Nice story and of course there is only so much you can convey in the attention span of a lot of Medium readers.

Some things I want to add. Fly back is also an alternative to Parachutes and Propulsive Landing. The Space Shuttle did it and X-37 is still doing it. It provides as much precision and greater cross range than either Propulsive Landing or Parachutes.

These vehicles that have parachutes have them for a reason. The drawbacks are outweighed by the benefits.

I went on a tour of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster Parachute facility. They gave us an extensive briefing of those parachutes. Wikipedia claims that “These parachutes are the largest that have ever been used — both in deployed size and load weight.” The deployment of the parachutes has two stages of reefing before main stage. There is a lot more to a Parachute recovery system than just the parachutes. All active recovery systems will need redundancy including Propulsive recovery systems.

Passive systems like Fly Back only have redundancy in the lower level pieces like controls and computers.

TEK