After watching the video a bunch of times, it is clear the booster touched down with zero velocity. That says a lot. So they are on target (twice now) and can get the rocket to zero velocity. It is really just fine tuning and sticking the landing. I'm sure it will not be easy but I am also certain that they will perfect it soon. It probably would have been successful this time if they could have been allowed to do the landing on land. On land they can program the landing for a variable of 100+ feet. The booster wouldn't have needed to make the last minute rapid corrections that caused the instability. It would have worked - I am certain of it. With the barge there is no room for error.
SpaceX Engineer @SpaceXEngineer 1h1 hour ago Speculation on the FB SpaceX of a July launch & landing at Vandenberg Air Force Base if a second barge under construction isn't complete...if this is accurate Vandenberg area will be inundated with Tesla's.
It's the what-happened-after-it-tipped-over that interests me. Because the less damage there is, the more information they'll have for what it'll take to re-use it ahead of actually landing the thing.
Agree. On land you could conceivably have a square mile of dedicated flat surface, and then the lateral positioning becomes a non issue. All you need to worry about is speed and attitude, which they seems to have got that nailed anyway on both the landings
SpaceX Engineer on Twitter: You can see from the photo that it clearly hit on target (center of the rocket at the time of this photo was on the outside edge of the bullseye ring). The reason for the spray is they are moving the rocket laterally to bring it on target and have to rapidly tilt the rocket to stop that lateral movement. So the bottom of the rocket is pointed into the water and therefore sprays up the water. Even if they came down the whole way dead center, you would still see water spray because of the force and power of the engine displacing the air would reach the water and still cause spray. And as others have stated it is because you cannot continually fire the engines because they have a higher thrust to weight ratio on one engine vs the weight of the 1st stage all depleated of fuel and missing a payload. 99% of the weight is gone at this point and even 1 rocket engine is way too much power. So you have to arrive at 0 velocity right at 0 altitude. This has been stated by Elon on at least one occasion back when they were landing on the water and people were asking why it came down so fast. It isn't that they are "rushing" anything, they are operating within the scope of how they designed the system to work.
Besides the barge not being that big (so there is some inevitable plume from the ocean), the deck of the barge in intentionally flooded by water jets as we saw from the previous landing attempt.
Certainly, for the rockets they've been testing previously, of which they circulated videos, they had plenty of fine control of thrust and could go up, hover at will, then drop in a very controlled way. Are you saying this rocket is quite different from the one they tested previously? That seems strange, if true.
Yeah, that's pretty good. I was particularly amused be the recurring Gwynne Shotwell lookalike and the dig at Orbital (which really is "too soon").
a little factoid for you that you MAY not have known. WD40 was originally used as an de-icing agent on rockets (general dynamics Atlas). Prevented LOx tanks from causing ice and water condensation on the outside of the rocket.
Wow.. That was much better than anything I had imagined. This thing would have landed just fine had it been on land with a much larger landing zone. on this video it seems to be on the ground from 0:09 til 0:12 a full 3 seconds.
Spectacular footage in that most recent YouTube link! (On edit: it was set to private literally seconds after I watched it. )
really shows what they mean when they talk about balancing a broomstick on your hand, incredible attempt there, doesn't look like they'll be able to recover much based on the ending though. Still I bet they learned a ton from the attempt!