From what I understand, the reason they don't show it live is because they don't have enough bandwidth to transmit live video from the barge. They get a frame every second or two, and lots of telemetry, but not video.
Which is probably because they don't want to show it live. If they wanted to, I'm sure they could find a way to get enough bandwidth to it.
Their PR is very well-run, and not only will they not show a live video for something that they aren't sure is going to go right, they'll also have a plausible technical excuse for why they can't do it.
Not that I have anything against running your PR well, just admiring it.
I don't buy it. I'm sure Musk (and many others) would like nothing more than to watch the event live. Just having the stream doesn't mean they'd have to show it to anybody. It could be kept private. The fact that they don't have a stream at all means it must be pretty hard. Certainly it can be solved, but it's hard or expensive enough that other things take priority.
(Note that the seeming ease with which they send live video back from the rocket during the launch tells us nothing. It's relatively easy to receive high-bandwidth data from a rocket above the horizon to a tracking station with a big dish that it can point at the rocket.)
In the early launches, whenever something went wrong the stream would be cut off instantly --- sometimes they'd even leave the connection open but just stop sending frames, which made my video player very sad.
I sympathise: they don't want to be associated with failure. But on the other hand, there were an awful lot of people, including me, who would have been utterly fascinated to see a first-hand view of the failure modes.
They're getting ever closer. And they have a great setup to experiment with. They have paying customers funding the whole thing, and they can take their time to get it right.
If this was some pure R&D project, today's events would probably be a major setback. But SpaceX still made a healthy profit on this launch even with the bang at the end. That's the genius of their approach, and it's why I think they'll succeed where others have failed.
So far SpaceX has used approximately a third of a billion dollars in launch hardware in reusability testing, almost entirely subsidized through commercial launches. It's a very savvy way to do R&D. Note that it takes a lot of foresight to design a rocket which can serve as both a good expendable booster and also be sensibly made reusable, and most of the optimizations for expendability would push the design away from being good for reuse.
It takes some smarts and will to realize that fully optimizing for reusability isn't the right move, too. It's a constant refrain in these comment threads to ask, why don't they use parachutes? Why don't they use wings? Why not do all sorts of things that would make it easier to reuse, instead of trying a crazy vertical landing suicide burn onto a boat?
The paradox is that making reusability easier would make it harder, because you'd have to get it right from the start, and spend a lot more money developing it, and ensure you can reuse each vehicle many times to make up for the increased cost.
So instead of inventing something new, they started with something known to work, and then adapted it. Because it's cheap, you can keep tweaking it in live tests and not worry too much when you break the stuff.
People often compare this stuff to the Space Shuttle, since that's the one example of a reusable rocket that actually flew, and it was never cheaper than expendable launchers. Imagine what would have happened if the Shuttle had crashed on its first two landing attempts. The program would have been dead before it got anywhere. Now imagine what would have happened if the Shuttle had been so cheap that they could build and launch one for $60 million, instead of $2 billion per orbiter and $500 million per launch (and imagine that somehow they could be lost without killing anybody). It would have been an enormous success even if a bunch had crashed.
Indeed. Just look at Blue Origin. They've well funded, they've got tons of high caliber engineers (rocket scientists even), they've been "bending metal" and building real hardware for years, and they've had pretty good designs, but they're far behind SpaceX in terms of progress. While SpaceX was launching rockets, earning dollars, and doing R&D with launch vehicle leftovers Blue Origin was still mired in the midst of building an orbital launcher.
This is a good example of both "worse is better" and the MVP concept. The Falcon 9 is not the best design for a reusable launcher that one could put together, I could list easily half a dozen optimizations that would lead to a vastly superior reusable vehicle, for example. But by going the expendable mode first route, and building a dead simple vehicle (2 stage LOX/Kerosene, a 60+ year old design) they've been able to iterate, do full-scale testing, and earn income. Income is the life blood of any operation, so being able to bring in profits early made it easier for SpaceX to invest in rocket R&D. And by using the expendable -> reusable route they're able to gain a lot of confidence in the behavior of their rocket as well as get multi-million dollar test vehicles to play with, all financed by their customers.
