SpaceX Plans Drone Ship Landing On January 17th (nbcnews.com) 115
Rei writes: With the world's first successful low-speed landing of an orbital rocket's first stage complete, SpaceX looks to continue that success by attempting its second landing — this time, on their new drone ship in the Pacific. While SpaceX has announced plans to turn their successfully-landed rocket, reportedly flight-ready, into a a museum piece, the stage they recover next may be SpaceX's first chance to prove the mudslinging of their competitors wrong and show that Russia's worries are well founded. That is, if they can successfully pull it off.
Re:Ship landing? (Score:5, Informative)
This argument was made back when the Shuttle Program SRBs were ocean-landed and recovered, if I remember right they were never reflown either.
Re:Ship landing? (Score:5, Informative)
Shuttle SRBs were never reflown as the same unit, but they were disassembled for parts to use on later boosters - which were a combination of new and refurbished parts from various flights. Several booster components (structural/aerodynamic parts, mainly) from STS-1 were still being flown on STS-135, the final mission.
I can't speak for the actual economics of the practice, but on paper it looks like it has several obvious advantages, particularly when, as a solid rocket, the largest and most complex component is consumed during flight.
Re:Ship landing? (Score:4, Informative)
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The segments were refurbished, refuelled and assembled back into stacks for reuse.
Re:Ship landing? (Score:4, Insightful)
They're essentially reusing the steel cylinder. Presumably they strip it, media-blast it to remove all traces of its previous use down to bare metal, inspect it with sonic or magnaflux or X-ray or pressure test, along the way somewhere confirming its dimensions are still within spec and haven't ballooned due to use, then if it passes, clean again and build it in a similar fashion to if it had been a new steel cylinder being built as a rocket motor...
Don't get me wrong, it's not cheap to build a new steel cylinder capable of handling the pressures that the SRBs take, but if my assumptions about the reuse procedures are even somewhat in the ballpark it's more like recycling than a simple reuse. It saves money, but it's not a simple matter of recovering the spent SRBs from the ocean, checking a few things, buffing the paint and repainting anything that needs it, and casting a new propellant grain into them.
I'm assuming that SpaceX's goal is to collect the landed rocket, clean it, run diagnostics on its active systems, perform some materials tests at places that are known to have suffered load like where the legs attach and at the endcaps where the thrust pressures are highest, touch-up the paint, fill it with its liquid fuel again, and launch it again, possibly all at the same spaceport.
Re:Ship landing? (Score:5, Insightful)
The two things that are different between the Shuttles SRB situation and SpaceX's Falcon situation is that the SRBs underwent a significant impact with the ocean and a prolonged dip in salt water, so they literally needed to be stripped down, checked for stress issues etc etc, especially as there was a lot of rubber seals in there which are all suspect after that salt water bath. The Falcon undergoes none of that, so hopefully requires less stringent checks before it can be reused.
Re:Ship landing? (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm not disputing that, but the point is that the SRB undergoes a lot more individual high impact events than the Falcon does - the Falcon gets a pretty good ride compared to what happens with the SRB and thus the re-use scenario is different.
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There's another big difference: the SRBs had walls of 8 mm thick steel. The F9 uses 0.4 mm of aluminium.
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The Falcon 9 is built more like an eggshell whereas the SRBs was built more like a ship.
That actually makes a big difference. The SRBs should have been more reusable than the Falcon 9 is, although the SRBs needed more rework each time.
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It saves money, but it's not a simple matter of recovering the spent SRBs from the ocean, checking a few things, buffing the paint and repainting anything that needs it, and casting a new propellant grain into them.
It's debatable too whether it actually saves money. Maybe if the launch rates ever reached the projections it would have, but as it is they just about broke even.
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Part of the refurbishment procedure included using a hydr
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Yes, they were definitely reused - infact, the skirt and the nose cone are the two parts which would be most suspect out of the stack, due to the vertical impact with the ocean that the SRBs underwent (the skirts take most of that impact, and the nose cones undergo their own impact, while the rest of the stack "bobs" more gently to a horizontal position).
