Question about landing a traditional rocket

I was wondering the same thing. Good series, though.






Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar and doesn't.

Wings don't work on Mars.

I guess you haven't been following SpaceX AT ALL. They have made quite a few successful booster returns, with both barge landings as well as at Cape Canaveral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_first-stage_landing_tests

The Falcon 9 Flight 20 first stage is now on display outside the SpaceX facility in Hawthorne CA.

As BlackiesDad said they have succeeded in landing "tall skinny rockets".

People shouldn't post comments until they research them.

"Either a shuttle will come down from a large ship in orbit, like we did when landing on the moon, ..."

Shuttle? It was a three-leg tin-can with a rocket!

In the preview trailer they show Musk Space X trying to land a traditional rocket and of course it crashes. What's that all about, why would you ever think you could land a tall, skinny rocket? Even the shuttle was basically an oversized jet that landed on wheels like a jet. Isn't Musk wasting his time? Then there is Musk and others taking about the difficulty of landing a ship on the surface and indeed in the series the landing almost fails. Is this dramatic license? If you can't figure out how to land on Mars, man you are a long way from getting there too. At this rate of innovation we are 100 years from landing on mars.

Of course it won't be a rocket landing on Mars. Either a shuttle will come down from a large ship in orbit, like we did when landing on the moon, or the ship itself will fly in and land like a jet or a Harrier jump jet, like in Prometheus, the film. Why don't they have this concept in this series? Can it really be because they wanted the landing to be difficult for dramatic reasons? if so, that's bogus.

"What's that all about, why would you ever think you could land a tall, skinny rocket?": Because it turns out this is the best way to get a used rocket back. You could add wings but they add a lot of dead weight. It's simpler to just run your main engine backwards and add some landing legs. This is nothing new either, Science Fiction has rocket landing backwards since the 1950s, it's just in recent years we have the computer and avionics to make it actually happen.

"Isn't Musk wasting his time?": Hardly, seeing SpaceX already succeeded in landing his rocket. BTW it's not just Musk doing this, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is also landing rockets, this is the way of the future.

"Then there is Musk and others taking about the difficulty of landing a ship on the surface and indeed in the series the landing almost fails. Is this dramatic license?": No, landing on Mars is super difficult (see recent ESA Mars lander failure for example) and it is a major obstacle for manned mission to Mars.

"Either a shuttle will come down from a large ship in orbit, like we did when landing on the moon, or the ship itself will fly in and land like a jet or a Harrier jump jet, like in Prometheus, the film. Why don't they have this concept in this series?": Because this is the concept currently being studied by SpaceX. There's some good reasons they want to do it this way, both technical and economical, a bit too long to explain here.