SpaceX Details Its Plans For Landing Three Falcon Heavy Boosters At Once (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As part of the process to gain federal approval for the simultaneous landing of its Falcon Heavy rocket boosters in Florida, SpaceX has prepared an environmental assessment of the construction of two additional landing pads alongside its existing site. The report considers noise and other effects from landing up to three first stages at the same time. After undergoing a preliminary review by the U.S. Air Force, the document has been released for public comment. As part of the document, SpaceX also says it would like to build a Dragon capsule processing facility on the landing zone to support refurbishment of the Dragon 2 spacecraft, designed to carry crew into orbit. The 130-foot-long facility would provide a "temporary" facility for vehicle propellant load and propulsion system servicing. When it originally designed its Landing Zone 1 facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, for the single Falcon 9 first stage booster, the company envisioned the need for one main pad approximately 200 feet across, and four smaller contingency pads, each approximately 150 feet in diameter. The chosen site had enough acreage to accommodate all five pads. Improvements in the rocket's landing navigation guidance system obviated the need for the contingency pads with the Falcon 9, however. So now the company wants to use the additional space to construct two concrete landing pads, each with an approximate diameter of 282 feet surrounded by an approximate 50-foot-wide hard-packed soil "apron." This would give SpaceX three landing pads and the ability to bring back all three Falcon Heavy boosters to land while also retaining the option to land one or two on drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to the potential for a dozen Falcon 9 launches and landings each year, the document says SpaceX may eventually make six Falcon Heavy launches a year, potentially returning an additional 18 boosters to the Florida-based site. The new pads and crane sites would be configured to allow parallel processing of landed boosters. With U.S. Air Force Approval, construction could begin as early as this spring.

Comments

Re:One bit doesn't make sense

[werepants]

Landing two boosters on drone ships could be desirable for a payload that's close to the performance limit of the Falcon Heavy, such that the center core uses all of its fuel and is expended. In such a mission, it's very possible that the side cores wouldn't have the fuel margin to boost all the way back to the launch site. So that launch profile would be close to the maximum performance of Falcon Heavy. Maximum would be expending all three cores and retaining no fuel to recover any of them. There could also be a hypothetical scenario where the center core completes one or more orbits and then returns to the landing site, while the two boosters land downrange on the drone ships.

Re:Where do these guys get their money?

[Bruce Perens]

All of Musk's businesses lose money every year. Where exactly do they get the funds for all this expansion, or for the Gigafactory or the Tesla 3 tooling and production?

Maybe your news sources are not reliable. Musk's previous business efforts have made a ton of profit and he has reinvested his own funds in his more recent efforts. Tesla is a public stock company, so both institutions and individuals are invested in it. SpaceX is privately funded, you can see who the investors are here.