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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.
But they want to push without fixing the problems they already have.
If you want rapid progress, you have qualified people work on current problems, while other people work on anticipated future problems.
Have you ever watched six-year-olds play soccer? They all cluster around the ball, in a tight little group, with everyone 100% focused on just the immediate problem of kicking the ball. By the time they are eight, they understand that is not a winning strategy.
Not only have they landed a number of them, but the launch of comsat SES-10, currently expected sometime in February, is being done on the booster that flew ISS resupply mission CRS-8, and was the first successful landing on the droneship at sea. Another used stage is undergoing conversion to be used as one of the boosters on the Falcon Heavy launch that will use these pads.
It's not that anyone is dodging an important question. It's that the question is, I'm sorry, naive. The benefits of space research are around you every moment of your life.
The Apollo program, for example, used some of the first integrated circuits. This work progressed to essentially all modern electronic devices.
Bruce Perens.