Agreed. Getting payloads to interplanetary orbit is a decades-old trick now---still tricky, but we've become exceedingly good at it.
Having the machine that does that work realign with the angular velocity of the surface of Earth under its own power in any way other than "catastrophic disintegration" is arguably the harder task, and this new method of doing it is still very novel.
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The landing was way more exciting than the car in space in my opinion.
Agreed. Getting payloads to interplanetary orbit is a decades-old trick now---still tricky, but we've become exceedingly good at it.
Having the machine that does that work realign with the angular velocity of the surface of Earth under its own power in any way other than "catastrophic disintegration" is arguably the harder task, and this new method of doing it is still very novel.
Definitely. Both thrusters landing simultaneously was incredible. They truly made a part of scifi reality with that milestone.
The Tesla in space was cool but in the end it wasn't more of an accomplishment than placing any other satellite out there.
SpaceX recently released new 4k footage of the first stage returns to the landing zones:
https://youtu.be/fbbSCqaeWyA
It's a pretty cool orbit though: https://www.whereisroadster.com/