I was shocked at how abrupt and extreme the pitch changes were. I think so long as it needs such gross adjustments so close to landing, landings will be unreliable with a significant chance of failure. It is not at all like the tidy landings made by the Grasshopper test vehicle.

Two engineering changes which could make a big difference are lower minimum thrust (so it can approach the landing with lower acceleration) or lateral control rockets (RCS) at the top of the stage.

In addition, big bang nucleosynthesis models place strong limits on how much baryonic (protons, neutrons) matter there can be and it is not enough to be the dark matter.

Because methane is a very potent greenhouse gas.

I'm not sure why you bring flatulence into the discussion at all.

Besides, there is a scientific mystery, so scientists want to solve it, independently of how good methane's rap is.

"... any modern airliner can be specced with options to fly itself from gate to gate on an ordinary day ..."
Can you tell me more about this? My understanding is that taxiing and take off are always performed manually. Unless it surrendered control to a central airport system, I don't see how autotaxi would even be useful, as actions are so dependent on other traffic.

Dumb Americans. Sensible people measure land area in Wales. How many Wales are there to an Oklahoma?

This is word for word the first comment after the original story. However, as both commenters are named "Scott" it may not be plagurism but rather comment reuse.

Of course Minecraft is violent. Do you have any idea how many innocent instructions get executed to make it run?

How about using supercapacitors to convert 5 seconds of 60kW into 15 seconds of 20kW (less losses)?

5 seconds of 60kW = 300kJ. Supercapacitor energy densities are in the range 0.5 to 15 W-hour/kg according to Wikipedia. Say 5 Wh/kg, = 18000 J/kg, so you'd only need a few kg of supercapacitor to make this work. The only price I find is US$2.85 per kJ in 2006, putting the cost at around $1000, probably much less now (but there will also be costs beyond just the supercapacitor.)

You could also make this an option - not much point paying $2000 for this capability if the car is going to be in Singapore.

I can't tell if you're serious.

The idea of landing a stage on rocket power for reuse has been around for decades (DC-X comes to mind, there may be earlier examples.) As rockets generally launch seaward for safety reasons, that you might want to land one at sea is obvious. The idea of using a ship as a landing platform has also been around for decades. There is nothing that should be patentable in the big idea "landing a rocket on a ship".

Within this general idea, there are bound to be many smaller patentable ideas: e.g. method for automatically securing a rocket to a deck when it could be up to 15m away from the target landing point.

Furthermore, that is why rockets launch from the east coast in the first place: if something goes wrong, the flaming debris comes down over the sea.

However, SpaceX are aiming to do a return to launch site for recovering their stage I boosters. (This surprised me - this must use more fuel than land-at-sea, and the mass of that fuel is directly subtracted from your available stage II payload.) The landing at sea is an interim measure while they prove the technology (because of the afore mentioned potential for flaming debris.)

I don't see why not (so long as software patents are allowed), but once you have your patent application, you'd better run the software on it and also submit all the variants it comes up with, before someone else does.

Also: both this launch and the previous one (space station resupply mission) had an "instantaneous launch window", meaning that any delay at all means they scrub for the day. Why is that? What is so magical about their launch time that they can't accept a one minute delay? And how much does it cost to scrub a launch for a day?

Just yesterday I looked at the SpaceX website's news page specifically to find out when the next rocket recovery attempt would be, and it said nothing about this. I just happened to check /. in time to tune in to Nasa TV 5 minutes before launch time. (Incidentally, they've scrubbed the launch for today.)

If they couldn't dump to fuel tanks, and if dumping RP-1 overboard was a hazard, surely they'd just use a different fluid? If they're using RP-1 for the fins, I think that is a very strong indication that they're dumping to the fuel tanks.

How about a pocket computer that just happens to make phone calls?