"A few minutes later, the first stage of the rocket landed successfully on a platform in the Pacific Ocean." - They have made this so normal. Its not even news title worthy now. Exciting times we live in!!
I don't know what they did on the camera and transmission side, but having the sub-orbital view on the 1st stage all the way down to the barge was super impressive.
Here's a photo I took of the ascent from about 50 miles east.<p><a href="http://imgur.com/a/RlJUR" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/a/RlJUR</a><p>(Nikon D7000, 300mm, handheld. Cropped and adjusted for contrast.)
Sadly, with these new Iridium satellites, the 'Iridium Flare' phenomenon of a bright flash visible in the sky when the old satellites passed through sunlight and reflected it downwards when overhead, will no longer occur. I liked the quote from the Iridium CEO explaining why it won't happen: "[...] we weren't going to spend money just to make angular shiny things on our satellites [...]"
The video says a one engine burn on the return of the first stage. The descent seemed a bit slower than the last landing and thus less of a dramatic suicide burn.<p>This time the descent video seemed more "real". On the last barge landing it was so quick that it seemed magical.
Recent discussion on the webcast: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13399119" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13399119</a>
Good for them! I'm impressed with how quickly they were able to conclude their accident investigation and get approved for return to flight. Brings to mind all of the multi-year Shuttle accident investigations.
Watching the broadcast, it appeared that they launched _westward_ off the coast of California. That seems very weird to me, since my understanding is that you can use the not-insignificant rotation of the earth as "free energy" to achieve orbital speed.<p>Did they launch westward? Why?
And the beauty of this is, launching these Iridium satellites is just a beta test for what they're going to do next: launch _four thousand_ of their own satellites which will blanket the planet with gigabit broadband.
Why does Space X land on barges while blue origin land, well on land. Also does anyone have a pictures of iterations of Space X's landing methods and strut setup?
It would be really cool if there will be a recording of "arriving to Antarctica" from stage2 <a href="https://youtu.be/7WimRhydggo?t=3012" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/7WimRhydggo?t=3012</a>
Does anyone else feel like the COPV problem was not truly solved? This is the second mission loss caused by the same exploding COPV's.<p>They need to be redesigned and SpaceX is twiddling around the issue to avoid the r&d cost. If I was NASA I would be very hesitant to use their rockets for people at this point