It's lighter to not reuse the hydraulic fluid.

It's an open loop system with pressurized gas pushing the fluid out and then it's dumped in the air. Pumps and whatever powers them have weight.

Remember that big fuel-required multiplier in getting any weight at all to 78 miles height and suborbital speed.

We could start with our already phallic looking rocket and then have it come down into something that looks like the world's largest inflatable sex toy. Elon Musk might have trouble living that one down. :-)

Yes, there have been many proposals to somehow catch the rocket.

Where I used to live they had trucks dump salt on the road!

The Kerbal Space Center?

Not until the next time we cut the NASA budget to pay for a subsidy of some incredibly rich industry. Like oil. We need more oil drilling subsidies, don't we? Or intellectual property. That's just another word for innovation, isn't it?

In those tests, both Grasshopper and R9 were coming down much more slowly. But it appeared they could come down slowly. Pretty close to hover.

The tweet from Musk this morning used the word "sticktion", meaning static friction. And said it was the cause of a phase delay. And then the tweet got deleted.

Oh, they're Canadian. That explains everything!

(Ducks and runs for cover)

:-)

But we've seen Grasshopper and Falcon R9 position properly on land. Nobody's told us what the maximum wind was in those tests.

Musk alluded to a process control issue this morning and then deleted the tweet. It will take time to find out what the deal is.

Merlin 1D can throttle to 70% and the old 1C could go to 60%. Perhaps there's room for deeper throttling. I would expect that they'd try that before adding a new system and its weight.

Split seam the fuel tank, then swing out and rotate the elements and create a massive autogyro.

They have a job for you in the ULA marketing department.

They have talked about refueling on the barge and flying the booster to land! That's really difficult to do after a salt-water dip :-)

The ship is 300 feet long. It's a big rocket :-)

The pad area they have at KSC is made for F9 Heavy, and multiple stages are supposed to land there, the neighbors are sensitive about having other rockets come down in their yard, and there's a big building you really don't want to hit :-) . So, they probably do need the precision. There was an odd tweet from Musk, later deleted, that said there was actually a process control problem and a phase delay.

You can see a lot more if you go to 1080 HD and full screen. There's some large piece of equipment, perhaps the motor head for one of the barge's corner thrusters, being thrust off of the barge in flames.

It looks like they'll need to do a lot of work on the barge. The support ship Go Quest and the tug Elsbeth III seem to be back in Jacksonville according to vessel tracking sites. There is a Carnival cruise ship that parks next to the barge's dock every 4 days, so we will probably see photos from its bow netcam if we don't see them otherwise.

Oh, check out this newscast. At 2:43, CBS News uses a sequence a SpaceX fan produced with Kerbal Space Program to illustrate how the landing is supposed to work.

They don't have the option to take an orbit before boosting back either. Even if the trajectory would work for that, the propellants would probably get too cold for a restart.

Thank you. I remember that the sequencing of explosive bolts - all at once instead of one at a time - killed a Soyuz crew.

Gosh, that video looks so close.