KerBlammo

In disguise?

Saw this on my twitter feed earlier today I wonder if this location is close to the West Texas town of El Paso.

Cosmic Charlie how do you do.

Oh I loved those TTA books when I was a kid. They are partially responsible for me being the nerd that I am today!

At least Kerbals don't demand cable.

SF Author Charles Stross wrote a fun little short story about dangerous rocket fuels and Cold War mind games... http://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/

Four legs good.

Looks like it landed perfectly, and then the unlocked landing leg just folded and, well, kerblammo! edit: ninja'd

Video of a perfect landing, engine shut off, landing leg folding up, booster falling over, and a RUD

"Well, at least the pieces were bigger this time!"

I think it had more to do with the delta-v budget than anything else, they need less remaining fuel to land down range than RTLS.

I was on the "rocket only" feed. The timing was right for it being the rocket exhaust, it seemed to be getting brighter for the short time it was visible. It looked to me that the camera was vibrating at the same time. Either the exhaust plume blew the antenna away as the stage made its final approach or its another RUD. Landing a rocket on something heaving around on the waves like that has to be nearly impossible, they need a bigger boat like an oil platform or something.

The video froze just as reflection of the engine flame appeared in the lens. The barge was moving a lot, it has to be nearly impossible to land a rocket on that.

They're going to need a bigger boat.

If this was a static fire ahead of an operational launch I wonder what impact would those thrust variations would have? Inspection of the engine and a re-do of the test?

SpaceX was supposed to fire the engines of the recovered first stage yesterday. Does anyone know if that occurred and if so how long they fired the engines for?

The first stage may not go very far compared to the second stage or nearly as fast but it does literally do most of the heavy lifting, and represents much of the cost of the rocket. Assuming that they can really easily reuse them getting those 9 rocket motors back is huge.

This should not come as a surprise to a KSP player!

yeah slick video with some pretty cool new views, but only a couple of seconds of new on-board video. Maybe there really isn't much to see. If they make this routine presumably at some point we'll see a rocket 's eye view of a daylight landing.

I'd love to know how high and how fast the booster is going when it starts the landing burn. The touchdown at the Cape last month looked a lot less than 6 m/s to me.

Corporate PR ranges from mildly informative to outright deceptive in my experience. Yes there is no obvious external damage to the booster but that does not mean it is capable of launching again. Don't get me wrong, I hope they can achieve true re-useability and getting the booster back is a huge step in that direction but whether they can really fly again without rebuilding the rocket engines remains to be seen. As far as the video goes surely Elon Musk has some compassion for his fellow space nerds out here in internet land? If "Chris B" is correct they are sitting one of the coolest space flight videos ever! Won't someone think of the Space Nerds? Please?

Well I guess we aren't going to see any on-board video (assuming it exists). Maybe they've taken a good look at the returned first stage and realize that there is no way that it could fly again without extensive and expensive refurbishment.

I hope SpaceX has mercy on us space nerds and releases the video. Maybe its simply that they want to cut together the available video into something really cool, and now that the holidays are over their video/PR people are all back at work preparing it for release...

Hope this is correct and we get to see it. I am very surprised we've seen so little video of this.