A video from the barge is now online here. If you step through the final frames, you can see that the camera mount ends up knocked over and pointing at the ocean, but the lens and its cover are unbroken and all we see flying appear to be small debris. So not a really high-pressure event.

It's very tempting to think this should work like an airplane. Lots of people wrote that it was "too hot", etc. But it isn't an airplane. The plan was really to approach at 1/4 Kilometer Per Second, then brake at the very last second.

Obviously Crew Dragon, which carries people, will approach differently. But it's a lot lighter.

In the F9R test videos they catch some of the backscatter from the engine and seem to catch fire. Maybe they were trying to avoid that. They are very light carbon composite. Or perhaps they mess up the airstream for precision navigation, or they don't like the 250 m/s wind.

It looked to me that the barge was structurally undamaged but that some heavy equipment on the deck was forcibly ejected. It's clear to see in the HD version. Those 1000 HP thrusters are expensive, and it looked to me like one of them going overboard. But I suspect they were prepared to lose more than one vessel in testing this.

And I bet there was a range safety self-destruct charge onboard. F9R blew itself up with one. But it was probably so safe that it didn't go off.

Remember the reporters asking what was holding DC-X up? They couldn't see the rocket exhaust.

I sneaked inside of the Rotary Rocket the last time I was in Mojave. Someone left the bottom hatch ajar. But there wasn't a way to climb up to the cockpit from in there. Lots of pigeon droppings and it's used to hold the equipment for the multimedia kiosk nearby. Sad to see.

I learned an important lesson from Open Source, and it applies to SpaceX too: Things work a lot better if you just give the engineers the freedom to do engineering.

I think that in government projects and in most larger companies we tend to devalue the technical people in favor of the nontechnical. And we don't give them much power to actually run things. And then we wonder why efficiency is so low.

It has certainly given me ideas for how to run my own company.

Yes, but what engine were they flying in F9R and Grasshopper? Both of those were lighted up for the entire flight and didn't bounce around.

The final approach is at 250 m/s. If I have this right, they'd be going about that fast if they started falling from zero velocity at 3 KM, ignoring air resistance. So, whatever parachute you use has to get you much lower and slower than that, and so precisely positioned above the barge that you can do the rest on the rocket.

Now, ULA plans to revive the Rogalo Wing from Gemini and combine it with the mid-air retreival from Corona, so this might not be completely absurd.

Sorry.

I guess then you were not so lucky as to have rocket scientists in the family. I guess I'm not unlike many techies my age, whose dads worked in aerospace. My dad worked on the lunar module at Grumman. My father in law worked in the blue cube for Lockheed.

People think of me an the Open Source guy. But I have been getting space spoon-fed to me since before first grade.

It's still slowing down during the last rocket length. That is really cutting it close, yes. I think the goal is to use an absolutely minimal fuel expenditure. The current configuration is not capable of landing after a GTO insertion. When they were considering doing the test for the DISCOVR flight, they were not going to have enough fuel for the normal recovery sequence, and were planning to delete the subsonic decel burn and come up to the barge at 1 KPS rather than the leisurely 250 m/s.

Armstrong did punch out of an LM trainer before that mission. It crashed and burned. They say that afterward, he went back to his office and quietly did some paperwork.

Well, it did what SpaceX was paid for reliably, which was to send the Cargo Dragon up to ISS in an expendable rocket. All of the NASA demo and supply flights they have done have been successful.

Recovery is so far a secondary and private mission of SpaceX, and Musk did say it had less than a 50% probability of success for this attempt (but a 75% to 80% probability of success for the year).

Me, I'm damned impressed that they can bring that thing from 78 miles high and suborbital speed, and touch the landing gear down on the barge at an acceptable descent rate. I think this is pretty good for the second try and they'll nail it soon enough.

Just look for one that says "Fallout Shelter"

If you think that's bad, read some of the comments to nontechnical news site articles on the recovery failure. Ignoramuses whining "how much of my taxes did this failure use". They aren't even smart enough to realize that it launched the Dragon to ISS successfully, and that NASA isn't footing the bill for recovery attempts. It's really enough to kill one's sympathy for the common man.