SpaceX SES-9 Launch Simulation

Here is my simulation of the SpaceX SES9 launch. I followed the webcast tracking data as close as possible. The first stage trajectory is most likely incorrect but generally shows how the landing happened.

The simulation software I wrote can be found on GitHub here:

If you just want to run the simulation here is a link to the program:

[andrewdstokes]

Nice job with the simulation. Did you scrape telemetry from every frame to generate this, or was it a tedious stop, note down, start process?

[punpcklbw]

Hey, this is an amazing piece of software! I wish it had a more consistent visual style though. Is this a hobbyist project or you're doing this for a specific purpose? I'm wondering if it performs all its calculations in 3D space or uses a 2D approximation. I'm going to prototype a physics engine which is capable of simulating spaceflights as well.

[Jesmed]

Nice job Zach. How did you model the landing trajectory after entry burn? Was there telemetry data in the webcast or did you derive it somehow? Also, how accurate is the 170 m/s velocity at the start of landing burn?

[snviper]

Is it safe to say that with this flight they've basically proven that they don't even need any boostback burn for a drone ship landing?

So you could say together with the attempted 3-engine landing burn they've probably learned more than from Jason-3 and as such it was a success. :)

Since they talked about 3 maneouvres for the upper stage, do we know that it has deorbited after payload separation?