LDSD Test Vehicle Returns

So here we are on board the Kahana.

This morning, looking at the vehicle that we've managed to pull and recover from the water.

It all went perfectly. We recovered everything except for the smoke from the rockets. Everything came back.

So we're really thrilled with it.

It doesn't look that it's in very good shape right now but its perfectly fine.

Tomorrow we're going to start taking it apart. We're going to take the SIAD off, take the motor out. Take out the cameras. Be able to extract the data out of the camera recorders, which is also on the vehicle.

And I really want to thank everybody who's involved in this.

This was a fantastic effort: from the boat crews, they Navy Explosive Ordinance Disposal guy, the assistance from JPL>

All of them did a fantastic job spotting the stuff, getting it out of the water, finding all of the pieces and making sure that this didn't sink. Making sure we got the parachute before it sank.

Fantastic job.

We are so happy with this recovery effort.

Now we know how to do it for next year.