Lack of the 2nd engine ignition, over-rotated the landing and coming down at a 35 degree angle instead of 90. Boom! Spectacular!
Got a little bit explodey there at the end! Would have loved to see them stick it this time, but as they say...more data!
A nice view of the flight: I'm amazed that it takes 4:00 to get to 10kms altitude... is this thing powered by Ninja 250 engines?
Can't tell if joking but after SN8 SpaceX gave more info about the flight and it appeared they tried to duplicate with this one. They don't fire all 3 motors at full power to reduce stresses. They shut down motors one at a time as fuel burns to keep vertical speed slow and steady. If they wanted, they could fire them all at 100% but it would move pretty quickly and probably not survive the stresses. If you flipped the videos and told me SN8 was the 2nd test and SN9 was the first I would say they are making progress. It really looked like the motors didn't survive the accent as well this time. There was more smoke and material being discarded on the way down even before the re-light causing the reorient to vertical to look much less controlled than last time. Both times they had motor re-light issues but SN8 seemed to still better controlled. Not sure if it's related but the onboard vids stopped mid-flight (at least live streaming). Hoping they were still recording a good signal and SpaceX can use them to see what exactly was happening to the motors.
