CatastrophicFailure

And hot on the heels of today's success, Intelsat 35e and SES 11 both delayed, no new date specified. via spaceflightnow.com

Exact same concept, but looks like a tube.

Lol, ok technically what you're looking for on wiki is a damper, but on cars everyone calls them shock absorbers. It's a tube sliding inside another. Vaguely like this: But at the bottom of the outer tube, you have a slug of aluminum honeycomb. This part of the leg collapses on impact, absorbing it.

The F9 legs have internal "cores" made of aluminum honeycomb. Think a shock absorber that can only move once. On a hard landing, the crush core gets smushed-by design-thereby absorbing energy and saving more important components (like the engines). They tried using the engine as a shock absorber on a couple of the Apollo landings, turns out it was a bad idea. A tweet from Elon said they can replace a crush core in just a couple of hours.

Kerm flarping dangit, this is no time to be out of likes! Now that right there is something going really wrong done right. I have the oddest mix of grin and grimace right now. Tho I'm given to wonder, now...

I'm all out of likes for the day (SpaceX), so here's a guinea pig riding a capybara with a silly hat.

So, given that the landing was hard enough to crush all 4 crush cores, that barge must have really felt it. The question now is, will they have to change the name?

@CSE I'm out of likes for the day so here's a bunny with an ice cream cone on its head.

It looked like the upper stage had a pretty significant off-attitude kick it had to correct for, too. For all the talk of how light this bird was for a commsat, this seems like a very high-energy launch. Ive probably asked this before, but any idea what that assembly that goes up inside the bell of the upper stage MVAC is?

Ironically it was my tooth extraction that got bumped. But with what they're giving me, I should be thoroughly in orbit myself by then.

Curse you, daily like limit.

And as usual, there goes my last like for the day.

That was the reentry burn.

That recorded footage from the barge is gonna be epic, I think.

Well thats interesting, I wonder why? Mission profile, or a deliberate test to push the envelope?

Oooh, now where is this?

If it gets bumped, it's my fault. Once again I have the day off. Stupid broken tooth. Stupid dentist. Would rather go out & catch the booster bare handed.

Well she sure is... hot.

I'd be interested in seeing a "Literally Playing God for Dummies" version.

How do you actually do all this stuff? Like, for someone like me who has exactly zero knowledge of modeling stuff... how do you create all this terrain? I'm sure you're not in there point-and-clicking every single polygon of the coastline... right?

This seems like the least absurd part of the whole setup to me. And by absurd, I don't mean unworkable. Like @Terwin said, just a few years ago landing a 10-story tall rocket booster on its tail from the edge of space sounded pretty absurd. The technology for this kind of accuracy has been around for a long time, the military has made great use of it, and SpaceX probably benefitted from that experience one way or another. Like all technology, it will continue to get better and better. It's also worth noting, that returning stages do have an "oh crap!" mode. The flight path is such that if an engine fails, the stage will land in the water. The landing burn is what puts it on final target. I wouldn't be surprised if they have a further failure mode at this point, that if an engine fails during the landing burn, the remaining controls will steer it away from the pad/barge.

But... space bulldozer...

Well, just pulling an answer out of my-- er, thin air here, IRL you've got all the shielding you could possibly want just laying all over the ground like dirt. Because it is dirt. Just bury the reactor and/or the habitats, which would probably be a good idea anyway. If you're just roleplaying the challenge (no Kerbalism), then instead of tones of shielding just send along a space bulldozer & call it good.

I'm on mobile and can't post these proper but !!!!!! Dem photobombz doe! (from SpaceX twitter)

Extra Prescrption Strength, now without a prescription.* *for external use only