"Autonomous spaceport drone ship”
twitter.com
twitter.com
Even more interesting for me was he tweeted the X-wings [1] which make total sense. On re-entry you don't need to burn fuel to provide attitude stabilization and drag if you can do that aerodynamically. I realize the first test failed due to an out of control spin, but if you remember the old rotary rocket days you may note that one could use reentry to spin up the F-9 then flip the pitch on the x-wings to provide an auto-rotation type of re-entry into the denser atmosphere. That would save fuel needed for the landing.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/22/space-x-x-wing-rocket-drone...
"Base is 300 ft by 100 ft, with wings that extend width to 170 ft. Will allow refuel & rocket flyback in future."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/536263260056850432
Instead of spending valuable propellant on a boostback burn to get to the launch site, they'll just partially refuel the spent lower stage on the barge and have it fly itself back to the launch site. This'll improve their maximum payload, and possibly save money.
given the capabilities of the stage, wouldn't it basically be a suborbital hyper-transport - they can fly it from any point A to point B, like from SF to Honk-Kong must faster than Concorde.
That's why the U.S. launch sites are located on the coasts: Wallops Island, Cape Canaveral, and Vandenberg AFB. They all launch vehicles away from CONUS.
A stern googling will get you the Wall Street Journal article this comes from. If I link it, they won't let you read it.
Bees are both airborne (not seaborne) and make a notable (droning) sound in flight.
Old English-->Male Bee
from the German --> Droning sound
Although bees aren't remote control via a computer chip, they are generally seen as being commanded by the queen :)
A relatively recent example of this is the word 'literally' which used to, and still does, mean 'in the literally sense; exactly' but has also come to mean 'not literally true' when used for emphasis, as in: I have received literally thousands of emails).
Words!
Even if it's just a test that they know has a reasonable chance of failing, that's not how it will be portrayed in the mainstream media (see: the F9R-dev RUD)
There are lots of comsats in GEO; no doubt some of them are open to doing a deal, but I don't know the cost. Maybe an international TV news network would be willing to do it "for free" so long as they get exclusive access?
That being said, they have announced that there will be cameras on the barge. The fact that they have announced that ahead of time makes it very likely we will see at least some footage in the days or weeks after the attempt (they'll just want to do it in a PR controlled way).
http://www.spacenews.com/article/launch-report/42305next-fal...
Looks like the Bayes is strong with Musk:
> If the stage successfully lands on the platform, Musk said, it could potentially fly again. He put the odds of success at no greater than 50 percent for this particular attempt, but was more optimistic about the company’s chances of landing on the platform on a future mission.
> “There’s at least a dozen launches that will occur over the next 12 months,” Musk said. “I think it’s quite likely — probably 80 to 90 percent likely — that one of those flights will be able to land and refly.”
The scheduled date is Dec 16: