Comment by somenameforme
6 days ago
Those barges can withstand a ridiculous amount of force - it'll be standing at the end of the day regardless of what happens. But I generally agree. I think the orbital test is likely to succeed, but landing on the first go - that would be simply epic. There's just too many unknown unknowns to go straight to success IMO, but I'd love to be proven wrong!
I guess you were wrong, they scrubbed. But do you really think the barge would survive a direct hit? I mean it might not sink but all the equipment on it would be very broken, would it not?
A scrub isn't generally considered a failure. Lots of things like the cross winds, weather, and so on have to align in order to try to launch, and those are simply outside your control. And there's a lot of normal variance with the different subsystems that can cause a scrub if anything is sub-nominal. Of course things like the SLS 'scrubbing' over a period of years is a bit different, but I'd call that more of an entire program failing, as opposed to a launch.
You can see videos of the SpaceX barges taking multiple direct hits before they managed to start nailing the landings. There's very little exposed equipment and the barges are mostly unharmed.