Titusville is a s***hole
The landing pads are nothing more than 250m circles of flat concrete, where they've removed the former pad structure. There's no landing aids that I know of, other than being accurately surveyed and the GPS coordinates determined.
The USAF has to take public comments, but they can also completely ignore them. Not only are they not binding, they can just say the magic words "national interest" and "national security"
Don't forget Titusville is a bunch of uneducated hicks. They don't even have the energy to be chavs. Florida is the stupid part of the US and Titusville is the stupid part of Florida.
These are the same people that complain about a lack of high-paying space jobs now that the Shuttle is gone, yet they complain about sonic booms from SpaceX.
I went to Space View Park to see the launch. I happened to run into a British family on vacation, and he was surprised so few people were there.
The launch happened and people started leaving! I asked one guy why he was leaving before the landing and he said "what landing?" !! Now these are people that spent the energy and took the time to come see the launch and they didn't even know what was going on.
It was very spectacular, by the way. The launch was directly in front of us, across the Banana River, and next to the huge cube of the VAB. Just as the rocket reached the thin cloud layer, the sound hit us, and "hit" is the right word. You could see the stage separate and flip around as 2 bright dots with swirls from the gas thrusters. A couple minutes later, the re-entry burn was almost directly overhead, and a couple minutes after that was the "reverse launch" landing burn. The landing was just over the horizon, but by the flames you could tell there was not an explosion or anything. About 5 seconds after shutdown, we got the single sonic boom. It was very different from the Shuttle double-boom, or an aircraft boom, so I'm not surprised there was a lot of 911 calls.
This was at night, about 1am local time.
So I got to see a rocket launch, and 10 minutes later, I also got to see a rocket landing. Great!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
