I've received all kinds of mail from them and DirectTV, but I've never got a call from them or Dish Network and I've never heard any complaints of people receiving calls from either. On the other hand I get all kinds of calls from car warranty and home security companies.

The grid fins may have contributed to the booster being off course from the pad but I have a hard time believing that they would have caused such an (apparently) abrupt change of orientation. Such control surfaces usually only function significantly at high speed, not at the slow speeds at landing. Think about it like putting your hand out of a car window, at 25 mph nothing happens, when you get up to 45 you get a little bit of push, but its only at 55+ when you can really have an effect.

Wow, when Musk said that it was a "hard landing" I thought he may have been exaggerating, he wasn't. Though it was VERY close. If I'm not mistaken the rocket is oriented pretty well (though is off the landing pad) just before it suddenly goes 45 degrees (presumably in an attempt to get to the barge) and slams into the deck. A larger pad would definitely help, but they may be able to tweak the navigation software to make it work.

Isn't this the same department that has been caught actively destroying their cruiser recording equipment, installed specifically because of abuse concerns? Unless the video is instantly uploaded to remote, third party servers and there are SEVERE penalties for damaged equipment or "malfunctions" then its not going to really mean anything. If officers think they're in the right they'll keep the footage, if they thing they did something wrong there will be an "accident" with it resulting in loss of the video/audio.

You can't change rough seas but you can get a ship that is equipped to handle them better (semi-submersible oil platforms for example) or make sea roughness at the landing platform part of the launch criteria much like the launch site wind/rain/electrical launch criteria.

I've heard that parachutes are fairly expensive, not horribly reliable (on the Ares-1x test flight 2 out of 3 failed), aren't really reusable and don't really decelerate spacecraft enough for a soft landing. There is a reason why most capsule spacecraft land in the ocean, landing on ground requires retrorockets.

If it was a fuel issue it could explain something. I've never seen a fuel tank camera before (though I am sure they have been flown before) yet at least the video I watched they gave a view of the second stages fuel tank (I believe) for quite a while after ending the burn. I wonder if they were trying to show the NASA guys that they could stage the rocket a little earlier (leaving more fuel in the first stage) due to an ample safety margin (there seemed to be quite a bit of fuel left.)

There are some working on a similar concept (Stratolaunch, Russian Re-entry Rocket Module (RRM), defunct Roton Rocket). To each their own, I would imagine that SpaceX didn't want to try to mix disciplines (rocketry & aircraft) and add moving parts. You can't just put a wing on a rocket and launch it, doing so adds immense drag and difficult to resolve aerodynamic forces so they often have to be stowed/folded into the rocket somehow. The only craft that I believe has successfully added fixed wings is the shuttle and that did it through brute force (SRBs) and a minimal aerodynamics (it screamed towards its runway at around 600 mph and then slams on the airbrakes and puts itself into controlled a stall to land at over 200 mph).

The fact that it made it to the platform itself is a major milestone, correcting whatever caused it to land hard (rough seas, hardware/software issue, ran out of fuel at the last second) would seem to be childs play compared to what was required to get to that point. Reentering craft usually have landing ellipsis of dozens if not hundreds of square miles and this thing landed on a 300'x170' platform. I look forward to the next (hopefully successful) test.

Several parts of the tunnel system were/are going to be built by TBMs. While they are a definite improvement on older methods of tunnel construction they aren't exactly what you would call fast and when things go wrong they go catastrophically wrong. The Seattle TBM digging a paltry 1.7 mile tunnel. It was stopped by a tiny metal pipe in its tracks and it will cost several times more than a brand new TBM to get things up and running again.

Boring straight through the planet may be (extremely) impractical, but shorter hops like the one I noted are not necessarily beyond current technology. Such a tunnel would be about 20 miles deep at most, handling the temperatures at that depth might be difficult (somewhere between 600 and 1000F I believe) but shouldn't be insurmountable. Again it would probably be wildly impractical from an economic perspective but not technically impossible as the "red stuff" is I believe at least 40 miles deep at least beneath the continents.

In theory sure, but in practice it is prohibitively expensive and takes insanely long to complete one. For example New Yorks' Tunnel No 3, an Aqueduct, is only going 60 miles, was began in the 70s, is not expected to be completed until 2020 at the earliest & will cost over $6 Billion. That is $100 Million per Mile, so a relatively short tunnel system (say Chicago to New York) would cost almost a hundred billion dollars and take somewhere between 5 decades and a century to complete even if you started construction at 14 different places simultaneously.

Most gadgets/appliances these days are designed NOT to be repaired. Finding parts is often a royal nightmare, opening the gadget/appliance often results in damage and even if you can find the parts & get the appliance open its almost cheaper to buy a new one. A while back we had a washer's control board fry (likely a lightning strike), a few screws and unpluging a few connections was all that was needed to extract it from the machine. However after an exhaustive search we found a replacement board for it but it was over $400 for a washer you could buy $600 new. There are sometimes exceptions (I repaired a cracked screen on a $700 laptop for $125) but unfortunately these days more often than not its cheaper, safer, more time saving & easier to toss your broken gadget/appliance and get a new one.

"What calculations did you use to get 1000 years anyway?"

I'd always heard 100-150 years for an Orion craft to get to a Alpha Centauri, a lot of those calculations don't include the energy required to slow down for some reason (I think) so I multiplied the estimate by two (200-300 years). Alpha Centauri is about 4.3 ly from us so I divided 16 by 4.3 and multiplied that (3.7) by the 200-300 estimate to come up with 744-1116 years. Of course all of these numbers are probably based on the original 1960s Orion so with modern tech it might very well be possible to bring the time down quite a ways. And with research into more advanced propulsion it might be possible to bring it down even more (spiked fusion, antimatter, Bussard ramjet). But a major design consideration no matter what the technology (unless its some FTL tech) is going to be time. Any materials/technology that you have on board is going to have to be repairable, manufacture-able and recyclable on board. Sure you could make some ships components out of carbon fiber, but you wouldn't be able to replace them so your probably going to use aluminum. Sure you could use top of the line computer processors, but if they fried you'd have to have replacements (and hope age hadn't killed them) so you'll probably go with an older design that can be built on board. Any of these would of course require a massive ship be built, but even that isn't all that improbable, for the likely final cost of SLS alone we could launch the mass of a WWII aircraft carrier into orbit on today's commercial launchers. Times that by 10 and you've reached the mass of a moderate sized Orion (or about the initial cost of the Iraq War).

You're half correct, it would take several times as long, but this is space travel, you don't need several times the fuel. The smaller Orion designs only have the craft accelerating for about 10 days. Any craft that can last a hundred years is in all likelihood going to have all of the capacities (long term energy source, on-board fabrication of replacement parts, crew replacement, etc) to last much longer with only moderate modifications. No doubt that the level of danger increases with the distance, but if a civilization is willing to wait several hundred thousand years to send an expedition to another star system I doubt some extra risk to send an expedition now with a longer trip is going to make them even bat an eye.