Had a particularly good day today. Got to have lunch with daughter and ex (whose birthday is tomorrow). After spending an enjoyable afternoon of food and mental time travel, I came home to find that SpaceX failed for a second (third?) time to land a returning rocket on a large floating barge. That they can do this at all is near miraculous.

There's a fascinating article by Geoffrey Mohan in the Los Angeles Times that chronicles SpaceX's experiences with landings at sea.

Here's a great sentence from that story: "The full round trip has been compared to vaulting a pencil over the Empire State building, then getting it to come back and land on its eraser atop a floating target smaller than a shoe box, and not tip over."
Boom!!!!!
There goes my head. 
Ready for another? That damn pencil is 14 stories tall!!! (I tried to find out weight but gave up. It's gotta be humungous.)

I asked the guys in Meland who like this stuff what they thought. This is what they returned:

Make surface area of landing platform larger to stabilize. Construct three, vertical structures capable of generating large, powerful, individual  magnetic fields. The weight of said structures should also help stabilize floating platform. Object becomes to land returning rocket into the magnetic well which is much larger than the end of a narrow rocket. As rocket descends to platform, magnets exert equal force and dampen vertical instability. (Being able to vary the strength of each field would be even cooler.) Big magnets, like at CERN.

(I'm pretty sure Elon Musk thinks at levels dwarfing my poor guys so we recognize the arrogance of even piping in on an unknown blog.)

I so want these guys to succeed. There's a shit storm brewing and I truly believe having the ability to get off this planet is a good thing. Even if we screw up everything we touch as a species, there's SO MUCH ROOM! We better learn how to master that space if we are to thrive. 

Go Team, Go!