<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Falcon on LZ-1 at Cape Canaveral <a href="https://t.co/dBkjBCDIRs">pic.twitter.com/dBkjBCDIRs</a></p>&mdash; Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/754908615757234176">July 18, 2016</a></blockquote>
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T'was awesome...

Way cool. It's fantastic to see science and business combine for the betterment of us all. :clap:

We should pool our money and send Dave Lane out there to get some CP pics some time. Put some Chiefs stuff in the view finder...

Land the Lander:

https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/768...ef=producthunt

I just realized the coolest part of that photo. If you zoom in at full resolution....

http://i.imgur.com/v9gEUbZ.jpg

You can actually see the first stage starting its "flip" while the second stage continues onward. Pretty cool.

I get forward momentum, maintaining energy in a turn, centrifugal force, centripetal force, and all jazz, but after they use the cold-gas release to flip it, I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around how does a rocket get going back the other way to make it back over land (in the near weightlessness it's in)? At least not without another burn, or unless the flip is more of a slow turn to allow momentum to ultimately send you back the other way?

While I don't claim to fully understand it myself, I think the key is that there's a lot more force being applied during that boost back burn than you'd think based on the brightness of it. It's burning a TON of fuel during that little arc to turn itself around and start heading back to land. The thrusters flip it around, the main engines are used to make it actually change direction.

I think this diagram is at least reasonably accurate (though it's boosting back further to make it to land).

http://i.stack.imgur.com/3zJ0c.png

Also, another thing to keep in mind is that the first stage weighs MUCH less at that point than the original rocket did (given that there's no second stage at all, and a majority of the propellant has already been used up), so it's quite a bit easier to slow down than you might think.

That makes sense actually. We know they do barge landings because they "don't have the fuel", but that not having fuel might be a combination of pushing a heavier load up, thus not having that amount of fuel to use on the boost back. And I found similar drawings for those barge-based landings, I just didn't find one that was noted-up like that for land-based landings.

Perhaps a trip to SpaceX (to ask questions) would be a wise vacation for me... :D

Sent from my phone using Tapatalk (so spelling be damned!!!)

Official pics are up:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/spacex

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Also, the next launch will be JCSAT-16, but there's not an exact date for it yet - just "sometime in August." I'll take the countdown clock out of the OP until we have a firm date.

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Well that video clears-up how the stages boost back to land. Woot. Thanks..

It's gonna be a hell of a sight to see, for sure. I'd almost make a vacation down to Florida to watch if it wasn't for the high likelihood of delays.

VPN? Telework?