Tim Dodd

It will literally stop like, say it stopped 200 feet above the ground,

Their only option is to kill the engine and then it's just going to fall those 200 feet.

So it's what we call like a suicide burn or a hover slam, kind of interchangeable terms, because your thrust to weight ratio is never below one.

So they have to actually literally be riding the throttle.

So what you do is you kind of start, ideally, you know, you kind of start like in the middle of your window of throttle range.

So let's pretend your engine can throttle down to 40%.

of its maximum rated thrust.

You might start at like 70% of thrust in the middle of that window of where it could burn.

So if all of a sudden it's kind of coming in too hot, you have room to throttle up.

If you're coming in too, you're actually a little too early, you throttle it down.

You have a little bit of wiggle room.

And it's just amazing how smoothly and how perfectly they're able to still control that thing, even though they're down to one engine out of the nine.

And they're still riding the finest margin of what's possible.

And they're continually playing with that to try to get it.

Because every bit of fuel they're using and propellant they're using to land is propellant they weren't using to put something into space.

So they want that to be as efficient as possible.

So they're really watching them hone that in and just continue to evolve and edit that and just get it to be the workhorse.

We're coming up on 100 consecutive landings.

Perfect landings, 100.

I think they've done like 150 something landings altogether, 160 altogether.