For those of you who have followed the "Roomba," it has officially been used. This is the Bulgariasat booster (east coast from last Friday). She's a leaner!

https://i.imgur.com/BY4WoAT.jpg

The booster on the west coast is in too, but not much exciting to report there except that the crush cores got destroyed. It apparently missed the deck height by a bit and dropped pretty hard in the rough seas.

https://i.imgur.com/W3FZzrO.jpg

They also knocked a day off of the schedule, so the next launch is currently scheduled for Sunday (though the weather is iffy). After that, looks like there will be a big gap while the Range (different entity) goes down for pretty much the whole month of July.

Excellent! Now I just need HD footage of the Roomba in action! That lean is the perfect reason for its use. I'm open they took some video and post it.

Man. That looks so precarious.

It definitely LOOKs crazy, but it's important to keep in mind that a ton of the rocket's weight when empty is in the engines. Here's a diagram from reddit:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/w03Q1.png

So if you account for 5-10 degrees of rocking due to waves, that still leaves plenty of room on top of the ~5 degrees it was leaning. The bigger issue to me is that the grid fins were completely destroyed. No surprise that they're moving to titanium moving forward.

https://i.imgur.com/3FS0Blc.jpg

So it landed a bit crooked? Can someone explain the significance of this? Was it all built in? Does it damage it to the point it can't be used again?

Possibly but doubtful. The fin just crumpled. Doesn't look like any structural damage.

At the risk of giving you more detail than you really care about...

This booster took more stress than any they've tried to land thus far. (There have been some lately, including the next one, that are flown in "expendable" mode and no attempt is made to land due to the extreme flight profile.) Because it came in so hot, the friction coming through the atmosphere was so severe that it actually ripped part of the grid fins apart.

Either related or unrelated to that, the stage came in very awkwardly. We're still hoping we get video, but as Donger noted above, it looked like it was coming down off the ship, but somehow ended up landing successfully on the other side of the ship.

We don't know how it got there, but it's no surprise that it came down hard on one leg more than the others. They're designed for this and have a "crush core" that is meant to compress in the case of a severe impact and take as much of the remaining force as it can. That happened here, which results in one leg being much shorter than the others. The leg is destroyed, but they're replacing those each time anyway, so no big deal.

The core itself looks generally intact, but I'm going to guess they don't fly this one again. It was its second time already, and the two they've re-flown so far have been on pretty easy missions in terms of load on the rocket. In theory, future iterations of the F9 will include improvements that should make them better able to handle extreme forces like this.

The end.

Perfect. That's about the level of technical info I can understand.

It landed hard and probably shouldn't be used again, but considering the stress of the load this time they might not have been counting on a successful landing anyways. Probably a lot of good data to be gleaned from the semi successful landing anyways.

Bump. This one's expendable (no landing) so probably not a very exciting launch assuming it goes OK.

Saw this cool article on SpaceX.

Article format is not CP-friendly for a copy/paste. Apologize for the extra click required. :)

Scrubbed for a guidance system issue. Should be around the same time tomorrow.

The Falcon 9 launch is now set for 8:07 p.m. The launch window runs until 8:35 p.m.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">We&#39;re going to spend the 4th doing a full review of rocket &amp; pad systems. Launch no earlier than 5th/6th. Only one chance to get it right …</p>&mdash; Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/882117255407980545">July 4, 2017</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I think Elon's concerned about a rocket that has self-aborted at T-10 seconds twice in a row. Don't blame him.

Anyway, I'll update the OP for the 5th, but don't count on it actually happening then.

Third time's a charm?

Fingers crossed!