This capsule was recovered from orbit, SpaceX boosters are not orbital at all and are just falling basically

To be fair, orbit is also "just falling, basically".

I guess the Dragon capsule doesn't count because it lands in water just slightly offshore, lol

Water is famously not soil.

Those reentered from suborbital trajectories. If reaching space (> 100 km) was necessary, I think even amateur rocket people have achieved that.

Come on LOL.

Falcon 9 is an orbital booster that's landed dozens of times on US soil. Suggesting this spacecraft has achieved some kind of world first is totally ridiculous and diminishes the actual achievement.

I mean sure, there's ambiguity around the word "spacecraft". But Falcon 9's booster isn't orbital, its payload is. So it might still be a first for an orbital spacecraft.

The gravitational potential energy of a 100kg payload in 100km orbit is 98 MJ. The kinetic energy of a 100kg payload in 100km orbit is 3042 MJ, over 30x more. So surviving reentry from orbit is orders of magnitude more difficult than surviving a straight up/down shot.

Now F9 boosters obviously have a horizontal velocity as well that they need to cancel out, but suborbital and orbital spacecrafts are very different beasts and it's absolutely noteworthy. It's the difference between surviving a car crash at 20 mph vs 95 mph. One is trivial, the other requires a heck of a lot of engineering.

F9 landing is not trivial, and despite all the comments on this thread trying to back up the claim this is the “first commercial spacecraft to land on US soil” ludicrous.

I wasn't trying to extend the analogy to saying landing F9 is trivial. But F9 surviving re-entry is fairly trivial, which is the important difference between the two. Once you've survived re-entry and slowed down to terminal velocity, there's not a huge difference between landing from orbital and sub-orbital trajectories. I agree that the way it's phrased is fairly meaningless and reeks of baseball commentary cherry-picking, but surviving from orbit is still a very different milestone than surviving from sub-orbit.

Huh? Did you flunk freshman physics?

E=K+U=GmM/2r−GmM/r=−GmME/r. We can see that the total energy is negative, with the same magnitude as the kinetic energy. For circular orbits, the magnitude of the kinetic energy is exactly one-half the magnitude of the potential energy.

Do the calculation over.

You are correct (aside from the s/ME/M/ typo), but the snark isn't needed.

No, they are not correct either.

You're quoting this article, but you're misunderstanding it:

https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/University_Physics/U....

This is calculating the gravitational potential between two point masses. In other words, the potential energy if both masses were singular points at a distance from each other.

I was quoting the potential energy differential between being 100km over the ground, and on the ground. This is 98 MJ for a 100kg object, and that's what you have to cancel out to land back on Earth. The total gravitational energy of that object to the Earth's centre is more like 6300 MJ, but that's a meaningless number.

I disagree. Falcon 9 is an orbital booster, but only the second stage goes to orbit. The hard part is surviving re-entry, the first stage only barely requires a heat shield.

Dragon would qualify, except it lands on the ocean, so not "US soil".

apparently the hard part is getting the control systems and landing legs simultaneously lightweight enough and reliable enough, if i correctly understand spacex's long history of failing to land rockets (which i may not, since all i know is a small sample of what they've published)

agreed about dragon. those fuckers do orbit!

The hard part for landing a suborbital rocket vertically is that. The hard part of landing anything from orbit is still definitely the re-entry.

oh, sorry, you're right. a few rocks do survive re-entry every day without the benefit of any engineering at all, but they have a very, very low success rate

Falcon 9 boosters are not orbital. The point of first stage booster is to get rocket part of the way to orbit and the second stage gets it into orbit. The boosters don't have the heat shield to return from orbit.

Umm, no. It's a booster of an orbital rocket, the booster itself is not orbital. Falcon 9 stages super early even compared to other rockets, specifically so the booster can come back before it gains anywhere near a significant fraction of orbital energy.

This is great because it does make it practical to recover the booster, but it's only possible by making the second stage significantly larger and more powerful than comparable rockets that stage later.

If the booster got up to orbital velocity, it would burn up just like the Rocket Lab "mothership" host satellite that accompanied the Varda capsule. They were coupled together, the mothership performed the braking burn to adjust their orbit into a reentry trajectory before the two separated. Only a minuscule amount of drift separated the two as they hit the atmosphere, but while the mothership burned up, the capsule survived.

If Falcon's booster achieved orbit, it would burn up just the same. The only reason it doesn't, is that it's only going a tiny fraction of orbital velocity when it comes home.

How was the spacecraft in this video "more orbital"? Did it reach orbit itself?

It was a capsule sitting in orbit for a few months waiting for bureaucratic processes before being allowed to come back down.

Then what about Starliner? Here's a video of the landing from OFT-2 [1] two years ago, on the way back from the ISS. It was in orbit and landed on land in New Mexico. And while they are doing this as part of a NASA contract, the spacecraft and mission control were both from Boeing. I don't see how they don't qualify

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPFS8Bp643o

Done under government contract. This was the first time a purely commercial effort did it on their own dime.

Went from founding to shipped flight hardware in 2 years with 45 people. I think the key was the really good coffee machines.

The boosters aren't themselves orbital, and while the Dragon capsules have re-entered several dozen times now, they splashdown in water. I think technically Starliner would better fit the case of a commercial company landing a spacecraft on US soil.

They should definitely also add an "intact" qualifier. ;-)

Others have pointed out why boosters don't count.

But what about Dragon?

Dragon capsules (as well as all US-based capsules [could be wrong]) splash down in water, so not soil. Soyuz capsules land on soil.