> control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets
My stepfather worked as a programmer on the Apollo program, and the thing he always talked about as his biggest accomplishment was working on the "slosh problem" -- so yeah, props to the SpaceX team for managing that landing. And props to my stepdad for managing it on hardware that was... a billion times less capable? :-)
I might be misremembering but I think slosh was the failure cause for one of the three failed Falcon 1 flights. It was number 11 out of a pre-flight list of top 10 most likely failure scenarios. Definitely a difficult problem.
My stepfather worked as a programmer on the Apollo program, and the thing he always talked about as his biggest accomplishment was working on the "slosh problem" -- so yeah, props to the SpaceX team for managing that landing. And props to my stepdad for managing it on hardware that was... a billion times less capable? :-)