Amazing how close it is to the edge to the deck. Almost missed.
It really didn't look good, either the rocket had gone into the ocean there or the rocket somehow had hovered over that spot far from its expected landing zone. The video stopped again for what seemed like a long time might have been 30 seconds the next single frame showed the rocket far off center on the barge deck and there was a huge cheer from the SpaceX crew. It must have been a very close call.
The other interesting bit is at 23:42 where we see one of the grid fins in the process of burning off the side of the rocket. Then we lose downlink video from that point on with the stage. It is flying at nearly 4,000 mph at an altitude of 87,000 feet. The SR-71 goes half that fast at that altitude and experiences significant heating on its skin, since drag is proportional to the square of the velocity you're taking 4x the heating.
It has to be a very fine line between burning these things up vs landing them. And clearly the more 'abuse' they will tolerate during re-entry the more fuel you can use toward lift mass. Still, I'm always surprised that they don't use more rocket power to slow down while above 100,000' to avoid the high speed re-entry and then use streamers or drogue chutes rather than RP1 to slow down in the thicker atmosphere.
Chutes have to be repacked, means it's a no-go. Powered landing is where it's at for true reusability.
Every single thing they're doing in this program is prep for Mars.
SpaceX-pushing rocket tech makes mars a more targetable endevour.
Tesla- better solar panels and better batteries mean you can consume and store more power on be red planet.
Open AI- it's going to be very important to be able to prefab critical systems before any astronauts get there. AI can help there.
Boring Company- Where do you build a home in a place with almost no atmosphere to shield you from radiation? Underground. What's nice and cylindrical and would fit nicely in a tube atop a rocket? Bore segments. Also TBC's bores are being designed with a smaller diameter than your typical bore. Elon says it's so cars can fit in them to revolutionize the LA commute, I see something that can be moduralized and put on top of a heavy lift rocket and used to prefab Martian living quarters.
We have actually been precalculating trajectories, and have used trial balloons to measure wind speed and direction immediately prior to launches, combined with planned pre-flight path alterations in an effort to land rockets with parachutes more accurately into a targeted area or small designated area.
I can't tell by your wording, and I was similarly confused about their video recovery system, so maybe this will be helpful for you.
The only thing SpaceX hasn't invested in is a better downlink. The video is fully recorded and stored on OCISLY, so they will analyze and post later.
The rocket merely interrupts the realtime feed.
Which leads me to believe SpaceX just doesn't care about a robust realtime feed since they can analyze offline -- or they just don't care about one for the public.
Given that the downlink is reasonably stable when OCISLY is just sitting there (with our without a booster sitting on it) I'd love to see them back up on the locally recorded video and then send it via the downlink once the link has restabilized. We're talking about 18 seconds of video here, not hours :-)
I would be interested to hear how SpaceX internally views sharing video with the public. I could imagine a range of feelings from "why waste time showing them" to "an essential part of our marketing and outreach." I personally see it as fascinating stuff that touches on so many interesting questions about rocket design, future space feasibility, and the design limits around cost optimization.
So time will tell. :)
That said, SpaceX has a phenomenal number of video feeds and I really enjoy them. Early in the Falcon 9 project we would see on the web cast a cut to a video shot with no explanation of what it was, but we know now that they were looking a fuel settling and other effects during re-entry.
And yes, given that you can learn a lot from said videos about how it is done, and there is at least one high profile (Blue Origin) and a no doubt a number of low profile efforts on going to duplicate what SpaceX can do, there is some competitive advantage from not sharing all the video they have.
I still want to see them though.
Can you link to any posted-later videos of landings? They pretty consistently either drop frames or cut out entirely on the live stream around the moment of touchdown, so it'd be great to see decent quality footage of some landings.
Also the braking burn just above the atmosphere is already a long high thrust burn. They run three engines for quite awhile at a time when the vehicle has more fuel in it than during landing, which is a single engine burn. Extending that three engine burn significantly would require a lot of extra fuel and as we can see from this landing it isn't needed.
Witness Russia tries to design such things. Since about 1985 I read articles about adding small wings and chutes to the first stage of various proposed rockets. Nothing came from that so far.