This mission was to launch JCSAT-14 to geosynchronous orbit which requires the falcon 9 to move the already heavy satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. That meant the first stage had to do a lot more work and was left with a lot less fuel as a result. Therefore, the re-entry burn was less aggressive, the first stage came in with twice the speed, and SpaceX needed to do a far harder landing with three engines lit in the quicker and riskier suicide burn. Somehow, despite playing down expectations, they managed an even more precise landing than last time.

First stage landing is just after 38 minutes - https://youtu.be/L0bMeDj76ig?t=38m

Doing it twice in such a small window of time is a logistical/programmatic leap.

Instead, coming in very hot, the rocket had to use three engines (instead of one) to slow for landing. The last time this was attempted, the first stage put a nice hole in the deck of the drone ship.

Seeing the rocket dead-center on the barge was quite a sight!

http://www.space.com/32811-spacex-rocket-landing-jcsat-14-la...

Hopefully we won't have the typical hacker news discussion about why the employees chant USA.

Landing at 38:18mins https://youtu.be/L0bMeDj76ig#t=38m18s

Great info on the thrusters on the first stage at 19:37. https://youtu.be/L0bMeDj76ig#t=19m37s

Edit: Thank you and sorry about the time stamp link, I posted quickly from my phone. Hopefully it works on shortlinks.

I know SpaceX is doing it all more cost effectively, because we have better technology, but have they actually accomplished anything tangible that NASA didn't a generation ago?

The Space Shuttle did reuse SRB casings and the orbiter, it was a bit different but a great achievement too.

However this time there is more potential for cost savings. It can still happen that they can't be realized because of some details or even fundamentals we don't understand from the outside.

Are they also testing similar things but we aren't hearing? Or they aren't threatened by the advances?

How many years out is that?

Does it use fins, or simply engines and whatever those little jets are that, say, the space shuttle had around its nose...

How does the falcon manage to physically orient its body?

Also, is that process completely autonomous? Is there a remote flight engineer steering this to the barge - or is it completely self-guided

There. See. No harm, no foul.

Anyways, as a non-American living in the US since 2001, I fail to see an issue with chanting USA, one way or another.

It is an American company, with majority US employees, running this project (mainly) for an American entity (NASA), on US sovereign territory (or ocean?), using a significant chunk of US resources. So, it is their company and their country. I say, let them do what they want with it. And if chanting USA is what they wish to do, I have no problem with that.

SpaceX is exciting because they're doing launches and landings right now, reliably and successfully.

The shuttle was the first attempt at re-usability but was far too expensive to be viable. Only the space station is genuinely long term re-useable infrastructure. It's something you can actually use as a platform for further missions beyond it's initial purpose but it also has been excessively expensive. We can't go on like this. Nobody is talking about a replacement space station, the appetite just isn't there. Unless somebody does something, the space station might be the last long term repeatedly occupied human habitat in space.

SpaceX is doing something about that. If they really can reduce launch costs by a factor of 100:1, it will change the fundamental economics of everything we do in space. Suddenly going to the moon stops being a pointless gesture and becomes an economically viable long term proposition. Human habitats in space of the scale of the ISS or bigger become affordable. They're even talking about colonizing Mars and plan to do what's effectively a tech demo of that in 2018.

For the first time the rocket man dreams of the 1970s look like they could actually happen. For a lot of people, that's pretty exciting.

P.S. Downvotes for this question? Really? I'm as much a fan of SpaceX as anyone but it's a fair question, SpaceX haven't even launched one of their recovered rockets yet.

By saying this, you have now guaranteed that there will be. Well done.

The Chinese have mentioned an effort to recover and reuse first stages by landing them with parachutes.

So far, the Russians seem to think the effort isn't worthwhile.

Closer to home, ULA's new Vulcan rocket is supposed to recover the first stage engines (but again, not the fuel tanks) using a parachute and helicopter.

It remains to be seen whether any of these schemes will work or how long they'll take. They have a lot of catching up to do in any case.

Ariane 6 is going to be built with a cost effective approach and trying to focus on market needs (3D printing of parts, reusability of the first stage, etc.)

At first, concerning SpaceX, his group of experts told him that the design of the rocket wasn't going to work and was going to explode at high altitude due to fluctuation. They also told him that the first stage would just go through the barge, sinking both the first stage and the barge. Now they are taking new entrants way more seriously.

But also because a parachute landing actually does a lot more damage than you might expect, and sea water is the last thing you want in your million dollar rocket engine.

