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Elon Musk posted a video of a first stage landing.
My father started working on the space program in 1952. He watched what was supposed to be a test firing of Viking 8. There was so much vibration that the bolts came loose and it took off! His TV-3 satellite was on top of the rocket which got four feet in the air before it blew up spectacularly.
Discussion (16)
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Going back to the early days. Redstone. (very early days)
NASA had thought about recovering the Redstone booster with parachutes and a flotation device... Did some engineering studies, and proof of concept testing but never got the funding to a real test launch...
But how different would history have been?
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Cooler than an under-ice lake in Antarctica.
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Like an old science fiction movie coming to real life. Amazing.
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Some of us are in a strange place as we watch this video.
We know it’s just like the countless simplistic inventions we cooked up when we were kids, knowing nothing about engineering realities… destabilizing thrust vectors, flying through burning explosives, the limitations of control systems, fuel consumption, free fall velocity, the inevitable impracticality of Rube Goldberg mechanical contraptions…
And yet our rational minds keep repeating, “No, this really happened…and it’s really going to land safely!”
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As I was watching it come down, I thought about the old James Bond movie You Only Live Twice. I believe SpaceX really could drop a rocket down inside an extinct volcano.
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