Seeing the boosters fly back and land themselves reminded me of watching the shuttle boosters detach and fall away from the shuttle.
The shuttle boosters would parachute and land in the ocean where they were retrieved and could be reused.
Back then, the thought of those boosters precisely flying themselves back to the launch site would seem like science fiction -- now it is science fact.
Just watching that video brought back memories of watching the shuttle launches -- as swish_bob says those were a BIG DEAL back then both for the engineering achievement but also culturally. It was something to admire and be proud of even if your only contribution to the project was "being born in a time and place where people do things like this".
If my memory is not playing tricks on me, when the MTV music channel started (which was also a pretty BIG DEAL in my world back then) they used animations of the shuttle (landing on the moon, I think) as part of their branding because it was hard to get any cooler than the shuttle.
The shuttle boosters would parachute and land in the ocean where they were retrieved and could be reused.
Back then, the thought of those boosters precisely flying themselves back to the launch site would seem like science fiction -- now it is science fact.
Just watching that video brought back memories of watching the shuttle launches -- as swish_bob says those were a BIG DEAL back then both for the engineering achievement but also culturally. It was something to admire and be proud of even if your only contribution to the project was "being born in a time and place where people do things like this".
If my memory is not playing tricks on me, when the MTV music channel started (which was also a pretty BIG DEAL in my world back then) they used animations of the shuttle (landing on the moon, I think) as part of their branding because it was hard to get any cooler than the shuttle.