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The point is to recover the stage for easy future use. How easy will it be to reuse a stage which has been floating in the sea for several hours (minimum).
Also, a longer term plan is to be able to touch down on land, the sea provides a good environment to practice soft landings because when you fail you are a really long way from any people/infrastructure and because with the motion of the landing ship, once you can reliably do sea landings, surface landings should be relatively easy
Re:Ship landing? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also not just about floating in seawater. The shuttle SRBs, for example, hit the water at highway driving speeds. It's basically a highway-speed crash.
But yes, floating in seawater is not exactly conducive to reuse of sensitive components ;) It's like saying, "Hey, toss your car in the ocean, have it bob around for a couple hours, then fish it out, dry it off and start it up, it'll surely be fine!" Only rockets have far tighter tolerances than cars - cars are sturdy, heavily built things while rockets are giant aluminum balloons that weigh a couple dozen times more when full than empty. Cars pump their fuel through tiny nozzles and drain a half dozen liters per hour of driving, while rockets can drain a swimming pool's worth of fuel and burn it in a manner of seconds. Cars roll down roads and face "some" air resistance, while rockets face so much that the compression heating burns the paint off of them. Etc.
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Also, a longer term plan is to be able to touch down on land, the sea provides a good environment to practice soft landings because when you fail you are a really long way from any people/infrastructure and because with the motion of the landing ship, once you can reliably do sea landings, surface landings should be relatively easy
That was originally true, but the order kind of ended up getting swapped: SpaceX has already successfully landed a Falcon 9 first stage on land, back at the launch site (different pad, but nearby): https://youtu.be/1B6oiLNyKKI [youtu.be]
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The point is to recover the stage for easy future use. How easy will it be to reuse a stage which has been floating in the sea for several hours (minimum).
Also, a longer term plan is to be able to touch down on land, the sea provides a good environment to practice soft landings because when you fail you are a really long way from any people/infrastructure and because with the motion of the landing ship, once you can reliably do sea landings, surface landings should be relatively easy
Also the reason for an ocean based landing is so the booster does not have to do a U turn to come back to the take off location. This means that Space-X can launch a larger payload because they don't need as much fuel for the return. Or do it cheaper.
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Salt water is a killer on structures and engine components. Even being near the sea is what killed one of the Falcon 1 launches, salty air caused corrosion of a bolt I believe. Soaking highly complex rocket components in it is exponentially worse. While you could probably build a rocket to soft land in the water and survive, refurbishing it to launch again would be a nightmare.
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I'm not sure I understand the point of a ship landing. If you want to end up on a ship, it seems like a close-to-ship splashdown and recovery would be much simpler and cheaper to implement.
It's easier, but not a good idea if you want to re-use the equipment. Dunking hot rocket engines into cold saltwater turns out to be a bad thing for the hardware.
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Salvage law is actually much more complicated than that. The key issue here is that the returned space hardware is not abandoned, so just taking it would be theft or piracy. But the main reason SpaceX doesn't want itts rocket in the water is the same reason you don't want to give your car a few hours dip in salt water.
Re: Ship landing? (Score:2)
The end goal is a landing at the space port, right near the launch pad - turn-around in a few days, so they can get to 50 launches a day on an ongoing basis. Watch the vision video on their website.
As far as landing at sea goes - they have the ships and they want their vehicle dynamics control to be able to handle the challenge. It will help improve correctness. Land landings will benefit from the improved algorithms. If the extant regimes get too bitchy it gives them additional options too. Plus, I du
Re: Ship landing? (Score:4, Informative)
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At first it was just to prove to everybody that they could land accurately enough to be safe, and it wouldn't land in a populated area.
But they still need the boat because the center first stage of Falcon Heavy will be too far downrange for a land landing. They want to eventually be able to refuel the stage on the boat and launch it back to an on-shore landing pad.
Re: Ship landing? (Score:1)
So the old one... (Score:2)
Makes me wonder if his wife is going to play Tiffany Case in the remake of Diamonds are Forever...
