.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Social Justice: When an SJW gets punched in the face.
Hell of a sig there, Hanzo. Advocating violence. What are you, twelve years old?
Elon Musk has stated that their design goal is 100 uses. That's pretty ambitious and time will tell if this is feasible or not. I'm sure when they do reuse the stage for the first dozen times they will be doing a lot of structural analysis and look for cracks with x-rays until they completely understand the stage's failure modes.