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SpaceX's Reusable Rockets Win US Air Force General's Endorsement (bloomberg.com)
As the military looks to drive down costs, the head of U.S. Air Force Space Command said he's "completely committed" to launching future missions with recycled rockets like those championed by SpaceX's Elon Musk. "It would be 'absolutely foolish' not to begin using pre-flown rockets, which brings such significant savings that they'll soon be commonplace for the entire industry, General John W. 'Jay' Raymond said," reports Bloomberg. From the report: "The market's going to go that way. We'd be dumb not to," he said. "What we have to do is make sure we do it smartly." The Air Force won't be able to use the recycled boosters until they're certified for military use, a process that Raymond suggested may already be in the works. "The folks out at Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles that work for me would be in those dialogues," he said, declining to specify when certification could take place. "I don't know how far down the road we've gotten, but I am completely committed to launching on a reused rocket, a previously flown rocket, and making sure that we have the processes in place to be able to make sure that we can do that safely."
The fuel analogy does not seem to hold, the wing analogy seems to hold in our case, but the devil is in the details.
Thinking by analogy in engineering gives you completely random (and usually wrong) results.
this is a good example of thinking by analogy:
" the rocket is carrying the fuel it needs for the landing with it to space. Carrying the fuel it needs is the biggest problem every rocket has, and now, Elon is adding EVEN MORE fuel to it."
if you take time to reason from principles, it becomes quite obvious why adding about 30% more fuel to enable landing can be a very good trade-off in some situations. (in other cases they use non-reusable first stages for larger carrying capacity, so they are always close to the optimum)
In some cases having a wing can be a good trade-off too: for example for a small unmanned space shuttle, a delta wing is a very efficient solution, if you have a runway and atmosphere.
Rocket science is really too complicated to explain it in a comment.
" the rocket is carrying the fuel it needs for the landing with it to space. Carrying the fuel it needs is the biggest problem every rocket has, and now, Elon is adding EVEN MORE fuel to it."
Surprisingly few rocket launches are sent into orbit with a full tank. They don't need to make the rocket bigger as they are just using some excess fuel capacity of the rocket. The extra fuel is almost a rounding error in the cost and a little extra in an otherwise underutilized tank for the landing is no big deal in most cases. It's a practical solution for a wide variety of circumstances.
In some cases having a wing can be a good trade-off too: for example for a small unmanned space shuttle, a delta wing is a very efficient solution, if you have a runway and atmosphere.
There are corner cases for everything but as a general proposition it is safe to say that wings on a spacecraft are approximately as useful as tits on a bull. There are better solutions than a lifting surfaces most of the time. There are very good reasons why we don't use them on the majority of spacecraft.
Rocket science is really too complicated to explain it in a comment.
Nobody is trying to explain all of rocket science. But a comment is more than adequate to correct a clearly wrong statement from someone who seems to claim that the space shuttle was somehow an efficient or good solution.
>No more paying Boeing 20 times the amount needed?
(as hidden subsidies, so that they can still exist on the world market?)
No need to hide it, Trump just claims Bombardier has an unfair advantage, gets tariffs levied against them as competition, and ignores any inconvenient facts about US government support of Boeing. Sorry, not "ignores", "lies and says they don't exist".
America has a post-fact economy now.