He’s probably not aware of the fact that Yeager broke the sound barrier by increasing the max speed on each successive flight by a couple of miles per hour.

I am pretty sure most interested people would consider the efforts to land and learn how to re-use the first stage of an actual F9 class vehicle to be quite a bit more challenging and important the the tests involving the Delta Clipper test bed those years ago.

I think “drool” is a bit childish but I have to agree that commercial space supporters in general and SpaceX supporters in particular have much to be pleased about. We have an actual space program we can cheer for. One that seems to be producing good results with prospects for a better future. The people in commercial space are actually trying to open space to the American dream.

Not everyone has that.

1) Go to orbit with people soon (24 months) within the CCDev rubric.

2) Go to orbit with people even sooner if NASA/Congressional old-guard succeed in bouncing them from CCDev.

The “Powers That Be” would regret any political maneuver that put SpaceX on the outside even more quickly than their only alternative of leaving them in. SpaceX is going to eat their lunch, regardless. It’s just a question of how soon and how fast.

1) Let the ascending booster stage scrub off most of its own upward and downrange velocity, which should occur pretty quickly given the blunt upper end of the booster stage exposed once the 2nd stage separates. Simply use the attitude control system, if necessary, to maintain attitude during this interval.

2) Relight three of the F9’s engines and, in concert with the attitude control system of the F9v1.1 1st-stage, kill and reverse remaining vector along the boost flight path. Accumulate enough opposite vector to let ballistics get the stage back to the vicinity of its departure point.

3) Adopt and maintain a suitable tail-directly-into-the-wind attitude as the new ballistic trajectory descent proceeds first through near-zero air, that lets the terminal velocity ramp back up into the supersonic regime, then into thicker air that drops the terminal velocity again to well below Mach 1.

4) Relight one engine late in the game to ease the descent all the way down to – initially – the water, but soon – perhaps as soon as August – the land. Deploy landing legs in the last few hundred feet of controlled descent under power.

In other words, my understanding of the Falcon 9v1.1’s reusability maneuvers involves doing as much as possible at relatively low airspeeds and simply maintaining appropriate attitude during the hypersonic/supersonic regimes of upward velocity vector scrubbing on ascent and downward velocity vector accumulation followed by scrubbing again on descent. At best, the maneuver required near the top of the booster stage’s trajectory might be described as a far sub-sonic slow tail wag in two parts, but not a “hypersonic pitchover”.

I am no aerodynamicist and have no insider access to SpaceX internal technical documents, but what I just outlined has been my long-standing layman’s understanding of what Falcon 9v1.1 does to get itself back home. Of course, anyone with genuinely superior knowledge of the details of this vehicle’s flight profile is cordially invited to put me straight about anything I’ve erroneously assumed here. Always happy to learn from those with something genuine to teach.

Is that something Congress can accept. Seems like they have so the Russian issue is actually a non-issue.

The question really is who will win the down-select. When you read the COTS final report you get a lot of info’ on how NASA views these programs, both COTS originally and now CC. My take, FWIW, is that SpaceX will win. But if they don’t they’re well positioned to do it themselves.

What if they lost and do it themselves? Well that relieves them of a lot of paperwork for starters and they can focus more on their hardware and safety redundancy. CC slows down so that gives them more time to complete DV2 and when they’ve tested it there’s Bigelow and still potentially NASA ISS crew contracts waiting for them.
They’ll also have a crew / cargo spacecraft for the future which is what they want. NASA contracts being a means to an end and not an end in themselves.

I’m not terribly worried by this development. SpaceX have shown persistance and dedication to their cause and they’re not reliant on NASA for their survival.
Cheers

Okay, that maneuver, needed to return to the launch site, is certainly going to be challenging. When they do it will you then give them the credit they deserve?

Or will you just find something else to complain about?

Are you really saying that you think the SpaceX ocean landing was a hoax?