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Re:SpaceX Soft Lands Falcon 9 Rocket First Stage by jccooper on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @04:28PM (#8071397)
Parachutes also hit a lot harder. Powered landing you can touch down with ~0m/s. Parachutes you'd get something like 10 m/s (~22mph.) Not necessarily nice on your equipment.
Re:SpaceX Soft Lands Falcon 9 Rocket First Stage by Crito on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @05:13PM (#8071585)
Yup. The Soyuz landing capsule uses solid fuel retro-rockets at the very last second to slow down, but even then it is apparently a rather unpleasant bump.
Re:SpaceX Soft Lands Falcon 9 Rocket First Stage by tomswartz07 on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @05:30PM (#8071672)
What's interesting here is the difference:

Soyuz uses a 'suicide burn' that releases a ton of delta-V in a short amount of time.

From the video, it seems that Falcon uses a progressive burn as it approaches. They also mention that they can restart it up to 3 times in atmosphere.

Re:SpaceX Soft Lands Falcon 9 Rocket First Stage by rspeed on Wednesday July 23, 2014 @03:38AM (#8073283)
The third burn here is also a suicide burn. The first one is to change its path and the second is to prevent it from falling too fast.
Re:SpaceX Soft Lands Falcon 9 Rocket First Stage by fixermark on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @04:46PM (#8071470)
Not particularly nice on your astronauts / cosmonauts / 赵里昱 either, though they have training, preparation, and (according to an interview with Cmdr. Hadfield awhile ago) specially-poured per-backside crash seats to ameliorate it somewhat.