Fourth SpaceX Rocket Successfully Landed on A Drone Ship (theverge.com)

Saturday a SpaceX rocket completed the company's fourth successful landing at sea (watched by over 100,000 viewers on YouTube and Flickr). Saturday's landing means Elon Musk's company has now recovered more than half the rockets they've launched. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Saturday's report from The Verge: Tonight's landing was particularly challenging for SpaceX... The Falcon 9 had to carry its onboard satellite -- called JCSAT-16 -- into...a highly elliptical orbit that takes the satellite 20,000 miles out beyond Earth's surface. Getting to GTO requires a lot of speed and uses up a lot of fuel during take off, more so than getting to lower Earth orbit. That makes things difficult for the rocket landing afterward...there's less fuel leftover for the vehicle to reignite its engines and perform the necessary landing maneuvers.

CEO Elon Musk said the company is aiming to launch its first landed rocket sometime this fall...SpaceX's president, Gwynne Shotwell, estimates that reusing these landed Falcon 9 vehicles will lead to a 30 percent reduction in launch costs.
SpaceX named their drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You."

Comments

More than half?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see 28 Falcon 9 launches...6 recovered. Yup, sounds like more than half. Nope. How about 6 out of 11 *attempted* recoveries? Plenty of other problems with the summary and some of the replies...

Re:Numbers...

[Kjella]

More importantly, of the last 7 landing attempts, there were only two failures, (...) So it's looking like reliability of future landings can be expected to be quite a bit better than 50%.

Most importantly, none have flown again and until they do it's expensive garbage recovery. For what it's worth I heard they did engine tests and it looks good, but it's more important they nail the launches than the landings.