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Comment by pmayrgundter | Hacker News Reader

Swing and a miss.. but not by much! Congrats to the SpaceX team on the amazing and fast progress. What an incredible step forward.

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Definitely not a miss. They got telemetry data (3000 signals) covering the entire flight from start to landing -- which would've been impossible if it went RUD mid-flight. Plus they've located the bug (low pressure in the header fuel tanks) -- and the bug is plain and clear, with no uncertainty.

I'd definitely call that a success.

It says something about what they have done for rocketry when crashes on landing are note worthy. No one else even tries what they do normally without issue.

> It says something about what they have done for rocketry when crashes on landing are note worthy.

Err...???

Crashes of rockets always seem to be noteworthy. That's not anything specific to SpaceX.

Shivetya is talking about landing rockets afterwards.

If they keep up the launch cadence next year, they will surpass the Shuttle in number of reuses in a space program.

Who is Shivetya?

Can’t find it via DDG or Google.

The person who posted the grandparent comment (beginning "It says something...") to the person (ansible) who mentioned their name, and also the poster of the the great-great grandparent to this comment.

I think they're saying we've come to expect SpaceX rockets to successfully land, so much so that one not doing so is noteworthy. Something nigh unfathomable 10yrs ago

Ahhh, thanks. That makes more sense to me. :)

Very few rocket launches end with any kind of soft landing, let alone main boosters.

Soft-landing a small payload, or in the case of the shuttle, a winged reentry vehicle, is the exception. (And yes, the Shuttle also soft-ish watered its SRBs underr chutes.)

Retrorocket-soft-landing intact boosters from production launches fully upright was science fiction until four years ago.

https://geekologie.com/2016/04/unreal-video-of-spacexs-first...

The test platform was first hopped in 2012, only 8 years ago.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pzXlUw2WhcE

(I'm not a Musk fanboi,I thought the powered landing was nuts, he proved me wrong.)

Apparently they achieved all 3 main objectives. Landing was a secondary objective which was almost achieved! Very exciting stuff.

Yes, those 3 objectives being:

1. launch and fly to altitude

2. cut off engines and move to horizontal belly-flop profile, controlled using electric-motor powered flaps

3. relight engines to flip to vertical again for landing

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