Don't they drop batteries?

Actually, I can think of 2 more candidates for this year. The helicopter that clipped its own wings and kept on science-ing and the moon lander that dumped its fuel but at least made it back to earth while experimenting the whole way. But this category should not be selected by you or your community. It should be selected by the KSP community. And the award should represent the idea of pushing past the kalamity.

No… Bigger helicopter is the way to go!

Seawater doesn’t go well with rocket booster…

They've been way past that lol

​@@tonamg53Pretty interesting Peter Beck interview with NasaSpaceFlight that describes how they make the booster "seaworthy" from a couple months ago. They talk about it for a couple minutes somewhere towards the end.

1:29:30

Thank you!@@mukamuka0

Most companies struggle with just making into orbit, much less with going into space and back again. Getting into orbit is hard. Because of the Tsiolkovsky equation, it requires one to get quite high of a ratio between the fueled mass and the empty mass of each stage of the rocket. This is already hard for any orbital rocket. It requires excellent engineering and the safety margins are very slim. But adding any hardware for the recovery of the first stage adds to the dead weight of the rocket and makes everything even more difficult. As far as the rockets go, Falcon-9 is a very large rocket -- much larger than the Soyuz. It can add a few tens of tons of extra fuel and a few tons for the landing legs without making too much of a difference in the overall mass. Electron does not have the mass budget for any of this. It is a miracle that they can accommodate the parachute! Keeping the mass ratio up is always harder for smaller rockets. Any rocket requires a flight computer, the batteries, the inertial measurement units, the radio communications, etc. On a large rocket their mass is negligible compared to the mass of the fuel tanks. But on a small rocket every gram matters. It is very impressive that Electron can get anything into orbit, while being the size and the mass of the German V-2 rocket which could get to only 2 km/s.

How is it obvious? STS was more reusable then Falcon ever will be, and everyone hated it because of costs, and it's two hull losses.

@@ViperPilot16 people hated it because it was a billion dollars per launch.. and it was sort of reusable, but still needed like 5 months of refurbishments between each launch and lost all the boosters and such. When the falcon lands it could be ready to go in a few days . The perfect system would be a shuttle on top of a reusable 1st stage. That's what Starship is basically trying to do.

​@_ShaDynasty Starship will be lucky to carry astronauts. So far it hasn't done much of anything other then explode. As for reusablity, it's not going to be cheap or quick period. Nothing that geos to space will ever be cheap and quick unless you want a free ticket to hell.

@@ViperPilot16 the speed of development is insanely fast with starship... But I honestly can't even tell what your point is

why 15 years? spacex will be probably launching starship quite frequently within the next 2 years. its not too much of a stretch to think it could happen before 2030. HLS will probably be ready before 2030 as well, given spacex's pace.

Not that good!? Huh😂 everyone is copying spacex working ethics but they can't keep it up lol