Falcon Heavy launches, two boosters land, the central core crashes on camera

That's awesome! I think this is the first successful catch, so they must be quite happy over there right now.

I wonder when we'll have someone vlog about viewing the launch on a smartwatch aboard a flying car? (Vlogs, as well as smartwatches and flying cars are all Sci-fi inventions.)

Was it successful?

Perhaps it's not noteworthy enough now that we know the tech works

Space Shuttle Columbia (which broke up during re-entry) was reported in the news as having safely landed, with fake quotes from the crew members and everything as to what a pleasant reentry etc. The article as originally published was later either retracted or significantly modified.

Whats the takeaway here? Even space shuttle launches were so normal and routine that journalists would mail in predictable articles days in advance and they would be published online at a specified time with the expected outcome.

Someday, somebody will comment that even fedex deliveries to Mars are no longer newsworthy.

I have read that the trajectory is intentionally off dead center of the drone ship, until the very last moments, so that in the event of early fuel exhaustion it is highly unlikely to hit the ship.

I haven't seen anything official about this failed landing, but I know in the past boosters have made last second course adjustments to water crash in order to save the drone ship/landing pad. I would provide a link, but Google is overwhelmed by this morning's crash and I can't pull up anything on previous incidents.

Edit: Walrus01 reminded me about how it's actually done.

Maybe, it'd be a fairly narrow window where they could consciously do that so most of the time we've just seen failed landings hit the pad but maybe this one was far enough out of bounds it could trigger behavior we haven't seen. They do intentionally come in off target which means an completely uncontrolled landing won't just crater into the ship. It's a pretty sturdy ship though and what we did see could have been it running out of the nitrogen for the cold gas thrusters that provide a lot of control close to landing.

Wasn't that a sims 2 expansion pack?

As I recall that was their very first Falcon Heavy launch where we got to see the side boosters landing side by side in synchrony. Still gives me shivers that I got to see that.

I think you should cut SpaceX some slack. They pulled off the impossible and didn’t want to spend time on their record breaking live-stream speculating as to why the center booster landing failed. It’s not like they didn’t report it - later that day or the next, they explained exactly what happened.