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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Elon Musk's latest SpaceX idea involves a party balloon and bounce house [techcrunch.com]

Elon Musk took to Twitter Sunday night to announce a new recovery method for an upper-stage SpaceX rocket. A balloon — a "giant party balloon" to quote him directly — will ferry part of a rocket to a bounce house. Seriously.

[...] This isn't the first time a balloon has been used to return a rocket. Legendary programmer John Carmack's rocket company attempted to use a ballute in 2012 to return a rocket body and nose cone. It didn't work as planned and, according to officials at the time [space.com], the rocket made a "hard landing" around the Spaceport America property in New Mexico.

SpaceX has yet to recover the Falcon 9 fairing despite adding a parachute and positioning a boat to catch it.

The TESS [wikipedia.org] launch has been delayed [cnn.com] to Wednesday.

Also at Engadget [engadget.com] and Space.com [space.com].

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