[CydeWeys]

That's unfortunate if so. You'd have thought there would have been plenty of extra fuel to obviate the need for a hard landing, given that the actual Roadster payload is a small fraction of the rocket's capability. This wasn't a mission where they were stretching fuel to make the landing, like they have with some of the marginal Falcon 9 launches in the past where the payload size was just at max for the vehicle.

[Diederich]

I'm pretty sure that there was plenty of fuel margin. If it did come in too hot, there must have been some other reason.

My first thought is that the extra 'stuff' on the outside of the center booster required to connect the outside boosters might have caused some problems during re-entry.

[singingboyo]

That or simply timing issues. The center core should be faster than F9 is when it's coming in for landing, so if the compensation for that wasn't worked out quite right (possibly due to extra weight in addition to the velocity difference) that'd pretty quickly get it coming in too hot.

After all, it's only a few second difference between 'nominal' and 'way too hot' with the suicide-burn style landings.

[Diederich]

> That or simply timing issues

yup

> only a few second difference

More like hundreds of milliseconds I think. (:

[singingboyo]

> More like hundreds of milliseconds I think. (:

Quite possibly, I just wanted to be generous. I'm not quite sure how much leeway the crush core in the legs plus 3-engine burn can offer. The 3-engine burn especially may give more options if they allow for it to be extended if the core is moving too fast, though it'd be understandable if that's not something they do.