SpaceX does it again

Another Falcon9 successfully landed on a moving barge this morning.

In order to make the economics work, these birds do a ballistic reentry, essentially falling out of the sky and making a corrective landing burn at the last possible minute. Since this Falcon was delivering a Japanese communications satellite to high orbit, the lifter fell a lot further than the last one did, ending up going twice as fast and requiring a 12-G final burn before touching down softly on the recovery vessel Of Course I Still Love You.

Congratulations to Elon Musk and the SpaceX team, who are among the many people who don’t read this blog.

SpaceX lands at sea

A little late with the news, but anyway the SpaceX’s Falcon-9 has successfully landed on the drone barge “Of Course I Still Love You”. The landing deck is 170 by 300 feet long, and the Falcon’s legs stand 60 feet apart. As you can see by the whitecaps, the sea was very rough with high altitude crosswinds of 50 mph and low altitude winds of 25 mph.

For true space geeks, the beautifully produced full 18 minute video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZXu_rYF51M

VTOL Rocket Roundup

The Experimental Delta Clipper (DC-X) of the 1990s was canceled before it ever made it into space.

The Rotary Rocket Company’s incredibly innovative Roton was designed to land with helicopter blades instead of a parachute or a landing rocket. After the collapse of the small telecommunications satellite market in 1999 the company went out of business without ever building their unique spinning aerospike main engine; without a clear mission, investors were unwilling to fund the various exotic technologies that the company was successfully pioneering.

In 2013 SpaceX’s series of “grasshopper tests” picked up where the DC-X left off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwS4YOTbbw

But SpaceX’s plan to land their Falcon 9 lifter on a seagoing barge has not yet succeeded.

And bringing us up to date, Blue Origin landed the New Shepard on the 23rd. I love the final replay of the landing sequence!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pillaOxGCo

Tesla Motors opens electric car patents

Tesla Motors has decided to encourage competition by letting everyone have access to their technology edge.

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has viagra tablet for sale may be helpful include: St. As nicotine damages blood circulation badly, L-arginine may professional viagra cheap offer some help. Let’s look at the top penis enlargement pumps that levitra from canadian pharmacy can give you are results that you desire: 1. Historically, all parts of the plants have been used to improve overall health and prevent cheap viagra on line several diseases. repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers.”
— Elon Musk, CEO Tesla Motors

SpaceX Dragon v2 revealed.

Xeni Jardin has pics and video at the Boing.