those spot weld things are really neat
I didn’t notice that during the livestream!
Indeed, it is really neat.
Wow! I am so impressed. Seems like they took a cautious trajectory and burned lots of fuel on the landing, but that looked great!
I guess escapade being tiny gave them a lot more margin
The Glenn’s first stage can hover. Even nearly empty, the booster is heavy enough and the BE-4 can throttle low enough that it doesn’t need to do a suicide burn. Instead, and as they just demonstrated, it can just gently lower itself down on the deck.
Takes more prop to do so, but for a second attempt, the decision to play it safe was perfectly sound. It’s practically guaranteed that they’ll dial the margins in with more flights. This might be the softest landing that a New Glenn ever experiences.
I wonder if they’ll go with for full Falcon 9 style suicide burn at some point.
I assume that’s a method of using the minimum amount of thrust and time in the air? So, full blast at the last possible second?
Yup. Falcon 9’s Merlin engines have too high of a thrust to weight ratio to hover, so they have to do a last second burn. If it doesn’t work, boom.
It does also save fuel.
If they do, it won’t be anytime soon. They have no pressing need to.
Absolutely beautiful flight. The engineers deserve every bit of the pride they’re feeling right now.
Congrats to the teams
