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The author says exactly that at the end of the article:

Its tempting to go “woah I just figured out how SpaceX lands their rockets!!”, but sadly, that’s not really true.

Once you have generated a physically possible trajectory that gets you where you want to go, there’s a whole host of things that you need to do to actually go follow that trajectory: state estimation, closed loop feedback control, dynamically updating that trajectory based on real time conditions… and many more that someone who is an actual aerospace engineer (which I am not) would know. Beyond that, these solvers take a long time to run, and online (real time) optimization is incredibly hard to pull off correctly and safely: one wrong input and your solver could just spit back “fail”, causing the thing to fall out of the sky.



Indeed I was trying to allude to his own take on it, that it's just a fraction of what's needed. I reworded it clearer. :)


yeah, just not in the title. He's in fact way off.




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