Comsats now point their broadcast horns at reflectors, which can be formed to direct their broadcasts to specific areas and avoid others, rather than broadcasting directly from horns. For instance, Cuba does not want arbitrary U.S. broadcasts getting to their people, so reflectors for the U.S. are shaped in a way that the signal drops off in the 90 miles between Florida and Cuba.

A second advantage to focusing the broadcast to specified areas is that the signal will be stronger than if it were spread out covering the whole face of the Earth.

https://x.com/labpadre/status/1830374488095043679?s=46

Yes, Erich Hartmann landed for emergency repairs to his ME-Bf 109 canopy due to a ‘few’ bullet holes. His crew told him they would have to wait a day for a replacement. He laughed & said “Klebe sie über”. Then up & away.

Meanwhile, the GEO comsat problem with lack of power could be solved by using vastly larger ground antennas, that the French State could license, or pull the license for, at their pleasure. Thus was INTELSAT substituted for the Telstar series and its successors. The Kennedy mafia could thus get around constitutional objections by portraying this as a purely foreign affairs matter, while ignoring those money-grubbing businessmen at AT&T.

It was a successful end-run around the US Constitution, that placed well-connected members of the Demcratic Party’s coalition in charge of foreign news flows, and made sure the industry knew just who was in charge, if they wanted to make money.

Edward:
Thanks for the input. Just looking at the video it didn’t appear to me to have been related to a hard touchdown. It looked perfectly normal, although since the camera is secured to the drone ship any pitching or heaving of the deck wouldn’t be readily apparent. I was thinking more in terms of a latching mechanism failure, or simply an over-stressed leg after so many completed missions.

We’ll just have to see what they eventually tell us, as long as it doesn’t reveal any of their technical “secrets”.

Richard M: It is probably asking too much, but maybe the FAA’s rules should be based on the restrictions outlined clearly in the ninth and tenth amendments of the Bill of Rights. In other words, it isn’t its right to approve or control what any American does, not if it is going to abuse what little power might have been ceded to it in the past.

2. I think the FAA deserves some credit for approving SpaceX’s application for a determination so quickly – like, less than 24 hours. I also think the FAA rules on which they based the flight suspension need a major rework to reduce the grounds.

I found two videos that speculate on what went wrong.

Scott Manley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJjRpeO5FXs (13 minutes)

NASASpaceFlight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcSd3lnSNXM (20 minutes)

One possibility is that a tank went dry just at landing, causing a hard touchdown. Evidence of this includes the engines striking the deck, causing damage and the fire.

Another possibility is that the legs wear out. A failed leg could also cause the engines to strike the deck. Since swapping out legs is relatively easy, we do not know whether the legs on this booster have only 23 landings or more than that. One thing that had been reported some years back is that the gridfins are swapped out often in order to reduce the number of these very expensive items. Maybe they do something similar with the legs.

Could it have been a radar or navigation problem? The telemetry data Never quite reaches zero km/hr.

Perhaps the seas were too rough for a safe landing, resulting in events similar to an early engine cutoff. It could happen.

We probably won’t see the final report, because it may discuss proprietary items, but we may hear a less detailed and more general explanation of what happened. SpaceX likely has a good idea of the root cause, otherwise they probably would have not resumed launches.
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Robert wrote: “… [government] then mandated that all commercial launches had to be launched on [the Shuttle], thus destroying the already weakened American rocket industry of that time.”

Not quite destroying it, but it came close. By the time of Challenger and the resulting decision to reverse the mandate to launch everything on the Shuttle, the Titan, Atlas, and Delta families of launch vehicles were still working through a backlog and survived by the skin of their teeth (or whatever is the rocket equivalent). The Ariane family of launch vehicles benefitted greatly, because they were available when the U.S. rocket fleet was trying to wind back up, after Challenger. Even Russia and China launched some U.S. commercial payloads. The U.S. launch industry never quite recovered — costing too much and launching too infrequently — until SpaceX started reusing its Falcon 9 boosters.

“Had the government left people free to follow their own dreams, we would have seen today’s rennaissance in American rocketry happen in the 1960s.”

Even in the early 1980s, Robert Truax wanted to start a commercial launch company, but the Shuttle mandate prevented it. Even after Challenger, it still took a decade and a half for self-made multi-millionaires to fund their own commercial rocket companies, because government still held a stranglehold on launches and rocket design. If it hadn’t been for President Bush’s COTS program, we would certainly still be in the Dark Ages of the Space Age.

Mitch S: I have written about the negative effects of the 1962 satellite act elsewhere. Prior to its passage, ATT had already privately financed the building of several Telstar satellites and paid for their launch, in order to demontrate its plans to build a constellation of satellites (in the mid-1960s!) linked to ground stations that would replace the undersea communications cables that were very expensive, difficult to maintain, and very limited in capability. Ma Bell figured it could quickly and for much less money replace those cables with these satellites, and proved it with the first two Telstar launches.

Congress and Kennedy then stepped in and took control, blocking ATT’s effort. The new law mandated that all communications satellities had to built and launched by the quasi-private company Comsat, which was partly run by the feds. Had these government control freaks not interfered, ATT would have been using private money to launch a large satellite constellation in the early 1960s, thus providing lots of business for the rocket companies that were building rockets for NASA.

The law also blocked U.S. television and cable companies from launching their own satellites, which is why the first direct broadcast satellites were launched by Japan, for Japanese customers. It wasn’t until Nixon in the early 1970s that the law was changed, allowing American companies to finally launch their own satellites. However by that time the shuttle was about to go into operation, and NASA and the feds then mandated that all commercial launches had to be launched on it, thus destroying the already weakened American rocket industry of that time.

Had the government left people free to follow their own dreams, we would have seen today’s rennaissance in American rocketry happen in the 1960s.

“Americans are finally doing what they would have done in the 1960s, had Congress and President Kennedy not stepped in”
That’s an interesting thought. How much did Kennedy/Gov’t policy interfere? Without that interference what would private space have looked like in the 60’s, 70’s 80’s? I don’t see a case for business to have invested in space at the time other than perhaps some broadcast/telephone relay satellites. With the technology of the time rockets etc were very expensive and there wasn’t a market for the services. Most of SpaceX’s launches have been for their internet service – no internet in 1965 (or ’75, and not much in ’85).

And even today’s 101 American launches are only 15 without SpaceX!
It’s not that SpaceX is choking the competition with their cost advantage – that may happen, but now the other players (BO, ULA, Ariannespace etc) are not hobbled by a lack of customers, they are hobbled by a lack of functioning hardware.
So what would American space look like in 2024 if Elon Musk hadn’t decided to start a rocket company?

If there were any real danger—the FAA would have kept the grounding in place.

Not only has SpaceX made history with quick-turnarounds, but this may be a record short grounding.

Has any other aviation even had such a short pause?

134 (12 flights monthly for remaining 4 months)
138 (13 flights monthly for remaining 4 months)
142 (14 flights monthly for remaining 4 months)

Blackwing1: No final report has been released at this moment. In addition the FAA in allowing launches to resume noted that it was doing so while the investigation proceeds.

I would not be surprised if SpaceX never issues a public report. It isn’t required to, and this is proprietary information. I also expect them to tell us some basic details at some point.

Did SpaceX ever issue a formal finding of what went wrong with the booster’s landing? Looking at the only video I could find it appeared that one of the landing legs either failed to latch in position, or simply collapsed under load.

It would be interesting to see how the team looking at that assessed the failure mode and addressed a correction.