This whole discussion is crazy; people have gotten so googlely-eyed over SpaceX that it’s like they’ve totally forgotten everything that’s come before, particularly some of the things that really came at greatest expense. Elon Musk is not walking on water!

How myoptic. Don’t forget the Space Shuttle just because you’re dazzled with the new kid on the block. NASA has 40 years of inspecting wear and tear on returning rockets, including both the space shuttle itself and the reusable solid rocket boosters!

I think the one thing I am most disappointed with in the new movie is that Luke’s location became a McGuffin that drove everybody’s actions. It just seems very odd to me to have this big detailed map of ‘x-marks the spot’ where to find him when the character of Luke would have been better served by wandering…

“But that doesn’t make it any easier to see Luke, Leia and Han turn from heroes into screw-ups”

It’s a very cool technique, but be careful not to oversell it. This technique requires the specimen to be in a crystal lattice, which means you can’t just look at anything.

Here’s the flight path it took. I was initially thinking that ‘fly it back’ is the wrong way to say it, but the speed differences are great enough that it’s probably appropriate: ~5,000 km/hr of the booster at separation versus 1,440 km/hr of surface speed... booster needed a delta V of ~5,200 km/hr to be subsonic…

1.5 million pounds of thrust versus 100,000.

The key word here is ‘orbital.’