Well, to be fair, the engineers working on this system have been thinking about the accuracy this whole time even if you haven't. Even on the first go, it still had to land on a relatively small pad floating in the ocean.
As impressive as the space efforts in the 60s and 70s were, I've often thought that they were a false start created by a war-like impetus to show off. Tech-wise, we really weren't ready for a space age. The sort of control systems that make this sort of outcome possible haven't been around for all that long, really, especially if you mark them from being economical and not just "it technically existed in a lab somewhere". Plus if you really dig into how these rockets are built and maintained, you see a lot of other technologies that have not been around for that many decades, like, practical and reliable 3D printing, and computing simulations that have more computational power per second than the entire computing world could scrape together in a year in the 1960s, and those are just the highlights, not the exhaustive list.
A lot of people are like "we got to the moon in the 1960s, where's the progress we should have had since then?" but I see the 1960s as the bizarre exception rather than the thing that should be used to set the rule. There was no way the space age was going to happen then, in an era where you're almost sitting there counting each bit of RAM you can afford to send into space. The true Space Age is just dawning now, and it's still early in the dawn; we still have to have massive international cooperation to put a single space station up, we can't do something as basic as refuel in orbit, we just barely started having people in space for commercial rather than governmental reasons... it's just the beginning.
golemotron|1 year ago
jerf|1 year ago
A lot of people are like "we got to the moon in the 1960s, where's the progress we should have had since then?" but I see the 1960s as the bizarre exception rather than the thing that should be used to set the rule. There was no way the space age was going to happen then, in an era where you're almost sitting there counting each bit of RAM you can afford to send into space. The true Space Age is just dawning now, and it's still early in the dawn; we still have to have massive international cooperation to put a single space station up, we can't do something as basic as refuel in orbit, we just barely started having people in space for commercial rather than governmental reasons... it's just the beginning.
GaryNumanVevo|1 year ago