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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

According to Elon it landed:

"Data upload from tracking plane shows landing in Atlantic was good! Several boats enroute through heavy seas." -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/statuses/457307742495993856

Which is pretty amazing. Apparently the telemetry continued for 6 seconds as it fell over.

"Flight computers continued transmitting for 8 seconds after reaching the water. Stopped when booster went horizontal." -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/statuses/457311780943822848

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I wasn't really sure why SpaceX decided to launch when they knew that recovering the first stage would be almost impossible when the waves in the Atlantic were 20' high. I guess recovery of the stage was the tertiary reason for the launch (after the payload for the ISS and for the cubesats), however was it critical to launch at that point or could they have waited a few more days for the weather to improve?

One thought which had occurred to me was maybe they needed to get people working on the upcoming Orbcomm OG2 launch which is currently scheduled for May. When you think about all the time and energy which goes into fabricating the rocket along with all nine Merlin engines, it really hits home how significant of an achievement making reusable rockets will be when SpaceX pulls it off. You have to think that at some point in the not-too-distant future it would be absolutely crazy to launch a rocket where you knew you were going to lose the first stage.

SpaceX is getting free testing out of commercial payloads. That's already a huge boon - asking the commercial flights to delay their stuff so SpaceX can test better is pushing it a bit.

The flight was already delayed 10 times (April 6 2013, Sept. 30 2013, Nov. 11 2013, Dec. 9 2013, Jan. 15, Feb. 11, Feb. 22, March 1, March 16 and March 3) and scrubbed once. Given the importance of demonstrating a fundamentally new capability and potentially saving millions of dollars might be worth delaying for another couple of days. If NASA was willing to wait over a year for launch, presumably they'd be willing to wait a little bit longer. They've been tremendously helpful and supportive of SpaceX up to this point.

Even if NASA was fine with it, their other customers may not be. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. They have managed to build a system where the customers basically pay them to test new products. That's a fantastic situation! They don't want to even hint at something that might cause the next customer to say, "We want to make sure you're focused on our mission, so kindly leave the landing legs in your factory for this one, thanks."

Another way to look at it though is the customer gets really, really cheap access to space (in this case, cheaper than anyone else including Orbital Sciences), but has to put up with some amount of tinkering. I guess there's only so much that any organization is willing to bear.

Regardless, I'm really glad that the mission went off mostly without a hitch. I can't wait to see when SpaceX glues all of the pieces together and has a truly reusable rocket platform.

I'll be more interested at the moment to see how recovered engines perform in "reused" state testing. Even the breakdown on the cost of refurbishment would be big news.

From what I understand, they had a window on Friday, a fallback window on Saturday. If they missed the Saturday launch, then the mission would go to Orbital.

Maybe they technically could have waited until Saturday, but there is no way they would scrap one of their windows for a tertiary objective.

In the post-launch press conference, NASA made it clear that ISS scheduling is tight, with a lot of traffic (Dragon, Cygnus, Soyuz) and onboard activities, and rescheduling was not going to be easy.

Yeah, this launch has been delayed and rescheduled over and over again for various reasons. Too many to count actually, the customer (NASA) will always be the primary concern and they did not even have to allow Spacex to run these tests while transporting their cargo.

Because recovering the first stage was not what they were being paid for. They are paid to move stuff to the Space Station.

That said, the ability to 'tag along' additional testing without jeopardizing the main mission is a huge win for SpaceX. The cost of the launch (about $100M according to their web site) is paid for by the contract. Getting flight test data as well is pretty priceless.

Finally, even if the seas were calm it would be unlikely they would put a ship in the area as it would put people at risk of having a chunk of rocket and fuel crashing into them. They might have gotten better video though. If I were there I would have tried to figure out how to borrow a predator drone to have it loitering right there to film the arrival.

Well, also according to Musk, its last reported velocity was 360 m/s. That's a pretty hard landing.

That message was sent while the vehicle was still high up and had not started its powered landing over the water. It was only its last reported velocity at that time, not its last reported velocity now, or even shortly after.

Ah, did not realize that. Thanks for clarifying.

That was when it dropped over the horizon from the Cape and they lost telemetry. It was still 8.5 km in the air at that point.

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