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this footage give a real sense of how close they are to getting it right

• NDizzle 12y ago
  Watching this footage made me immediately go to SpaceX's website and look at job openings.
• mrep 12y ago
  I agree. I feel like if they had a larger area to land on they would be able to get it. That way, they could focus less on pinpointing the exact position, and more on keeping it upright and stable.
• waterlesscloud 12y ago
  Watching it made me realize I only had an abstract idea of how difficult it was to even attempt this. It's insanely hard, and they're so close!
  • 31reasons 12y ago
    Yes its a very hard problem but what makes it hard ? Is it engineering of the components, algorithms or expensive tests and economics of it ? Maybe people before Elon Musk were not interested in solving this problem not because its technically hard problem but because their existing business model is much more lucrative.
    • imaginenore 12y ago
      You have to deal with real physics and the real physical world - turbulence, friction, lag, wind, waves, none of which are predictable.
    • InclinedPlane 12y ago
      It's hard not because the engineering is fundamentally difficult (it's challenging but compared to a lot of engineering problems not terribly so) but rather because it's very unforgiving and it takes a great deal of foresight and risk management / business savvy to do what SpaceX has done efficiently and cost effectively. Look at a couple of the issues they've faced and managed to deftly conquer. Take vehicle design, for example. If you design a purely expendable launcher you tend to want to minimize engine count and concentrate on 2nd stage performance, which leads to a design with an expensive 2nd stage and a cheaper 1st stage with very little throttle authority (due to using a small number of engines). That makes reuse very difficult and not very worthwhile because you'd need to either try to reuse the 2nd stage (a much more challenging task) or to heavily modify the 1st stage, which would then only save the cheapest component of the launcher. So if you want to concentrate on reuse you need a vehicle like the F9, with lots of 1st stage engines, and most of the cost in the 1st stage. But even then you need to figure out how to run your business. It would be easier to envision the launcher with reuse an integral part of the design from day 1, which would lead you towards testing the reusability aspects of the design prior to the first launch. But that would be tremendously expensive and would make it more difficult to keep a company running while that was going on. SpaceX has been able to provide numerous orbital launches with their rocket and earn a tremendous amount of revenue before it is capable of actually being operated in a reusable fashion. A common engineering dictum is "you ain't gonna need it", to avoid introducing unnecessary design elements that aren't strictly immediately necessary. But without designing the Falcon 9 with reuse in mind from day 1 they would have had a much more difficult time in developing the reusable aspects. Note that SpaceX has made use of hundreds of millions of dollars of flight hardware in their various landing tests, all of which they not only didn't have to pay for out of pocket but actually earned a profit for. That's smart business. Meanwhile, for all of the launches where they haven't attempted landings they've added operational experience and real-world testing of their overall vehicle design and components. Big, bureaucratic companies that are bringing in billions a year in revenues (like ULA or Arianespace) don't tend to engage in behavior like this, because they don't have the hunger, they don't have the boldness, they don't have the coherent foresight. What SpaceX has done is something that a lot of other companies are going to replicate, likely fairly successfully, once it's been proven. But getting to that point has required not just engineering acumen but enormous risk management skills and business savvy. They'll have a significant market advantage due to their head start for quite some time, and hopefully they will retain enough boldness and savvy to continue moving ahead even as others attempt to catch up.
    • jccooper 12y ago
      From a technical standpoint, it's tough. You've got big expensive machinery that operates at or past any reasonable limits in extreme conditions and moreover gets destroyed with every test if you make the slightest mistake. I know that when I end up with an iteration interval of an hour it seems like development takes forever. SpaceX is able to test, what, every couple months? But the economics is probably more important. The incumbents have such sky-high development costs that reusability seemed like an impossible task to do economically. Last time anyone tried they came up with STS, which was highly capable but ultimately dangerous and ruinously expensive. A new reusable system seemed like it would take half a trillion dollars in development, and would probably never have the flight rate to make it worthwhile. Elon thought that he could do it better. NASA believes designing a reusable system would be too expensive for them. They're probably both right.
  • ansible 12y ago
    It's called a "suicide burn" for a reason. Even with just one engine, the thrust/weight ratio for the nearly-empty stage makes landing difficult. The engine can't throttle down enough. So you can't just come to a near-hover, and then ease you way onto the landing pad. You have to cancel your velocity right at touchdown, with little margin for error.
• joeyspn 12y ago
  Yup, looks like they're about to crack it.. exciting times