Posted by ls612 1 hour ago
booster was low on fuel, plus no mood of risking tower with boom, boosters are cheaper than towers.
source: Scott Manley https://youtube.com/shorts/m2oGDCvDmdE?si=0AlX8sgHDihXCED6
If I understand correctly, the margin was tight enough not to take the risk of damaging the tower.
The booster footage indicated to me that its engines turned off, and then the body of the booster imploded, before it touched the ground and then became the expected fireball.
I'm definitely not a rocket scientist, but this series of events leads me to believe that the fuel was absolutely exhausted.
(In case that distinction is missed, I do mean "implode" as the antonym of "explode".)
Amazing that a one-second difference can matter, but those things go through tons of fuel every one of those seconds!
Huge congratulations to the team.
As it seems building rockets has historically been a capital intensive business with low profits and limited demand, so there just wasn't much competition in the space industry.
Only a few companies in the world can manage the top-tier fab processes for modern chips.
Only one company in the world has successfully caught a rocket.
It's hard to directly compare, safe to say they are 2 of the pinnacle examples of modern human engineering.