The Falcon Heavy launch is still the highlight for me but this one is probably more important, simply because it's so normal and routine now and paves the way for drastically cheaper crewed orbital flights.
The Falcon Heavy launch is still the highlight for me but this one is probably more important, simply because it's so normal and routine now and paves the way for drastically cheaper crewed orbital flights.
Just in case anyone is unaware of the most notable exception:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-X
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IWIv2MKcyg
DC-X has been a major inspiration and proof-by-example for commercial reusable rocket efforts. Its technical achievements and focus on aircraft-like low-cost operations showed a path out of (or into?) the darkness.
Turns out, both of the video streams for the 2 side rockets were actually of the same rocket! You can go back and watch the corrected footage of both landing at once, but it was funny when many watching along (myself included) were like "wow they are so identical" only to find that it was the same footage!
Edit: I didn't know that three boosters were supposed to land. That probably would've blown my mind if it had succeeded ^^
They setup the landings so that they are on a trajectory to hit the ocean, and only if everything goes right do they then adjust course to the landing pads. This gives them an additional failsafe which the center booster took advantage of here. Instead of crashing into an expensive barge in the ocean, it just splashed down into the ocean purposely missing the barge.
[1] is a diagram that kind of shows what this looks like for land based landings, but it's very similar for barge landings too.
And don't worry, they are going to be flying Falcon Heavy again soon-ish, so there's another chance to land all 3!
Probably a quad/octocopter - I know they've used one before for footage.
Third booster was supposed to land on a droneship - it was a near miss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXd5UHFuZVI
It needed to relight three engines, it ran out of igniter before lighting more than one.