Comment by lupusreal

Comment by lupusreal 2 days ago

8 replies

The new space company is over twenty years old. For such a long development time I figured they actually had a reasonable chance of nailing the booster landing. I bet they'll do it next time.

trothamel 2 days ago

It also helps that they fairly routinely land boosters (with New Shepard), which means they've likely worked out the 'landing' part.

Now to see if they can solve the reentry problem.

bpodgursky 2 days ago

Sounded like maybe a telemetry loss, which is hard to fully simulate. They'll abort to be conservative in these situations even if the rocket could land itself without tele-operation.

  • mulmen 2 days ago

    Stage 1 is remotely operated? I find that surprising.

    • nirav72 2 days ago

      I’m not knowledgeable in the deep technical details of rocketry. But curious - how else would the first stage be operated? Should it be autonomous?

      • 0xffff2 2 days ago

        Yes. The timings involved would make it impractical to land a rocket reliably via human teleoperation even with zero latency.

      • mulmen 2 days ago

        I’m not a rocket scientist but my assumption is that it would be internally guided and only take external inputs in the form of GPS and “land on the ship” or “don’t land on the ship”. Saturn V was manned and had a an internal guidance computer.

    • bpodgursky 2 days ago

      No, but they want to be able to remotely abort.