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SpaceX Plans Drone Ship Landing On January 17th (nbcnews.com)
Rei writes: With the world's first successful low-speed landing of an orbital rocket's first stage complete, SpaceX looks to continue that success by attempting its second landing — this time, on their new drone ship in the Pacific. While SpaceX has announced plans to turn their successfully-landed rocket, reportedly flight-ready, into a a museum piece, the stage they recover next may be SpaceX's first chance to prove the mudslinging of their competitors wrong and show that Russia's worries are well founded. That is, if they can successfully pull it off.
I got baited into clicking on the mudslinging link in the summary and I saw no such thing. The worst I saw is X's competitors just mentioning the engineering hurdles that X will have to overcome to have a reusable vehicle. How is that mudslinging?
You can't reuse one until you learn to land them successfully. They have landed ONE. And I can see the rational about saving it for a future museum. When they have 2 or 3 more successful landings, it will then make sense to launch them again.
It's also not just about floating in seawater. The shuttle SRBs, for example, hit the water at highway driving speeds. It's basically a highway-speed crash.
But yes, floating in seawater is not exactly conducive to reuse of sensitive components ;) It's like saying, "Hey, toss your car in the ocean, have it bob around for a couple hours, then fish it out, dry it off and start it up, it'll surely be fine!" Only rockets have far tighter tolerances than cars - cars are sturdy, heavily built things while rockets are giant aluminum balloons that weigh a couple dozen times more when full than empty. Cars pump their fuel through tiny nozzles and drain a half dozen liters per hour of driving, while rockets can drain a swimming pool's worth of fuel and burn it in a manner of seconds. Cars roll down roads and face "some" air resistance, while rockets face so much that the compression heating burns the paint off of them. Etc.
He's the sort of person who would sell the Red Cross to Dracula.
So, to confirm this, and yes, I know, I'm oversimplifying...
They're essentially reusing the steel cylinder. Presumably they strip it, media-blast it to remove all traces of its previous use down to bare metal, inspect it with sonic or magnaflux or X-ray or pressure test, along the way somewhere confirming its dimensions are still within spec and haven't ballooned due to use, then if it passes, clean again and build it in a similar fashion to if it had been a new steel cylinder being built as a rocket motor...
Don't get me wrong, it's not cheap to build a new steel cylinder capable of handling the pressures that the SRBs take, but if my assumptions about the reuse procedures are even somewhat in the ballpark it's more like recycling than a simple reuse. It saves money, but it's not a simple matter of recovering the spent SRBs from the ocean, checking a few things, buffing the paint and repainting anything that needs it, and casting a new propellant grain into them.
I'm assuming that SpaceX's goal is to collect the landed rocket, clean it, run diagnostics on its active systems, perform some materials tests at places that are known to have suffered load like where the legs attach and at the endcaps where the thrust pressures are highest, touch-up the paint, fill it with its liquid fuel again, and launch it again, possibly all at the same spaceport.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The two things that are different between the Shuttles SRB situation and SpaceX's Falcon situation is that the SRBs underwent a significant impact with the ocean and a prolonged dip in salt water, so they literally needed to be stripped down, checked for stress issues etc etc, especially as there was a lot of rubber seals in there which are all suspect after that salt water bath. The Falcon undergoes none of that, so hopefully requires less stringent checks before it can be reused.
As much as anything, SpaceX is a monument to Musk's ego.
...and if his little venture is sufficiently successful in getting mankind into space on a regular basis, let alone as permanent residents, I honestly don't give a damn if it pumps his ego or not.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?