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18 hours ago, tater said:

No need for sound on, has music not rocket sounds.

 

The booster comes in at a lot more of an angle than I expected at that altitude. I guess we normally see the ones coming in for landing on the landing pads at Canaveral looking mostly along the direction they are coming from. This is going to make it even more interesting to see a Super Heavy or Starship come in for a landing at 39A if they follow a similar angle.

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9 minutes ago, Brotoro said:

The booster comes in at a lot more of an angle than I expected at that altitude. I guess we normally see the ones coming in for landing on the landing pads at Canaveral looking mostly along the direction they are coming from. This is going to make it even more interesting to see a Super Heavy or Starship come in for a landing at 39A if they follow a similar angle.

Yeah, watching the live feed from the booster I am usually thinking it is going to miss, the angle above shows me why my intuition is always wrong.

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8 hours ago, Brotoro said:

The booster comes in at a lot more of an angle than I expected at that altitude. I guess we normally see the ones coming in for landing on the landing pads at Canaveral looking mostly along the direction they are coming from. This is going to make it even more interesting to see a Super Heavy or Starship come in for a landing at 39A if they follow a similar angle.

The booster actually has a surprisingly decent glide ratio for what it is, around 1:1 IIRC. More gliding = more slowing down without using fuel, so they’ll fly down as low as they can before lighting up. 

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19 hours ago, tater said:

Yeah, watching the live feed from the booster I am usually thinking it is going to miss, the angle above shows me why my intuition is always wrong.

Yeah, it totally looks like it's going to miss.  It doesn't help that they *aim* to miss until after the landing burn starts and everything is nominal. At that point it adjusts its trajectory to land on the ASDS.

19 hours ago, Brotoro said:

The booster comes in at a lot more of an angle than I expected at that altitude. I guess we normally see the ones coming in for landing on the landing pads at Canaveral looking mostly along the direction they are coming from. This is going to make it even more interesting to see a Super Heavy or Starship come in for a landing at 39A if they follow a similar angle.

The trajectory for RTLS is very different from a droneship landing--an RTLS launch is much steeper, so MECO/separation/SES happen much closer to the pad, horizontally.  So the booster has (and needs) a lot less horizontal velocity to get to the landing pad, compared to an ASDS landing.

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