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Posted on 04/18/2014 1:56:24 PM PDT by blam
At this point it’s looking successful.
Data upload from tracking plane shows first stage landing in Atlantic was good! Flight computers continued transmitting for 8 seconds after reaching the water. Stopped when booster went horizontal. Several boats enroute through heavy seas...
And he's a genuine African-American.
I recently found out that he kind of started by SpaceX by accident. He wanted to use his Paypal money to do a couple of demo launches, like sending a tiny amount of cargo to Mars. He was going to buy old Soviet ICBM's, but the Russians tried to screw him so he started his own company.
Please ping me to aviation and aerospace articles. Thank you.
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Wouldn’t the extra fuel necessary to land the rocket reduce its payload? Why not just use parachutes?
The idea is to be able to land it on land and thereby reduce costs and turn-around time to launch again.
Isnt the efficiency of the booster much less because it has to carry so much excess fuel weight to soft land?
Seems a steerable parchute would be better.
The weight penalty is 30% or so, but that’s not as big a deal when you don’t have to trash a $40 million vehicle after every flight. They tried parachutes but the issues of supersonic flight made it impractical. They did the first test of the propulsive landing system in September 2012.
Oh good, was waiting for some news about this
current experiment.
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