Wow that was way cool!!! What's with the "we don't have any cameras on the recovery boats so we're ending coverage"? You can clearly see the whole thing from the land-based camera.
So far much for landing 2200m offshore. Forget the recovery ship - they'll just need a jetski and tow rope to get back to the beach.
Yeah, I would have gladly kept watching from that shore view. I switched to the NASA feed, but they signed off soon after too.
It's probably farther out than it looks - telephoto lenses tend to compress the distance visually. If you go back to the video from the Dragon itself on the way down, it looked to be a good distance offshore.
Still it only like 200-300m offshore. You can tell something is astray when their voices become much quieter when calling the distance values. Very cool nonetheless - I especially liked the the silky smooth separation. Was that a little air-brake that popped out?
That capsule got out of there quick! I'm so used to the ponderously slow launch of a large rocket. This took off like a bat out of hell. I will be curious to find out how many G's were pulled. After the burn was completed, one guy says that it was "lightly below nominal." Which is not nominal. So something went wrong with the trajectory possibly, since the burn certainly seemed the right length of time.
I was also confused by that statement. There is no one in the capsule. Who exactly needs to "hang tight"? I guess he was referring to the SpaceX personnel involved in the test. It was pretty cool to watch, but it seemed like the capsule landed closer to shore than planned based on the distance it was outside the surf line. Couldn't have been over 200 m.
I think they said they expected 4.5 g. It's not meant to be comfortable; it's meant to save your life. Also: I assume that means the thrust ended 8 seconds earlier than expected.
There is some slow motion on the NSF website that seems to show one of the Super Draco engines shut down a bit early. A puff of smoke came out of it. The capsule then did a slight tip, and the remaining engines then shut down shortly after that. Could have been an "abort of the abort". Still, loved the video, and things more or less worked. Often times you learn more when tests go wrong than when they go right. See post #1550 for the 16 second super slow motion: SpaceX Dragon 2 Pad Abort Test - May 6 2015 - DISCUSSION THREAD RT
A couple people explained what it prolly was over on NSF but I have no idea what they were talking about as usual over there.