After seeing footage from the ship landing in the water, I’m convinced they put that thing exactly where they wanted it. Can’t be long until they try to catch that fucker too.
I don’t think they will ever catch the ship. The vision for the booster is that it flies back to the launch mount, gets refueled, and then they stack another ship on top of it and launch again. That’s not really practical for the ship though, since it has to fly a whole mission rather than just a boost phase.
Thought they were planning on catching the ship as well. Guess we’ll see.
Cell phone comet picture. Hard to see by eye but I don’t have good night vision and obviously the city lights and haze don’t help.
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That’s the plan if they can figure out the heat shielding, they definitely seem to have reentry and landing covered so it wouldn’t be too crazy if they go for a double catch with IFT-7.
Why isn’t some version of the space shuttle already a solution to all this?
The space shuttle wasn’t a good design when it came to costs and payload. Landing on a runway is just not the right option for something coming back from space. Even more so if you want to land on Mars.
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I feel like the Space Shuttle is a good counter example for people who think that you automatically get amazing results if you take a bunch of smart engineers and give them lots of money. It’s got lots of amazing components, but the system as a whole isn’t really good at doing useful stuff. They built these amazing engines that work with high efficiency in space while still being safe to use at sea level, and then they compromised the whole design so that they could fire those engines for the whole flight and bring them home for reuse.
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Yeah, Space Shuttle was great for sure, but it’s rinkey-dink compared to what the SpaceX engineers are going for.
[And fuck you Elmo obv. Riding the coattails as if he’s one of them]
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