Tim Dodd

a literal force field as it's falling through the atmosphere.

Interesting.

But it also decreases the velocity by almost half or around half, and then that therefore decreases the amount of – the biggest thing with the atmosphere is that as it gets compressed against the front of anything flying through the atmosphere, the compressed atoms just get hot.

And they can get so hot, they turn into a plasma.

And they get so hot, they can just absolutely destroy anything.

So they slow down enough that the air molecules don't end up, you know, destroying the vehicle on reentry.

And then they realize, I think at some point, it's probably a similar crossover.

They're like, well, if we're lighting the engines already to slow down the atmosphere, we can just use that same engine to land.

And so like, well, what if we just stuck landing legs on it and...

just landed the thing vertically.

And next thing you know is December 21st, 2015, they did exactly that for the first time.

Yeah.

Yep.

Early 2014.

So that, and for me, like that was so fun watching, you know, that was like the peak of me just becoming obsessed with,

with this idea i'm watching at with like in back in the day it was like months between launches you know so a launch was like a big idea i'd wake up at 3 a.m to watch this landing attempt or whatever you know and every you know there's crs4 um almost almost landed crs5 almost landed crs6 cr7 blew up i was watching that on i think it was like a saturday morning or maybe a sunday morning and i remember watching that and watch it blow up and i'm like oh

Now what?

You know, and it blew up on ascent.

It was their first failure.

So it was their 18th flight, I believe.