Bump for more SpaceX news:
Today the aforementioned launch took place; the first stage apparently made a successful landing over the ocean, as evidenced both by the final telemetry they received and the final transmissions to the tracking aircraft indicating transmissions for 8 seconds after touchdown in the ocean until it rolled on its side (or in other words, it landed fully intact rather than smashing into the surface and disintegrating). Unfortunately no video of the touchdown, due to rough weather and clouds preventing the recovery ship from being in a good observation position.
Video of the launch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLJ3vns3ZysAdditionally, a test took place yesterday of their new Grasshopper replacement. This new rocket is around twice the height, and is really just a Falcon 9 first stage, pretty much the same as what landed today. Video here, with the grasshopper rocket nearby (on the right at the video start):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjWqQPWmsY&feature=youtu.beThis is all quite impressive for a couple reasons. First and most obvious, it means they've basically got a working reusable first stage for their rockets now, which is pretty big in itself. A second impressive feat is the fact that they launched both the vehicle in the video followed up by a launch to the ISS with a separate vehicle in about a 24 hour timeframe. One of them may not have been a full to-orbit mission, but such a small turnaround time on launching a test flight to launching a mission coupled with a test landing is pretty darn cool.
On a side note, spacex apparently has
really good wiki pages with even more details than you would get in a KSP part config.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_v1.1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_engine)
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