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Comment by cjnicholls | Hacker News Reader

Successful landing on Please read the instructions. 15 consecutive landings

15 total landings, 11 of them in a row, not counting missions intended to be expendable.

And as always, the live video feed of the landing was clunky :). They should nail one with a steady stream.

Every time I've watched a landing, the video feed is janky. One might speculate that they don't want to live-stream an embarrassing failure but that seems a bit odd when it would be more embarrassing to have an explosion during launch, losing the payload.

Edit: vvvv that sounds quite reasonable, you'd think they'd do something like throw a buoy 100m away to house the actual satellite link and just do wifi from the barge to the buoy.

it's vibrations that shake the sat dish so much the link gets severed. convenient for them.

No need for speculation - the feed never cuts out on the return-to-launch-site landings. It's only wonky on the ship landings.

Bouys bounce around a lot - the drone ships have special station-keeping thrusters to stay in place.

The rocket engines also put out a ton of ionized particles that can interfere with the satellite signal.

Keeping video feed going during the landing is way, way, way, way, way, way down the priority list. The video gets recorded, so they don't need this for analysis. It's purely a promotional thing, which is fun, but saving five seconds of the stream (even if it's an important five seconds) is only worth so much effort.

You're underestimating the shock waves those engines produce. During launches you see camera footage from miles away shaking as the engines go to full power.

Of course there are solutions, but they're all expensive, and SpaceX has better things to spend money on. It's not like the footage doesn't exist - we're just not getting it live.

It wasn't their best stream, others have been better. The achievement of landing and potentially reducing the cost is enough.

> potentially reducing the cost

Aren't we getting close to being safe to assume that this is actually true? They've already re-used a number of boosters. (:

I was playing safe, although i believe it does/will. I don't think they have publicly released prices for reuse and as such i thought it was a little too broad to state as fact.

The live feed is usually a little clunky when it's landing on the boat. The one from last week was crystal clear https://youtu.be/vLxWsYx8dbo?t=19m42s

Just Read the Instructions*

(sorry for the pedantry)

Ahem... _Just_ Read the Instructions

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