SpaceX (and others) are accomplishing amazing engineering feats aiming at sustainable, repeatable use of their technology, and improving as they go.

Both are amazing accomplishments. But just because "landing a rocket on a barge" is not as sexy as "landing a ship with humans on the moon" doesn't mean it's that much less of an accomplishment. Remember vertical rocket landing is something NASA chose not to attempt because they thought it was going to be too hard. And that's just what SpaceX is doing.

As you can tell count me excited.

You also can't land on a ship with parachutes. You don't have enough control. You can still land at sea, but then you have to actually land in the water, which means getting seawater on all your rocket hardware. That causes lots of problems when you want to use that hardware again.

SpaceX did experiment with this approach. Here's a picture of the second Falcon 9's interstage with parachutes packed inside:

http://i.imgur.com/PGXIqKX.jpg

But it turned out not to work so well.

NASA had some success with this approach on the Shuttle SRBs. It's easier with solid fuel rockets, because they're less efficient and built tougher. Even then, the cost of recovery and refurbishment ended up roughly breaking even compared to just building new ones each time.

As far as "wasteful" goes, that depends on what you're looking at. Saving fuel for the landing subtracts from payload capacity, which is wasteful in theory... but in practice, many payloads are smaller than the maximum anyway. If you suffer a 30% payload penalty, but you're launching a satellite which is 40% smaller than your maximum, then who cares? The only waste is some extra fuel, which is super cheap. The full fuel load for a Falcon 9 launch is something like $200,000, compare to the total mission price of around $60 million.

With the powered landing, you already have the engines there, it's just a matter of leaving a bit more fuel. It's not a lot of fuel because you've already dropped a bunch of mass (the whole second stage and a bunch of fuel), and air is helping instead of hindering.

There's also the fact that, unlike parachutes, you can use a powered landing on Mars and the Moon.

But fragile fuselage is certainly spot on. Parachute-landings still have quite some impact velocity. Strengthening an object the size of a Falcon 9 first stage to survive that impact would require a much stronger and thus prohibitively heavy structure, even if the parachute itself was free. The nice thing about powered upright landing is that all the forces involved are pretty much the same as during launch so that there is little (if any) additional strengthening required.

Note also how the ULA plans for the use of parachutes to recover first stage engine blocks require the parachute to be caught in-flight by a helicopter to avoid any uncontrolled ground contact.

This means that it must slow to a standstill, cut the engines and hit the platform at exactly the same time or it will either start going up again or be dropped onto the platform from a less than ideal height.

That being said, would you want to be in the nearby path of the rockets if they were going to be ditched?

WATTENBERG: I got to think a lot of illegals add a lot of value to the United States. You have been quoted as saying that you are nauseatingly pro American.

MUSK: Yes, that’s true.

WATTENBERG: What do you mean?

MUSK: Well, I mean, I think the United States is the greatest country that’s ever existed on earth. And I think that it will be difficult to argue on objective grounds that it is not. I think the facts really point in that direction. It’s the greatest force for good of any country that’s ever been. There would not be democracy in the world if not for the United States. We’re obviously falling in the recent few occasions -- maybe three separate occasions in the Twentieth Century -- democracy would have fallen with World War 1, World War 2 and the Cold War, but for the United States.

WATTENBERG: And perhaps the threat of terrorism would be much greater if it were not for the United States.

MUSK: Yeah, absolutely. I think it would be a mistake to say the United States is perfect, it certainly is not. There have been many foolish things the United States has done and bad things the United States has done. But when historians look at these things on balance and measure the good with the bad -- and I think if you do that and -- on a rational basis and make a fair assessment -- I think it’s hard to [unintelligible] that the United States -- is there anything better [speaking over each other]

WATTENBERG: I have a reputation of interrupting my guests. But when they say exactly what I believe, I just let them talk and talk. I think you’re 100 percent right.

MUSK: And -- you know I wasn’t born in America -- I got here as fast as I could.

Recovering the second stage is difficult because it's coming in from a much higher speed. The first stage came in doing about 2km/s. The second stage would come in doing 8km/s or more. That means 16x more kinetic energy to deal with and 64x more heating. You need a proper heat shield, not just clever engine burns. There's much less extra margin to play with as well. The second stage does most of the work but is much lighter, and one pound on the second stage is worth ten pounds on the first stage.

SpaceX definitely believes second stage recovery to be feasible at some point, but not on the current Falcon 9.