I constantly find the Chinese inspiring. Their construction seem to span an interesting divide between high tech and low tech. Their high availability of cheap labor being one of the primary factors enabling construction which would be considered prohibitive in the western world.
the deck of the bridge has just recently been connected over the valley below and is so high above the ground that you could fit the empire state building underneath it, and still have 360ft spare.
No, they're referring to the distance from the lowest point in the valley... so, yes, the plank over the well would be on-par with this Chinese innovation.
In all seriousness, the mountain takes care of that for them I suspect. It's probably burned all the fuel in flight and thus they just have to stand clear once it lands on the other side.
This is a natural extension of an idea that dates back centuries. One old-fashioned way to build a suspension bridge is to use a bow-and-arrow to get an initial rope across. Once that's done, you can attach a stronger rope to the end of it and pull it across. This is the exact same solution in a more high-tech guise.
I saw a documentary on the building of the bypass bridge near the Hoover dam. They used a helicopter to fly the cable over, had to wait for it to be dead calm as it was carrying near its max capacity and it still took like two hours for them to do it. I think they almost lost the chopper too.
Using a rocket is probably much more cost effective and probably more akin to how bridges used to be made. I mean look at the rope bridges the Mayan's made, some are way too wide for someone to easily throw a rope across, so they probably tied a guide rope to an arrow and fired it across.
You can probably transfer a heavier cable using a rocket than a helicopter, allowing the real work to commence earlier. I mean imagine how long it takes to drag increasingly thicker cables over a couple of kilometers of ravine.