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They have three now - "Just Read The Instructions", "Of Course I Still Love You", and this one, whose name has not yet been announced (it's built from a barge called the Marmac 303). It's not clear what they're planning with Just Read The Instructions at this point, it may be permanently retired.
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That would be the Just Read The Instructions then that went back to the owner; it had been taken out of service and replaced with the Of Course I Still Love You.
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Mudslinging?! (Score:2, Insightful)
I got baited into clicking on the mudslinging link in the summary and I saw no such thing. The worst I saw is X's competitors just mentioning the engineering hurdles that X will have to overcome to have a reusable vehicle. How is that mudslinging?
Re:Mudslinging?! (Score:5, Funny)
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Jeff Bezos has been that annoying smug asshole with an ego too big for his accomplishments.
I would have said the opposite. What is interesting about Blue Origin is how little they've been interested in press coverage. Mostly their attitude seems to be "let's build stuff; not talk about it." Space-X, and Musk, are constantly getting interviews, getting press coverage, discussing future plans and blue-sky concepts; Blue Origin, and Bezos, almost never discusses the future plans.
(a quick google search tells me that Blue Origin gets 1/30 of the news coverage hits that SpaceX does)
What Blue Origin and SpaceX did are completely different ...
Yes, that part is t
Re: Mudslinging?! (Score:1)
It's nice that the two projects exist, so that fanboys can team up.
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Re:Mudslinging?! (Score:4, Interesting)
Submitter here. I actually tried to come up with a better word but couldn't. They're really "slinging" doubt, but "doubtslinging" isn't a word. I thought of "FUD", but that implies a point of view, that the other side is deliberately trying to scare people off with misinformation, and that would be taking things too far.
Some of you with better English language skills than I can surely come up with better phrasing that's not overly wordy.
Re:Mudslinging?! (Score:4, Interesting)
They're really "slinging" doubt, but "doubtslinging" isn't a word. I thought of "FUD", but that implies a point of view
FUDslinging would actually be a pretty scrumtrulescent word.
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It's lying with statistics.
Essentially, it is an argument that the sunk costs of infrastructure and the factory are greater than those of the rocket, and that building a rocket 30% larger that can return undamaged is more expensive than the ULA plan of ejecting the engines alone and having them descend under a hang-glider and then be caught mid-air by a helicopter.
Because of their analysis, I am thinking of asking for a brand-new airliner every time I take a flight :-)
The full economics of re-use can't be a
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I'm not sure that the second stage could be returned, first it's single Merlin vacuum engine only has 934kN thrust which I don't think would be enough to de-orbit without burning up. Now what might be really interesting is just parking them in orbit, 8 or 9 vacuum rated engines with fuel and oxidiser tanks might be handy. The Merlin vacuum is rated for multiple restarts, refuel enough of them and a Lunar, Martian or L5 mission get a leg up without too much added cost.
Second-stage re-entry (Score:3)
No, the second stage really gets to orbit and is beyond propulsive re-entry. It would need a heat-shield and would have to dissipate a lot of speed through heat and ablation. SpaceX has a really good phenolic heat shield technology which they use on Dragon, it's capable of direct ballistic re-entry from Moon or Mars transfer orbits, and can be re-used after the lower-energy re-entry from LEO. But obviously lifting one and the other necessary components reduces the payload weight to orbit.
Musk continues to t
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From what I've heard they've given up on second stage return with the Falcon 9/Heavy program. I would imagine it is technically possible but it probably decreased the effective payload too much to be viable. They've already pushed the height of the rocket to the max withing the current rocket diameter to get the (impressive) return to launch site capability. They do intend for full reusability when (hopefully) they build the Falcon X with its significantly more efficient Raptor engines.
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Drone Ship Landing (Score:2, Funny)
Landing is cool. But how are they going to get the drone ship to fly in the first place? Is it like the Helicarrier in The Avengers?
