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In Daring Plan, Tomorrow SpaceX To Land a Rocket On Floating Platform
HughPickens.com writes "The cost of getting to orbit is exorbitant, because the rocket, with its multimillion-dollar engines, ends up as trash in the ocean after one launching, something Elon Musk likens to throwing away a 747 jet after a single transcontinental flight. That's why tomorrow morning at 620 am his company hopes to upend the economics of space travel in a daring plan by attempting to land the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket intact on a floating platform, 300 feet long and 170 feet wide in the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX has attempted similar maneuvers on three earlier Falcon 9 flights, and on the second and third attempts, the rocket slowed to a hover before splashing into the water. "We've been able to soft-land the rocket booster in the ocean twice so far," says Musk. "Unfortunately, it sort of sat there for several seconds, then tipped over and exploded. It's quite difficult to reuse at that point."
After the booster falls away and the second stage continues pushing the payload to orbit, its engines will reignite to turn it around and guide it to a spot about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida. Musk puts the chances of success at 50 percent or less but over the dozen or so flights scheduled for this year, "I think it's quite likely, 80 to 90 percent likely, that one of those flights will be able to land and refly." SpaceX will offer its own launch webcast on the company's website beginning at 6 a.m. If SpaceX's gamble succeeds, the company plans to reuse the rocket stage on a later flight. "Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level." SpaceX announced the plan in December.
After the booster falls away and the second stage continues pushing the payload to orbit, its engines will reignite to turn it around and guide it to a spot about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida. Musk puts the chances of success at 50 percent or less but over the dozen or so flights scheduled for this year, "I think it's quite likely, 80 to 90 percent likely, that one of those flights will be able to land and refly." SpaceX will offer its own launch webcast on the company's website beginning at 6 a.m. If SpaceX's gamble succeeds, the company plans to reuse the rocket stage on a later flight. "Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level." SpaceX announced the plan in December.
delayed. Rocket launches get delayed often. If you're new to this, get used to it.
Stratolaunch does kind of makes sense from the delay perspective, if we're gonna aim at something like daily orbital launches in the future (although of course in this case, the delay wasn't weather-related). Jets are much more tolerant of bad weather than rockets, so being able to fly above the weather or move away from it is pretty appealing.
A hi-tech engineering company will continue on with its plans to test a well-engineered aspect of its product that, that after rigorous R&D, is expected to reduce the costs to end users.
It's not Daring. Its business as usual for a company that is doing actual R&D on leading edge products.
But that doesn't mean that I don't want to see it work. Vertical landing rockets are the next step to the world of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet
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Even if they can recover the engine intact how many times can it be reused. Saving a few million on a higher chance of blowing up multi billion payloads is not exactly wise economically.
I have heard they have already put engines through 40 or more simulated launch cycles. These engines were designed to be reliable. To a certain extent, having tested an engine through previous launches might imply more reliability, at least up to a certain point. In any case, if they recover the rocket, they will be able to analyze how the launch has affected the structure and systems.
These rockets do not use hydrogen, and thus do not have the problems of embrittlement that the shuttle engines had. I suspect one of the bigger problems will be coking from using kerosine fuel, but I also suspect that can be mitigated using solvents to clean the fuel systems.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Plus rocket reuse has not happened yet.
Except by NASA from 1981-2011.
The external solid boosters were sort of reused - the entire rocket needed to be disassembled, and about 5k parts were refurbished and reused. The shuttle engines themselves were pretty much the same thing, they were taken apart and refurbished every mission.
SpaceX wants to only partially disassemble key components of their 1st stage in a way that they could potentially send up the same 1st stage within a week. Some parts will be replaced, most others inspected, but they are not all getting rebuilt/refurbished every single takeoff.
The nice thing about SpaceX's approach is that a Rocket launches, flies and lands like a rocket. The shuttle, spaceplane aproach attempts to build something that is both a rocket and an airplane. The result may be both rocket and plane but it is neither a very good rocket nor a very good plane.
Space shuttle pilots use to refer to the lander as a "flying brick". That was not a compliment!
The external tank is jettisoned too high to recover. It was thought that it could be used in space to construct something but that was never done.
As much as this played out in various types of fiction and so forth, the reality is that the tanks wouldn't have been all that useful in orbit. The foam insulation would have off-gassed significantly and dumped all sorts of crap into your orbital environment, and the tanks themselves had nowhere near the shielding required to be used for human habitation (both radiation, and micrometeorite).
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