Well done!! What a creative (but effective) way to rescue it!! 
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I love this method of repair. I’ve never exactly gotten the G-Code to resume correctly on a 3D print (somehow seems easier on a CNC) since the tolerances are so tiny (when you are printing in 100u layers, hard to figure out which one is the correct one and being wrong slams the head into the print or air-prints). But loving the optical realignment of the job patch.
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I LOVE this!!! Nice work!
Roomba gets into horrible mischief watched or not
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While that was a great way to handle it… it’s certainly not a good UX.
Given that the Glowforge should know at what point in the job it stopped, I would think implementing “job restart” would be fairly trivial. Is that in the hopper?
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Love seeing this stuff and the time you testers put in to push the machines and give those of us waiting more insight!
Did you etch the glass in the GF as well?
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Ok, this post is amazing. I really love the project, such a cool idea. really cool trick to pick up where you left off. great explanation of the process. THANK YOU!
I don’t believe it would fit 
It’s not, but it is. 
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Epic.
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Unless my ears deceived me walking out of work tonight they got their static fire test off finally. That should put next launch either Monday or Tuesday morning way early.
I don’t think they’re recovering this one though. I picture their hanger looking like a college dorm room with empties piled to the ceiling.
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This is from June:
I think they’ve recovered one more since then, if not more. I believe they plan to launch one of the used boosters later this month.
And yeah, they’re not going to be able to recover this next one; satellite is too heavy and the orbit is too high to have enough fuel left to land it. However once Falcon Heavy is proven, for future launches like this we’ll get to see three bosters landing at or near the same time… pretty amazing to think about.
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Those are gorgeous! And what a save!!! Nice to know if for whatever reason the job stops it’s not necessarily all over with. Thanks for sharing—this is awesome!
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We’ll see.
While the return and landing is pretty cool I want to see the savings make it worthwhile. I think they’ve already reduced the savings estimates for launch customers.
And getting the heavy to work is a lot harder than just strapping 3 cores together. They’ve got a lot of work in front of them.
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I remember skepticism as to whether or not the stage structure would remain viable after the stress of flight.
Looking forward to the re flight to silence the naysayers.
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There are years worth of SRB recovery showing you can design around that. In my mind that’s no big deal.
The use case for them and the rest of the space launch industry is affordability and reliability. Waiting to see.
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Thank you for the learning post and I do love the coasters…great job with them…maybe GlowForge can rent one or two of the boosters to deliver our GFs…just an idea…lol 
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Reading Elon’s biography was a real treat. He likened the disposal of the first stage to flying across the country and throwing away the airplane when you got there.
After the Russians, who were the only ones building engines at the time laughed at this guy with big dreams when he went to purchase engines from them, he walked out and began building them himself.
They aren’t laughing anymore. He is cutting the cost of launch far below what anyone else can manage.
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Elon is an interesting guy, no doubt about that.
Yes, they’ve developed their own rocket motors, boosters and capsules; have some gee-whiz stuff like the fly back booster; come up with cool names for recovery barges (that make really cool looking coasters as it turns out); and they’ve got the interest and goodwill of the general public.
And yes, they are cutting costs but the question becomes at what cost? I’ll just leave that there as I think we’ve wandered off topic 
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The first question that comes to mind for me with a reset/restart is who knows how much of the print has been completed? The cloud sends the job down into the local buffer, but only the firmware knows how much of that has been sent to the hardware. And unless it’s a soft reset (keeping the buffer contents) the firmware won’t remember that either. Hmm, maybe you can use the camera and the simulator…
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