That is one big flying telephone pole. I love how people in media keep hating on Elon. His company made a rocket booster with 32 engines drop down and hover over the ocean. So cool.

As others have said, the booster has no legs to land on. If it didn’t land well it would have damaged or sunk the drone ship. If it did land on the drone ship it would have fallen over and sunk anyway, so no point. They had a spot picked out to aim for and it sounds like they hit it.

With regard to the grid fins, they do not fold. That’s by design. SpaceX stated that their data indicate that the fins in a neutral orientation do not produce significant drag and so they can reduce complexity and weight by leaving them out.

Others have commended on the “pause” in the Ship’s descent just before the end of the video. Remember that the tower catch point is not at ground level. The ship needs to stop at the capture height and hover while the arms come in. On the test flight that would result in it dropping several meters or more to the ocean once the engine cut was performed.

OFT Booster #5 static fire complete.
If the rumors of a “catch” attempt come true for this upcoming lunch this is gonna be a nail biter.

I’d have to give it 50/50 at best. And only that much just cuz, well they seem to pull off wacky sh!t frequently.

Yea, that was definitely a "they're going to try what?" moment, but I wouldn't put it past them by any means.

Best,
Rich

I think Elon gave it a 50/50 chance too.

Elon tends to be optimistic.

No matter what, excitement is guaranteed.

Man the image and stats on Raptor V3-(sl) are insane.

Half the dry weight and 50% more thrust with nearly all the external plumbing now integrated internally.

When Dragon gives Starliner team a lift back home: (Oooof meme)

The lack of plumbing on V3 compared to V1 & V2 is insane...

For all the critique lobbed at Elon, more people should take note on how well his organizations iterate designs. The critique is always lobbed at their current state of the art but what you see is always way behind what’s coming. That’s really hard to do.

Our company has a lot of smart engineers and the battles we have over simplification are epic. Things like this v3 engine make me want to push harder.

Something compels those teams.
It usually isn't money or brute force, and I doubt it is "Mars".

There may simply be a video game style "Top Score" whiteboard somewhere.

The V3 just looks like a finished product to me; simple and elegant.

In the biography Elon the author talks about the process that he follows on design. I won’t quote it as it’s been a few months but simplicity in the rebuilding process of every generation of designs drives him and his teams. Status quo is simply not tolerated

Exciting projects attract good people. It works until some idiot bean counter starts finding ways to reduce costs while making work just a "little" less efficient.

Lots of different types of organizations can do this - I've seen in on national lab projects, but the enthusiasm is critical. Insecure managers don't like enthusiasm, don't understand it. I had one manager at SLAC declare "Its called work because its not supposed to be fun". That was the beginning of the end.

Good people enjoy their work and want it to succeed.




Something compels those teams.
It usually isn't money or brute force, and I doubt it is "Mars".

There may simply be a video game style "Top Score" whiteboard somewhere.

That only happens in publicly traded companies or ones that are incompetently run. In a privately held company, that bean counter wouldn’t last long if they ever got hired to begin with.

The V3 just looks like a finished product to me; simple and elegant.

Something compels those teams.
It usually isn't money or brute force, and I doubt it is "Mars".

There may simply be a video game style "Top Score" whiteboard somewhere.