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This may be a dumb question, but why are they test landing in the ocean instead of on land? Flight paths preclude it?

• iliis 13y ago
  The seas are huge and empty. Keep in mind that this was just an experiment which could easily have gone wrong. You probably don't want to have to explain why you made a rocket-shaped hole in somebody's roof ;) Also: Chances are higher that you're able to recover useful wreckage (like data loggers) when you crash into water.
• conroy 13y ago
  Safety. Previous attempts at a soft landing failed, with the firsr stage crashing into the ocean. Once they can be sure of a soft landing, my bet is they'll move to land.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• rst 13y ago
  They can't assume the test will work. (The first attempt, at the Cassiope launch, didn't.) Crashes at sea are a lot less consequential than crashes on land. (Flight paths are not an issue; they eventually expect to recover boosters from other space station cargo runs, which will follow the same trajectory.)
• InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Safety and ease. Landing in the ocean they don't have to boost back which saves them fuel (so it's essentially trivial to just add a test onto an existing launch at no significant payload penalty), plus they get to run through most of the flight profile (especially the most important parts) without having any potential of hitting anything on land and with the expectation that the vehicle is going to be destroyed anyway. They have several (at least 4) more flights within the next year with sufficient payload margin to do more of these tests so they can spend time gaining confidence (at almost zero cost to SpaceX) and exploring the boost back trajectory (coming closer to land) before actually attempting a landing.