The felony wasn't.

It's my understanding that the gyrocopter in question was actually under the 250 pound limit that would require FAA registration.

This would mean the felony charge is bogus.

Can anyone confirm the vehicle total unladen weight?

What are you talking about? Or was that supposed to be a funny statement?

Not clear whether or not you realize this, so to give you the benefit of a doubt:

A) In orbital launch booster rocketry terms, that's a pretty damn small fireball.
B) At the time he sent that tweet, nobody (Musk included) had seen the video from the barge. I doubt he even had the video from the airplane, probably just the telemetry data that showed touchdown followed by a loss of telemetry.

Explode when it crashes, there's a difference. SpaceX has demonstrated powered vertical landings on their test vehicles, there were no explosions.

Hydrazine is nasty stuff, but you don't need very much of it (a few second's worth, maybe) and the *entire point* is to avoid the crash, so what happens in the event of a crash is much less important.

I thought that was him estimating an 80% chance of at least one success by year's end, which (considering that they have a lot of launches this year) is a very different thing. Do you have a source for that?

OK I've read "various articles in the Seattle Times.

I read the one about the state auditor being indicted.

I read the one about the infant getting shot in the head in Kent in a drive-by.

I read the one about the whooping cough outbreak (which erroneously claims that herd immunity for Pertussis is mathematically even possible, given the diseases R(0) would require 94-96% immunization, and all unimmunized persons be uniformly distributed throughout the population.

I read the one about Shawn Kemp co-hosting a party because Thunder missed the playoffs.

None of these "various articles in the Seattle Times" supported your position.

Link one supporting article from the Seattle Times which is a post-analysis of the job market following the minimum wage being raised. I'll waive the numbers on the small businesses which have gone out of business over the minimum wage being raised (for now).

Nitpick: The first attempt ran out of hydraulic fluid (for the guidance fins), not out of propellant for the RCS thrusters.

The rest of what you say is generally true, although a larger target *would* help. The advantage of a larger target is that, while you still have to zero your horizontal velocity, you don't have to zero it anywhere terribly precise. You can pick an optimal set of thrusts that results in the correct orientation and velocities (horizontal and vertical) without worrying overmuch *where* that series of thrusts has you touching down. Both attempts so far clearly demonstrate the ability to do an excellent good job of targeting a (relatively) tiny barge, but currently, if the rocket would come down even 100' (30m) to one side of its target spot, it needs to induce a horizontal momentum (which requires leaving a vertical attitude as well, it can't just translate sideways) and then null that momentum at the right moment (and fix its attitude). That's hard.

To clarify for the person who keeps misunderstanding my posts: they should, of course, plan for the barge-level of landing precision. They should aim for a precision of inches, and within a year, they may get it... 90% of the time. Stuff goes wrong, though, and (especially early in the testing of such a system) it behooves them to use a larger landing area so that there's some margin for error. I'd say their land attempt (possibly next CRS launch, in a couple months) has a very good chance of being their first success.

The thrusters aren't even supposed to be needed there, actually. They're only supposed to fire in very short bursts, not a continuous stream like in the video. As for the legs holding up, just one of them supported the whole rocket for a few seconds; all four should have had no trouble. We know a hell of a lot more than just that it crashed. To claim otherwise is to embrace ignorance.

There is literally no point at all to living in a world where you are only concerned with the things that you absolutely know. You don't absolutely know *ANYTHING*, you could be a simulation in some advanced being's AI-run world, along with everything the program running you has ever simulated observing. The only way to achieve anything difficult is to analyze the differences between failures and successes, and a part of that analysis is to determine how close you came to success.

But then, you probably already knew that and are just a naysayer...

I'm not trying to fix the wrong problem, I'm trying to add a backup for the fix. Shit happens. Parts will fail, valves will stick, unexpected winds or waves will occur.

I thought the fact that the primary goal was to correct the problem that caused the excessive lateral velocity was so bloody obvious that it didn't need saying, but I guess I forgot I'm on the Internet. The purpose of my idea was not "fuck it, fixing a little problem is hard, let's do something much more complicated", it's "shit happens. What can we do to survive the likely error modes?"

Sure we grok it. Do you not grok the idea that if you are not pulling numbers out of your ass, then you probably have the reference material right in front of you, and can therefore paste the information a hell of a lot easier than having us go looking for supporting numbers for your made up statistics for you?

A) You've mastered "dictionary", "bookshelf", and "somewhere", but an eight-letter word is too big for you?

B) Welcome to the Internet. You probably got here using "the blue e", right? Tip: highlight (whoops, big word) the scary word with your mouse, right-click on it, and click the option that will search or define the word for you! No need to go over to your bookshelf at all, and you get to avoid looking like a lazy ignoramus (sorry, is that one too long?) at the same time!

Seriously, I get that you're probably joking, but that is a really stupid thing to complain about. Definitions don't belong in a summary, especially not a summary delivered through the biggest inter-connected information network humanity has ever created.

Agh, bloody autocorrect and stupid failure to proofread. First paragraph:

What would it cost (presumably a matter of weight) to upgrade the nose thrusters?

You saw the part where the reaction control thruster at the top (little white plume) is trying to keep the rocket upright, didn't you? Lasts about four seconds. The rocket had already touched down (on at least one leg, with engines shut off) at that point. If the stage had been even a *little* closer to upright, or the thruster a *bit* more powerful, the rocket would have settled onto all four legs and that would be it.

Also, the stage swings through vertical in the moment before touchdown. It's that half-second of overcorrection that doomed it. It was over the barge and in the correct orientation less than 1000 millisecond before touchdown. I'd say the only reason that "seconds away from what would have been the first successful landing" is wrong is because it was more like *one* second.

So, I asked this in the last thread but the discussion there was already mostly dead: what would it cost (presumably mostly a matter of weird) to upgrade the nose thrusters? These are cold-gas (nitrogen) thrusters, and I can't imagine they have a lot of power.

The Dragon uses hydrazine-based "Draco" thrusters for its RCS system; might it be worth adding a hydrazine thruster with a few seconds of fuel in place of the cold-gas thrusters, enabling the rocket to correct its orientation in the moment of touchdown (when it can no longer use engine gimbaling)? For that matter, how does the thrust of a hydrazine thruster (I think a Draco goes to about 90 lbf) compare to a cold-gas thruster? Wouldn't want to bend the rocket with excessive pressure at the top, after all.

Alternatively, the rocket contains a bunch of compressed gases (helium is used for pressurizing the fuel/oxidizer tanks, I believe). Would it be possible, on landing, to vent some of that pressure to provide additional attitude control? It might reduce the rocket's rigidity a bit, which could be bad, and it's a high-pressure valve (of course), but when your concern is that the rocket land upright (you'd want to use this in the moment before touchdown, to avoid excessive pressure on just one leg as appears to have happened here) it might be worth it. The obviously don't have a *lot* of excess pressure - fluids cost weight, pressurized ones moreso - but they probably have some and it might be suitable for a last-second thruster.

Thoughts?

Stupidest zombie movie ever. Seriously.