3 ms·

Hovering wastes energy though. The most efficient (theoretical) landing would be an instantaneous impulse that brings your velocity to whatever your landing gea

• vonklaus 11y ago
  spacex is a company that has an insane level of dedication to product and extremely lofty aspirations somewhere near the very edge of what is currently capable by humans and allowable by physics. From purely a process standpoint, I think that trying to tightly control 3 axis to this degree of precision is a daunting task. The need to do it this way could be entirely built into the architecture of the system, but from a "first make it work, then make it work better" stand point, the ability to hover or throttle trajectory would be an easier step one. Outside of this single piece (reusability) and all of the vectors surrounding it, the rocket still has other challenges (e.g no launch since last failure is concerning) which need to be overcome. SpaceX is scaling too fast and is doing an amazing job at complex coordination, however they don't seem to have the talent bandwith nor the time to tackle every problem 100% and the way they have structured reusability makes it really difficult to be successful even at ~98%.
  • chriswarbo 11y ago
    > The need to do it this way could be entirely built into the architecture of the system, but from a "first make it work, then make it work better" stand point, the ability to hover or throttle trajectory would be an easier step one. Of course, we can apply the same "make it work, then make it work better" stand point to the Falcon, where "work" is delivering payloads to orbit and "work better" is reusability :)