Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Falcon9 on a barge?

SpaceX's next test flight hopes to land one of its Falcon 9 rockets on a platform -- in one piece. The company puts the odds of success at around 50 percent "at best" but it's apparently a major step towards reusable space rockets - and cheaper trips to space. While it's already been able to demo two soft water landings, on a solid surface (and one that's not tethered to anything), things get trickier. The rocket will be coming in at a speed of around 1,300 meters per second, making stabilization, well, tricky.