Yep, it was not going to stay floating long if no floatation aids were attached. The wave action on such a long structure would keep bending it until it started leaking or breaking up.
What will be interesting will be whether or not SpaceX try to 'soft land' any more cores
The easy answer is they can practice soft landing at an offset, say 100 feet up. They still can practice hitting that spot, and there's no chance the stage survives the fall after engine cut-off.
That would seem to be an option - but from a point of view of not creating code that could lead to rearrangement of the ASDS if it were accidentally duplicated for a real landing (worse errors have occurred in spaceflight), surely better to run tests with landing level set as landing level and just work out a contingency for finishing off stages that for some reason do survive?
The best way to sell it to Elon would be to tell him that the Boring Company need to sell torpedos...
SpaceX Hired Company to Destroy Floating GovSat Booster, Not USAF
http://www.americaspace.com/2018/02/09/spacex-hired-company-to-destroy-floating-govsat-booster-not-usaf/
AmericaSpace has since learned that the Air Force was, instead, initially considered to take care of the job, but a commercial company of demolition specialists was eventually hired to safely destroy the hazardous booster.
Again, not the USAF; no strike by the U.S. military was carried out on the Falcon 9.
We tracked a US-flagged tender named Manisee out from the Bahamas which met up with Go Searcher at sea. It is now tied up next to
http://www.kairosmaritime.com/ -- I'm guessing they were the commercial company (although they probably contracted out the actual scuttling experts).
Manisee could also have ferried out fuel or engine repair supplies; there was a rumor that Go Searcher had to return before the FH launch due to engine trouble.
Update on Go Searcher - After the rendezvous with the other ship it has been making a normal 7 knots toward Port Canaveral.
Edit: The tug Manisee appears to have met up with Go Searcher and is arriving near Marsh Harbor now at 7.5 knots. Does 7.5 knots seem too fast for a successful recovery?
https://twitter.com/CowboyDanPaasch/status/960663935962755072
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/shipid:442006/zoom:10
That would seem to be an option - but from a point of view of not creating code that could lead to rearrangement of the ASDS if it were accidentally duplicated for a real landing (worse errors have occurred in spaceflight), surely better to run tests with landing level set as landing level and just work out a contingency for finishing off stages that for some reason do survive?
They have to program in the correct landing coordinates every launch. The possibility that the x/y get set wrong seems higher to me than someone sets the height wrong, as the latter would be far easier to notice...
YMMV.
SpaceX may also decide to add in a scuttling option to the stage. Should really be just some valves that can be opened to flood the tank hooked to a receiver and an independent power source.
That just adds complexity, expense and another potential point of failure - you don't want the scuttling valves to open at an inappropriate time! - for something that is likely to be a rare event that can be dealt with easily enough anyway.