They don't have nearly as much to offer if they can't do launches quickly. I'm sure they would make that a feature of their offering.

They can carry about 110kg to LEO, compared to the Falcon 9's 13150kg. That's 0.84% of the payload capacity. A launch is estimated to cost $4 900 000, compared to the Falcon 9's $61 200 000. That's 8.01%. That means cost per mass to orbit is nearly an order of magnitude worse.

Yes, this is a really small rocket. If you are a government or some other entity that needs to put something small in orbit right away, the USD$5 Million price might not deter you, even though you could potentially launch a lot of small satellites on a Falcon 9 for less.

And it's a missile affordable by most small countries, if your payload can handle the re-entry on its own. Uh-oh. :-)

Microminiature accelerometers are really cheap and very very light, and you don't have to wait for them to spin up or deal with their mechanical issues. I doubt you will see a gyro used as a sensor any longer.

Similarly, computers make good active stabilization possible and steering your engine to stabilize is a lot lighter than having to add a big rotating mass.

It's ok, I have a car analogy for hysteresis:

So, my first car was a 92 Plymouth Laser RS Turbo. It had a (rudimentary) cruise control system that wasn't quite capable enough for a turbocharged engine. The problem was that cruise control behaved as if throttle input was linear, but a 90's era turbocharged car is the very definition of non-linear throttle input. Thus, any time cruise was on and you hit a decent slope, the system would begin to oscillate. When the car slowed from climbing a hill, cruise control would apply more throttle - but then the turbo would spool up and you'd overshoot your desired speed. This caused the system to sharply back off, causing the turbo to slow, power to drop, and thus speed to drop too rapidly. The car ended up stuck in this long loop of "too slow, too slow, more gas more gas more more mooooOOOOH CRAP TOO MUCH TOO MUCH OFF OFF OFF WAY Ooooh that's better, much better this is nice, I'm right on, wait, no no no wait too slow, too slow more gas more more MOOOOAAAAHHHH TOO FAST TOO FAST..." which could sometimes last for miles, unchecked. That's a car experiencing hysteresis. The solution was as simple as very brief and very gentle throttle input right as the system started to back off too much. You could keep the turbo spooled and nail target speed for just a second, and then cruise could simply hold the throttle for you... until the next hill. Fortunately for me, I was young at the time and not quite as interested in cruise control as I was in long 3rd gear pulls while passing people on a two-lane highway.

When you last flew a jet somewhere, why wasn't it a seaplane? Surely such things would be an easier problem to solve than building airports.

Short of giving you the starter course in rocket engineering, I can only say no, it's not easier.

The booster can indeed make it back uprange to Kennedy Space Center, and they've leased a landing pad for it there. Besides the turn-around burn, they tilt the booster against the airstream and let aerodynamics push it back uprange during that 78 mile descent.

If there's one thing they should work on, it's not thrusters but having the capability to throttle to hover. That would potentially change the entire low approach. It is complicated by the fact that engine performance goes nonlinear in the low range.

Here is the barge on the way to port, possibly with debris onboard. Here's a video of the landing shot from the barge itself. And I am waiting to see the barge from the Carnival Fascination webcam.

A video from the barge is now online here. If you step through the final frames, you can see that the camera mount ends up knocked over and pointing at the ocean, but the lens and its cover are unbroken and all we see flying appear to be small debris. So not a really high-pressure event.

It's very tempting to think this should work like an airplane. Lots of people wrote that it was "too hot", etc. But it isn't an airplane. The plan was really to approach at 1/4 Kilometer Per Second, then brake at the very last second.

Obviously Crew Dragon, which carries people, will approach differently. But it's a lot lighter.

In the F9R test videos they catch some of the backscatter from the engine and seem to catch fire. Maybe they were trying to avoid that. They are very light carbon composite. Or perhaps they mess up the airstream for precision navigation, or they don't like the 250 m/s wind.

It looked to me that the barge was structurally undamaged but that some heavy equipment on the deck was forcibly ejected. It's clear to see in the HD version. Those 1000 HP thrusters are expensive, and it looked to me like one of them going overboard. But I suspect they were prepared to lose more than one vessel in testing this.

And I bet there was a range safety self-destruct charge onboard. F9R blew itself up with one. But it was probably so safe that it didn't go off.

Remember the reporters asking what was holding DC-X up? They couldn't see the rocket exhaust.

I sneaked inside of the Rotary Rocket the last time I was in Mojave. Someone left the bottom hatch ajar. But there wasn't a way to climb up to the cockpit from in there. Lots of pigeon droppings and it's used to hold the equipment for the multimedia kiosk nearby. Sad to see.