December 28, 2015
One Giant Leap
One of The Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes is all suited up and ready to go after observing the successful landing of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket.
The stage will be reused and that will go a long way towards reducing launch costs moving forward. This is a big step towards the fully reusable multistage rockets that have been dreamed of since Von Braun's time.
Space-X did a lot of similar operations earlier. Jeff Bezos's company which has a much lower performance rocket for suborbital space tourism achieved a similar feat a few weeks ago and several similar landings were done by the DC-X in the early 90s. However, this is the first time this has been successfully done as part of an actual satellite launch.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
02:39 PM
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1
The helicopter view of the landing is pretty damn impressive.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Mon Dec 28 17:09:09 2015 (zAcee)
2
It's amazing that they exactly hit the crosshairs on the landing pad.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Mon Dec 28 23:21:11 2015 (+rSRq)
3
It's not just the performance that's different. The landing stage of Falcon 9 performed a hypersonic retroburn, which many smart people said could not be done. The New Sheppard booster simply fell down using aerodynamic stabilization.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tue Dec 29 00:17:28 2015 (IcVEm)
4
There's a nice graphic out there comparing the flight paths of the two rockets as well.
I was lucky enough to catch the stream live, and I posted that Helicopter View video to my mee.nu blog as soon as I found it was available.
I was lucky enough to catch the stream live, and I posted that Helicopter View video to my mee.nu blog as soon as I found it was available.
Posted by: Mauser at Tue Dec 29 01:00:56 2015 (5Ktpu)
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