The "hover slam" is more efficient in action and in system design. It
is demonstrably unnecessary to hover before landing. It's not
justifiable to blanket state "it's better".
On Sun, Jun 2, 2019 at 7:16 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 2 Jun 2019, snyder@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Deep throttling to the point when you can have sub unity thrust to
weight is not really the hover-slam maneuver.
Yes, exactly. It's better.
Not least, because it's more fault-tolerant. It's what you get if you
*design* your stage to be landed, rather than being forced to retrofit
propulsive landing into hardware that's not built for it.
That SpaceX could make the alternative work, is impressive. That they had
to resort to it, is less so. (There was no shortage of people telling
them that their splashdown-and-salvage "reusability" plan was not going to
work...)
Henry
