Incidentally, here is the Blue Origin patent with the sea going platform:http://www.google.com/patents/US8678321
I'm curious, is this the camera smashing through the inter-stage? I don't really know what this could be other than that.edit; then to than.
From the update on the SpaceX site:"We will attempt our next water landing on flight 13 of Falcon 9, but with a low probability of success. Flights 14 and 15 will attempt to land on a solid surface with an improved probability of success."
The video doesn't seem to show any data link drop outs, or any bit flips, or even any visible macroblocks! Is it possible that this was extracted from on-board storage?
A few notes:...3. The rocket plumes are oddly patterned in this video, with a series of parallel "interference patterns", no doubt due to the arrangement of the three firing engines....
Quote from: QuantumG on 07/22/2014 10:47 pmConcrete floats, right?Concrete ships do
Concrete floats, right?
One implication of the news that they only plan one more ocean 'landing' before trying to land on land, is that the next ocean landing attempt (flight #13 - presumably next CRS mission) will have to demonstrate a pinpoint landing. So presumably that will be the first flight with the grid fins installed.
As for CRS-4 landing's "low probability of success", based on pure speculation, it could be they don't have the enhanced RCS on that flight.
There was some talk about the center core of a FH not being able to return the launch site because it will be too far downrange at staging. Makes me think they’re building a floating platform for landing the center core of the (then safing it and lowering it to horizontal and shipping it back) and they’ll use that for floating recovery of the F9 stage.