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posted by Dopefish on Friday February 21 2014, @05:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the rocket-kits-are-awesome-these-days dept.

WildWombat writes:

"nasaspaceflight.com reports that the next Falcon 9 flight will attempt a soft splashdown off the coast of Florida to test its newly installed landing legs. If successful, this will be a major step along the path to a reusable rocket.

The flight, CRS-3, is an ISS resupply mission scheduled for March 16th. The pace of SpaceX technology development is truly impressive."

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Kell on Saturday February 22 2014, @02:30AM

    by Kell (292) on Saturday February 22 2014, @02:30AM (#4658)

    "If you can land your rocket on a planet with 1 bar atmosphere and a 1G of surface gravity that gets you a good way to doing it on Mars with less atmosphere and less gravity."

    Except you have to lug all that landing system mass to Mars, which is terribly expensive. That's why (almost) everything landing on another planet has used parachutes and passive landing devices. It's lightweight and it's cheap.

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