I'm aware of all the things you mention, but they're irrelevant since they don't answer the issues (in the case of the Earth rotation, they don't even make sense since the launch goes eastward and with small flight distances over a mostly-eastward trajectory and with small altitude changes, you'll hardly notice the effects for the purpose of designing the first stage trajectory). OTOH, cjameshuff rightly points out that the only way of coping with this with the small amount of fuel allocated for the return phase would a complete redesign of the flight profile, since the overwhelmingly horizontal component of velocity of the traditional "flat" launch trajectory is a show-stopper. You have to take the return leg of the first stage into the calculation of the new flight profile, but in that case, all the numbers go completely off and we won't be able to infer anything applicable to a flight with a first stage return leg from this recent test flight.

Since Miami won't be there in a hundred years anyway, I wouldn't make such a big deal of it even if they managed to do just that. ;)

"Recover" as in "fetch the debris from the sea", or "recover" as in "have it land nicely"?

But it's you who sees religion where there isn't any. Why else would you call it "Calvinist"?

All right, all right. I'll stop having a beef with you.

(...if there is a hell, I fully expect to go there for that.)

What "Mann's program" are you talking about? All those studies are independent, there's no single Microsoft Climate program that everyone uses.

Well, if the US has all the ICBMs only for defense, why have them when they won't have their strip of land either after an attack regardless of whether they use them or not? Same logic.

Yes, the secret government conspiracy equipped the building with an alien gravity booster. Only then, it brainwashed a dozen or so of dedicated terrorists who already hated the USA (and wanted to attack it) to hate the USA (and attack it). :-p

If I got the numbers correct, "4% of the total fuel mass" of an F9 v1.1 is something like 18 tons. 18 tons also happens to be almost exactly the dry weight of the F9 v1.1 first stage. Combined with the fuel's Isp, that projects to something like 2 km/s delta V. That happens to be precisely the projected separation speed for the reusable first stage, so you'd have just enough fuel to decelerate from an undesirable velocity vector to zero. Let's say that the atmosphere has somehow helped you - saved a bit of fuel to leave you with a few seconds of burst for a soft landing. First, congratulations, you've managed to land, but not anywhere near the launch pad since you had no fuel left to cover the rather considerable downrange distance. Second, you're effectively claiming that those ~20 tons of fuel make a 1,4 km/s difference at separation speed (the separation speed for the non-reusable flight profile is somewhere around 3,4 km/s), even at the final mass of ~100 tons for the dry first stage plus fully fueled upper stage. That must be some wonder fuel they got there! I'm sorry, but that still doesn't add up for me. Still missing the real numbers.

That seems unbelievable, given its hypersonic speed and considerable downrange distance at the point of first stage separation. Any real numbers on that?

Well, from what I know, it has only been repeatedly independently confirmed (like more than a dozen times or so).

Was it an actual soft landing, though? Water seems much more problematic than dry land to me for this feat since rockets tend to be brittle and moving around such masses at single-meters-per-second levels of speed in the vicinity of other heavy masses (like water) without having control over pressure points (like landing gear) and impact impulses (in the presence of changing terrain contours, like water has) is going to break something. Rockets aren't designed to handle random dynamic stresses like that, they're designed for minimum dry mass (and some sustained axial stress), sometimes at extreme costs (look up the thickness of Atlas fuel tanks, up to but not including Atlas III).

First, I don't see what it has to do with ethics, as opposed to basic principles of economy and productivity. Second, I'm pretty sure quite a lot of people around the world (atheists, Buddhists, Muslims etc.) who are simply working their asses off (that's an religiously neutral technical term) would be profoundly offended if some American A-hole were to smile at them and tell them "Ah, I see you too have Calvinist work ethic!" That would piss me off to no end if anyone did that to me.

When I was playing with the Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0 back then, I came away with the impression that I'm a total screw-up at flying and I should probably never sit in a cockpit, but the one thing I've learned is that you don't pull the stick when you're not sure your airspeed and AoA allows for it.

Shall we call it Flight S/370, then?

Internet is for corn!

Religious wingnut detected! Activate sanity filters for the rest of the comment... (Which, to be honest, does seem mostly sane.)