Or are they lizard people wearing human suits just trying to find a way back home?

Also the first stage somehow turned around from whatever absurdly high speed it was going and came all the way back to the launchpad? WTF? That's like what someone who didn't understand how rockets work would expect it to happen but they did it like that in reality.

Couldn't believe how nervous I was watching this pan out. The same talent that took men to the moon with crude computers and brain power, is back in the space driver seat, two generations down the road.

That's the difference between an orbital rocket and a rocket that just 'goes to space' like the Blue Origin Firefly did the other day. BO essentially went straight up (like less than 1 km down range) 100km and then came straight down.

Falcon 9 first stage is something like 200km down range, 140km altitude and is traveling at a velocity of 1.8 - 2.5 km/s - around 5000 mph to put it in perspective - and is able to reorient itself vertically, boostback to the Cape, and perform a hoverslam landing (another thing the BO rocket had the luxury of avoiding). Not to mention the entire thing is greater than an order of magnitude more mass than BO_FF and carrying a payload.

The two are not at all comparable.

/rant

But to your point.....yes it is an amazing feat of engineering. I was hooping an hollering in my living room when it happened. So exciting.

I might be getting old or something but...

In this age of garbage people on Facebook complaining about garbage things, and garbage politicians trying to outdo themselves with who can be more garbagey than the other guy, to see what ostensibly looked like a group of smart, exceptional younger people grasping the concept that extending man's reach into space is the absolute most important thing we can do...

If you plug your ears and drown out the noise for a minute, you can almost have some hope for the future.

Got goosebumps watching this, so f*ckin awesome. Laughed out loud at the USA#1 chants.

This was easily top 5 most intense/exciting things i've ever watched. Read the WBW posts a few months ago and just kind of saturated my brain in spacex, elon musk, space stuff for a couple weeks after. So was pretty hyped. ****ing thrilling as ****

awesome in every way

let me know when they pull off a 5x

Haha yeah imagine what it feels like being on the team.

When SpaceX shows Elon with the headset in mission control before launch in their director's cuts (e.g. 0:12 into the awesome ISS delivery vid), it looks like he's having a out-of-body experience.

I couldn't imagine being a team member, much less as invested as Musk, Shotwell, Mueller, et al. Maybe I am secretly a pessimist, but my nerves were frayed leading up to and during launch and I'm just a very interested observer.

On the webcast you can see Gwynn jumping around, hugging anyone within reach at Mission Control when the landing was successful. (at which time the probability of overall mission success was really high) I can only imagine her relief/excitement/disbelief etc.

correction: AFAIK F9 was ~100km downrange, not 200km. The 200km figure is the distance downrange F9 traditionally was at stage separation; this was the first flight of F9 1.2 and a major change the temp of the LOX (liquid oxygen propellant...essentially it was super chilled to increase density allowing more fuel to be stored on board whilst also increasing thrust about 33% - i think - as the propellant had more energy per unit of volume going through the engines) which allowed SpaceX to use a much steeper trajectory than normal b/c they had the fuel for a less efficient trajectory to orbit. The trade off was an easier landing.

The facts are still trickling in so take that fwiw.

The guy operating the controller must have balls of steel.

bump for another falcon 9 launch scheduled for 10:42 am pst tomorrow.


if a mod could edit the title for the upcoming launch thatd be grand

Watching these landings is like watching animation, cgi, and science fiction. But nope, it's real baby.

I can't seem to find anything regarding a launch tomorrow. Do you have a link to follow?

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasa...l#.VpkucBgrIlI

That might get you a stream. If not, Google SpaceX live around 1;30 eastern time

Maybe someone will resurrect the Delta Clipper ( DC-X ) single stage to orbit?

It should be here http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

SpaceX live streams on their YouTube channel. It's always the best one to watch.

Tomorrow is a barge landing so don't be surprised if we don't have live video of the landing attempt. Depends on how far out the barge is.

Also, this is the last Falcon 1.1 core in inventory.

eta: JRTI (autonomous drone ship) will be positioned 280km south of Vandenburg. While I don't know exactly how far offshore it will be, I am reading that it is over the horizon. So don't hold your breath on a live stream of landing.

Swells are predicted to be 15' in the area JRTI will be positioned. I know SpaceX upgraded the barge thrusters after a failed landing attempt, so we'll see if it's enough. Since the F9 is incapable of hovering, the Z axis elevation is extremely important. While 15ft seas are child's play for the ship (generally speaking) I don't know what kind of Z tolerance it can hold in those seas; as a corollary we don't know what the F9 capabilities are to react to sudden changes in the altitude of the landing pad. (I imagine the difficult part is quickly and accurately measuring the change in elevation, which would then be relayed to F9.) This is a different animal than a land based landing attempt.

so they can land a rocket but can't sync audio & video?

five minutes

drone ship bobbing noticably tho

ground control to major tom...