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SpaceX To Refly a Dragon Cargo Spacecraft (arstechnica.com)
Thelasko writes: Tomorrow's scheduled resupply mission to the International Space Station will mark the second time its Dragon capsule has visited the station. Ars Technica reports: "This particular Dragon spacecraft was sent to the International Space Station in September 2014, and it delivered nearly 2.5 tons of cargo to the orbiting laboratory. The Dragon returned to Earth about a month later, splashing down into the ocean. It is not clear how much processing SpaceX has had to undertake to ready the spacecraft for its second flight to the station, nor has the company released a cost estimate. It also had to manufacture a new 'trunk,' the unpressurized rear section of the vehicle, and solar panels."
Dragon has flown to ISS on multiple occasions but this will be the first time that a Dragon capsule that has previously flown to ISS is being launched for a second visit.
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Story was written yesterday. The launch is today (Thursday) at 21:55 UTC.
The pre-launch briefing was live yesterday and a recording is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?... . It has a lot details both about the Dragon and its cargo.
I wonder why they don't transfer the solar panels to the space station and do reentry on internal batteries only? Surely the station could use them as additional, or at least spare, panels.
As people have pointed out, the various Space Shuttles were reused quite a few times and the X-37 has flown multiple times. They both require significant refurbishment before they could be flown again - the Space Shuttle required basically a reskinning of the thermal protection tiles and for the X-37 it sounds like the tiles are good, but it requires significant refurbishment inside the spacecraft after it's long stays in orbit. It would be interesting to see how much work is required on the Dragon (and SpaceX hasn't really explained what needs to be done to refly a Falcon booster).
The problem is, if SpaceX has very efficient systems for turning around Dragons and Falcon boosters then they may want to keep it secret to minimize competition. On the other hand, if they have a very poor process, they want to keep it secret to give the appearance that they know what they are doing.
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7 came in first, with 1 coming up fast at the end to make it a race. 5 and 8 were neck and neck, with 8 taking third by a nose.
Late 2017 or early 2018 they are aiming to re-fly a falcon within 24 hours of landing, with no refurbishment (just refiling the tanks)
The first one that was reflown had much more extensive work done on it (all components that can wear were replaced)
The grids used to steer during re-entry are currently aluminum and replaced after each flight. They are going to replace them with titanium (at which point these will be the largest titanium castings anyone knows of in the world from what I've heard), at which point they expect to not need to replace them after each flight.
The stated goal is to be able to fly 10 times with minimal work and then get a refurbishment for another 10 flights (repeated up to 10 times)
This reads like an old UNIX Fortune entry.
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Since craft departing the ISS routinely carry garbage and unwanted materials and supplies, did the Dragon return home with junk in the trunk?
I'll see myself out.
If it was +3% capacity for each flight, that would add up over time.
But NASA is not interested in recycling components. If it was, they would have had the shuttles carry their external tanks up to orbit and kept them around, or would have/let SpaceX park their second stages in some orbit to be salvaged and re-used instead of having them re-enter and burn up.
Yes, it would take a little more fuel to do so, but not much. Just like it takes a little more fuel to be able to carry the landing equipment on a Falcon 9 first stage. Most missions have (and had) enough capacity in the raw lifting ability of the rockets to have done this.
Growing up, the Science Fiction authors always assumed that the first real orbital bases would be constructed largely using re-purposed cast-off components. But NASA and the ISS are all specially designed modules and heaven help you if you want to do something non-standard (look how much work it was to get the approval to hook the bigelow module to the ISS and the NASA plan to leave it unused for three years while it was attached to the station and then throw it away to burn up on reentry, on Jan 28 2017 they started talking about keeping it around instead)
The (current) NASA way is not to use whatever is available to get the job done, it's to aim for zero risk, no matter what the cost.