Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ChuckMcM 3809 days ago
That was pretty much exactly what I expected to see from the video given the description of a broken landing leg yesterday.

Elon's twitter comment about the ice is interesting because it adds some interesting twists. If the stage is icing up as it descends it would change the mass calculation, however it does not seem to shed ice when it lands in the video. He suggested that ice at launch may have interfered with leg locking, which would mean that ice survived travelling supersonically through the atmosphere. But hard to figure how that could be.

2 comments

In an earlier re-entry video, the camera lens ices up during the re-entry burn, presumably due to water from the engine exhaust. So I don't think that re-entry is necessarily enough to heat up the stage enough to melt all the ice on it.
In this case the ice would have been protected by being enclosed or mostly enclosed by the leg mechanisms.