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SpaceX Launches NASA's Planet-Hunting Satellite, Successfully Lands Its Falcon 9 Rocket (theverge.com)
SpaceX launched NASA's TESS spacecraft Wednesday evening from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship following takeoff. This marks 24 successful landings for SpaceX now, notes The Verge. We will update this post once TESS is deployed into orbit. From the report: TESS is NASA's newest exoplanet hunter. The probe is tasked with staring at stars tens to hundreds of light-years from Earth, watching to see if they blink. When a planet passes in front of a distant star, it dims the star's light ever so slightly. TESS will measure these twinkles from a 13.7-day orbit that extends as far out as the distance of the Moon. The satellite won't get to its final orbit on this launch. Instead, the Falcon 9 will put TESS into a highly elliptical path around Earth first. From there, TESS will slowly adjust its orbit over the next couple of months by igniting its onboard engine multiple times. The spacecraft will even do a flyby of the Moon next month, getting a gravitational boost that will help get the vehicle to its final path around Earth. Overall, it will take about 60 days after launch for TESS to get to its intended orbit; science observations are scheduled to begin in June.
That those rockets fall on a drone ship, upwards and reusable.
I guess there will be one day that the news is that they didn't land successfully one of their rockets.
There is a serious savings when they re use a booster, but few of the existing recovered boosters will be saved in the future due to the advent of the Block 5 series which are slightly bigger, have retractable landing gears (rather than removable) and other improvements. Those are the more valuable boosters to save and re use. . The earlier ones are effectively out of date. They may very well use the older used boosters they do have on those missions where recovery is not an issue and they intentionally ditch them.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
You know what Falcon Heavy cost the taxpayers? Nothing, zilch, nada. How much money are we going to waste on ULA before we finally admit it exists to funnel tax dollars and nothing more? SLS is a sad joke in the face of the modern reality.
Good-bye
Ummm, no.
As of February they had reused 8 times, and 25% of their 2017 launches reused.
Book value on the first stages is estimated to be around $30 million.
Even if you imagine it costs them 1/3 of that to refurb, thats still $20 million saved per reuse.
By 8 times is 160 million.
Now, unless you are going to claim all possible development expenses against that, which would
be a bit foolish on a technology that is obviously in ongoing use, then it is easily going to be
a win already.
Note that in the start of 2018, they reused 7 stages for 9 launches...
Also people do not realize this often, but right now SpaceX has done 8 flights this year. The total worldwide is 38 at this time in 2018. This is 20% of worldwide flights. Last year was also around 20% worldwide. They launched more often than Soyuz, and more often than Long March LVs in 2017 (both have multiple type of vehicles, config and profiles, while the Falcon is mostly a single design). Of their 18 launches last year, 5 were reused, so until they are all at block 5 we won't really know the impact of reusability. But man, they are getting contracts after contracts and can launch at a pretty fast pace. Any normal corp would sit on this cash cow, but they are still pushing for reuse, falcon heavy, BFR and not slowing down.
Even if on the fence about reuse, or outright think it is foolish for any reason or are vocal again Elon/SpaceX (and yes, some criticism are valid), if you remove those from the equation, they have a pretty nice launcher: fast deploy, can do a lot of mission, incredible primary mission success rate. Sure they did not invent anything new in rocket science, but they still got here quite fast.