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4 minutes ago, RCgothic said:

I remember the sea looked pretty rough after the landing. Not surprised nobody could board to make safe if octagrabber wasn't compatible. 

Still sad though. This the first loss of a block 5?

CRS-16 was a block 5.

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1 minute ago, Toonu said:

Why can't the central core launch itself from the barge to the cape? It is not flying over land and can work. Except the losses by restarting engines, chance of crash or failure and sooo much.

For the same reason it can't RTLS: it has already used pretty much all of it's fuel.

I also suspect that refueling at sea is also less safe then welding the feet down.

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7 minutes ago, Toonu said:

Why can't the central core launch itself from the barge to the cape? It is not flying over land and can work. Except the losses by restarting engines, chance of crash or failure and sooo much.

Fuel. The barge is not equipped to refuel the booster. It may even need a full transporter/erector/launch pad... I think that the barge isn't even equipped to handle the weight of a fully fueled booster, and neither the legs.

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1 hour ago, Toonu said:

Why can't the central core launch itself from the barge to the cape? It is not flying over land and can work. Except the losses by restarting engines, chance of crash or failure and sooo much.

Like the other guys said. 

IIRC, this was mentioned way back in the early days of booster recovery, but since it hasn’t come up since then, and Falcon itself has become just a stop-gap to BFR, I’m guessing the idea was abandoned as too complicated and risky for the minor gains. 

After all, up until now recovery by barge had been working just fine (once they stuck the landings), and without OctaGrabber this was still an incomplete system. 

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20 hours ago, Delay said:

Well, they lost it due to the inevitabilites of nature, not due to technical failure. Still a 100% success in my opinion.

I was always skeptical of a Falcon Heavy center boost recovery: that thing has to go *much* further and faster than a normal recovered booster.  Landing that thing goes a long way to show that they can give Super Heavy Booster (or whatever BFR's booster is called these days) an optimal amount of delta-v for launching and returning (Falcon was largely designed to be expendable or at best recover with parachutes, thus has a pretty low delta-v from just the booster).

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Also, barge wouldn't probably take it well. It's one thing to blast a concrete launch pad with exhaust gases. It was built to shrug it off. But the deck of a ship is not the best place to light a huge bonfire.

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On 4/16/2019 at 11:09 AM, RCgothic said:

Good call, although CRS-16 wasn't a total loss.

I assume they reused the grind fins and legs and refublished the engines and some other parts. 

Assume they do the same with this stage. 

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