3 ms·

> There's nothing it really has to look at and understand that it can't easily get from some basic sensor data - speed, attitude, location, etc. Self landing

• Syonyk 5y ago
  In terms of "understanding the environment around you such that you can land a booster stage," it's not a particularly hard problem. The challenges are about designing a booster stage that can handle the flipping and reentry, then figuring out the details of how to stick the landing with several times your empty weight as your minimum thrust. "Where am I, and what's between me and my destination?" isn't the hard part, as it is with surface driving.
• throwaway-8c93 5y ago
  Propulsive landing has been achieved routinely and with perfect precision since the 60s - Apollo's lunar modules, Lunar surveyor, Lunokhod rovers. The question has never been about the feasibility of landing the booster stages - what has been questioned is whether it's worth doing. The fuel used up during landing is fuel that cannot propel the payload. The landing might fail. The effects of thermal and material fatigue are not well understood. The transportation, refurbishing and QA are unlikely to be cheap anyway.