We’ve said on more than one occasion that SpaceX landing their Falcon 9 booster rockets on barges in the ocean is doing things on hard-mode. Perhaps you don’t appreciate the feat of engineering involved in taking a rocket-powered object that weighs 550 tonnes. Once you see someone trying to land a lightweight drone based on SpaceX’s Falcon 9, you might understand just what the company has been pulling off.
A YouTuber, who has previously turned drones into an Imperial Speeder, built a copy of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, complete with drop-down legs. And then attempted to land said drone on a floating platform in a swimming pool. As far as difficulty goes, this hardly registers next to catching a 14-story steel column dropping from space. And yet…
In the video, you’ll get an idea of what it must be like for SpaceX’s engineers and crew tasked with putting the Falcon 9 down safely. Even using a drone, the process isn’t exactly simple. Fair enough, the drone is being piloted by a human instead of a computer but still… the precision of Falcon 9’s landings are even more impressive now.
Sadly YouTuber ajw61185 doesn’t have any plans to create for-sale options of the custom Falcon 9 drone built for this video. We wouldn’t have minded attempting to land (and probably drowning) our own scale-model rocket.
Source: ajw61185 (YouTube)