[InclinedPlane]

Perhaps on Mars, unlikely on Earth. With our dense atmosphere a vehicle like a mostly empty Falcon 9 first stage is going to have a fairly low terminal velocity, in the low hundreds of km/s range. Slowing down from that speed to a controlled hover/landing is pretty easy. The cost/benefit on Mars might be different though, since the atmosphere is thinner.

[jlgreco]

> in the low hundreds of km/s range

I think you might mean m/s? low hundreds of km/s is very supersonic. ;)

[InclinedPlane]

What am I, a physicist? Jeez, boffing a few orders of magnitude like that is pretty bad, and it's too late to edit.

I meant kph, which was HOPEFULLY obvious from context.

I'll just leave this here: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2679