I'm about as big a SpaceX fanboy as possible, and still find this a remarkable achievement.
You simply can't sim your way to a successful landing because there's too many unknown unknowns. Note on this launch it seems they even fubared the thrust:weight ratio a bit right off the pad, and that's normal.
This stuff is hard to do, and them getting to orbit in one shot is a great indicator of where they might be headed.
I'd love to see a competent competitor to SpaceX because that'll just get us to Mars (and beyond) that much faster.
> ... they even fubared the thrust:weight ration a bit ...
Fubared, or carefully nerfed? With so tiny a payload, I can see both engineering data collection and range safety reasons to barely crawl their first launch off the pad.
You simply can't sim your way to a successful landing because there's too many unknown unknowns. Note on this launch it seems they even fubared the thrust:weight ratio a bit right off the pad, and that's normal.
This stuff is hard to do, and them getting to orbit in one shot is a great indicator of where they might be headed.
I'd love to see a competent competitor to SpaceX because that'll just get us to Mars (and beyond) that much faster.