Quote:
Originally Posted by Startrek
The launch, ascent , apogee , flip and glide during descent work perfectly and no doubt further test flights will achieve this
Why don’t they just do 500m to 750m hops with an attitude adjustment at apogee to resolve the landing issue. Once they nail the landing a few times then go for the complete test ??
Elon did do previous hops to get this far !
Any thoughts ??
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I believe they need more altitude (than 500-750m) to achieve terminal velocity in the freefall, and to learn the wing configuration adjustments, how much aero drag they get, throttle setting and duration. But yeah, learning to land is pretty important too. Surely they have computer simulations of all this stuff, augmented by real flight data now.
I am puzzled by why they did not destroy the ship when it obviously lost control and was not going to recover. As it was there are pieces everywhere. I watched the RGV flyover video today, and Mary's debris video; there were big pieces everywhere. They had to get heavy machinery out on the mud flats at low tide to drag out the big pieces. They will be picking up pieces for a week.
RFV flyover video here:
https://youtu.be/DMtd-4D4Dlw
Mary's NSF video of the cleanup, start at about 15 minutes into this videro:
https://youtu.be/MJhHaLANaYk