SpaceX landed a Falcon first stage on one of their drone ships successfully. This is great news, and my warmest congratulations to the SpaceX team and Elon Musk for achieving this milestone. They also tweeted this really cool clip from somewhere fairly high up on the rocket, where you can see the "wings" moving to position the rocket and the landing legs extending. Really cool!
Onboard view of landing in high winds pic.twitter.com/FedRzjYYyQ— SpaceX (@SpaceX) 9. april 2016
I have tweeted a question to SpaceX, and if I do get a reply I will share it with you here. The question was, what happens after the Falcon lands? Is it secured in a vertical position and then transported to land, or is it somehow lowered to a horizontal position for the transport? What tickled my curiosity was that in the topmost video you can clearly see the waves affecting the drone ship after landing, and the Falcon is noticeably tilted by it, so they have to do something before transport. And since it is a drone ship, there is no crew to do stuff, which means that most likely it will be an automated process, which is really interesting!
