Were they really trying to land it? I mean intact? I saw zero evidence of a landing attempt. Looks to me like just a random spent booster since China launches rockets with the expectation for a land crash. And if a village is nearby, oh well.
It seemed to oscillate around a vertical position while falling. Couldn't see any rocket firing or air control surfaces to support that, though. I would expect if it was just falling it would tumble ? Also- is that an OLD video? I seem to remember a previous video that was touted to show that Chinese boosters just fell from the sky randomly, near villages or otherwise, but don't remember if it was the same one?
How do we know that video shows an attempt a booster soft landing vs simply a spent booster in an uncontrolled return? (Which we know is the standard fate of Chinese boosters)
The twitterer says it was from a launch that happened the previous day. China has been working on reusability because of SpaceX. I got it from a SpaceX Facebook post where people were commenting on it and no one was refuting the launch and attempt at recovery.
Very unlikely it was a recovery attempt. CZ-4B is pretty old and it’s hard to imagine they’d try to convert a decades old booster into something reusable. Since we’re posting Chinese launch videos, here’s the granddaddy: There’s so much to unpack with that one that it’s hard to know where to start. Ask me about it at the bar sometime. (I wasn’t there)
I think a lot of headlines confused the Long March 2F secret-re-usable-space-plane-that-landed-two-days-later and Long March 4B crash-land-near-a-school-definitely-not-a-landing-attempt launches. Long March 2F and X-37B clone: China carries out secretive launch of 'reusable experimental spacecraft' - SpaceNews Long March 4B first stage crashes, as planned even though the video is reminiscent of views of Falcon 9 boosters coming in for RTLS: Another Chinese rocket falls near a school, creating toxic orange cloud
This is huge. NRO and the military are fully embracing reuse in a big way. SpaceX to transition to fully reusable fleet for national security launches - SpaceNews
Nice to see. Pretty sad that the NROL ULA launch is still grounded and has been since August. At what point does the lightbulb go on and they realize that they should use SpaceX for everything. I guess another couple of years. Actually now that I think about it, that was the point of the recent contact SpaceX got wasn't it? To build vertical integration capability so that they could take these military launches.
How many launches were done with new boosters this year? Will there be a time where they don't need to manufacture any new boosters at all.
Only as they get close to sun setting the falcon 9 program and it’s clear the fleet will be able to make it to retirement.
A reminder of the milestones SpaceX hit in 2020, and the ones ahead: SpaceX sets reuse records in 2020, looks ahead to even more ambitous 2021 - NASASpaceFlight.com
The same number of newly manufactured Falcon 9 and Atlas V boosters flew this year: 5, but SpaceX was able to achieve nearly 6x as many total flights through reuse of old boosters.