CatastrophicFailure

Ooooohhh, what’s that little return pod from?

Nothing but Block 5 from here on out AFAIK. Time for SpaceX to get their routine on.

It’s brilliant. ಠ_ಠ

You should totally do a screencap recording of your development process then give us a time lapse of the whole thing.

Slept thru it, myself. Not even the incessant barrage of twitter notifications from my tablet could rouse me, it seems. But now I wake to a new era of no more boring expendable launches! Probably. Maybe. Hopefully...

This. I feel like a bit of a putz. I had no idea the lady had died.

I believe that’s Portuguese.

24 hours is the stretch goal, tho I doubt we’ll actually see that except once or twice just as a demonstration that they can.

Try eight. Also had holes for the LH2 and LOX feeds, and all three struts that secured it to the ET. Might have been more. But holey heat shields are a tried and true tech. not to be confused with holy hand grenades... Block 4 still. Tho I saw it confirmed in a tweet somewhere that this will be the last Block 4 launch, and presumably possibly the last expendable F9 launch ever.

By the sounds of it, that’s what it’s gonna be. They still had a week left in this window, no idea when the next is.

You don’t even wanna know how many holes there were in the Shuttle heat shield, then... Both the Soviets and the USAF experimented with putting hatches in the heat shield, too. The VA capsule could even fly multiple times with such. So that much, at least, is fairly well understood engineering.

Or... or... like, an Enterprise that spits out... BabyPrizes!..

[unsatisfied raving increases]

Everything I’ve heard was that the challenges for propulsive landing weren’t engineering, but bureaucratic. They could physically make it work, but getting NASA’s OK on ththe system would be more trouble than it was worth, especially with BFR on the (increasingly near) horizon. Like @tater has said, D2 is essentially a dead end for SpaceX, likely to be obsolete within a decade or so, and they aren’t likely to learn that much from making propulsive landing actually work on it. If they can’t get it by NASA anyway, better to just spend that R&D money on BFS.

Dem curves doe.

They've got four parachutes, of which they only strictly need two.

so much for their birthday wish.

Erm... I think you’re off by about an hour, my info says 10:10EDT/7:10PDT...

Ahem... And I thought I had a huge sun flair... ...no wonder your crews keep getting irradiated so fast!

Yeah but SpaceX has better graphics. Like the others said, not as gentle as it looks. There’s a reason Soyuz uses retrorockets and Vostok bailed out... Apollo could make a land landing in an emergency, too, but much like the D2 here, risk of injury to the crew was extremely high. But better than dying horribly. Probably. That’s exactly what Boeing is doing.

KSP NEEDS THIS!

I was just thinking that looked pretty rough on the back. Probably preferable to dying horribly, tho. Probably. That chute opening seems pretty complex, too, I wonder how they control the different “stages” of the mains opening?

Where is Max Kerman? Check the drag on that stack (F12), you’ve got a 2+ TWR but are barely accelerating beyond 1g. Not sure if KSP models the transonic drag increase.

Talent. Somebody introduce this guy to CKAN...

*panic mode* and right about here I realize that Revs has been going for over a year now, and I’m still not through Act I. um...