Re:Cart before horse (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cart before horse (Score:5, Interesting)
All we really know is that it landed. We don't know how flight ready it was for another launch, I imagine neither did SpaceX. So this first one I don't think they had any other choice but to strip it completely apart and test everything and then putting it all back together might not make sense. Next landing they probably know what needs replacing and can relaunch the rest. Makes sense to me at least.
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I don't think they plan on stripping it down, I think they plan some low-power static test fires to verify that it would be able to achieve full thrust again. I don't know if they can do that without stripping it down, but I would imagine that they would generally want to keep it as whole as possible just for posterity.
It BELONGS in a MUSEUM!
Re: Cart before horse (Score:2)
Except they're not doing that they've announced that they're going to inspect it and then stick it on 39A and fire it up for a static fire. They do that for all flight rockets, put them on the pad and go through the entire launch process except at the point where a real launch would release the rocket they shut the engines off.
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As much as anything, SpaceX is a monument to Musk's ego.
And the first one of these to succeed has as much PR value as it does technical value, probably more. By putting it in a museum his place as a pioneer of private space travel is assured.
This is as much about waving around his metaphorical penis as it is about space flight. When you're a billionaire doing such things, you get to decide which one goes to the museum.
Re: Cart before horse (Score:2)
Musk is on his way to being a new Howard Hughes. The Spruce Goose is in the near future. The years of weirdness in the Vegas penthouse can't be that far off. He truly is an admirer of Tesla and wants to follow Tesla's path. Maybe Bezos can be his Alistair Crowley.
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Although I might be pretty long in the tooth before we get to hear the story unless somebody burglarizes the wrong warehouse again.
Re:Cart before horse (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as anything, SpaceX is a monument to Musk's ego.
...and if his little venture is sufficiently successful in getting mankind into space on a regular basis, let alone as permanent residents, I honestly don't give a damn if it pumps his ego or not.
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Oh, for sure. I don't disagree at all.
Which is why I said When you're a billionaire doing such things, you get to decide which one goes to the museum.
He can stroke his ego and waggle his metaphorical penis all he wants ... he's the one footing the bill.
I'm not required to like the man. But he is pushing spaceflight forward, and he can crow about it all he wants -- right up to putting stuff in museums if they want it.
Re:Cart before horse (Score:5, Informative)
With all due respect, they can waste their money in whatever fashion they want to - the primary mission is to launch something, if they accomplish that and then want to land the next 100 boosters so Elon Musk can make his own private modern version of Stone Henge out of them, thats his affair.
Or, you simply realise that landing and reusing are only loosely linked, in that you cannot reuse until you land, but you don't have to reuse just because you land.
Re:Cart before horse (Score:5, Informative)
NASAs money is there as progress payments to fulfil NASA contracts, and the ability to land a booster is not part of NASA's contracts with SpaceX. As long as SpaceX is fulfilling the contracts, NASA cannot complain.
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NASA has *always* purchased launch services, they have never built a booster or vehicle themselves.
Investing in improvements to launcher knowledge and advancement of technology is 100% part of NASA's mission, just as improving knowledge and technology in the aviation sector is as well - which is why they still carry out experiments in both areas.
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You do realise that the Shuttle was operated by other companies for NASA right? NASA didnt operate it.
And NASA bought launch services all the time on third party launchers, the Shuttle was far from the only platform NASA used.
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SpaceX is renting the use of that property, what they do with it is none of NASA's business so long as they stay within the law.
They used the barge the first couple of times in order to demonstrate to the FAA they could aim for a small target, which they did. Landing those rockets would have been a bonus.
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Its also worth noting that NASA is not a regulatory agency, its a development agency - it can rent stuff to SpaceX, it can buy services from SpaceX, but it cant do shit to enforce regulations or oversight on SpaceX.
SpaceX comes under the remit of the FAA.
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More than half of the 20 launches so far were either wholly non-NASA (the vast majority) or had a significant non-NASA secondary payload (minority).
Out of the 29 launches planned for 2016, 22 of them are wholly non-NASA.
Out of the 16 launches currently penciled in for 2017, 11 of them are wholly non-NASA.
I dont think SpaceX needs NASA, I think NASA needs SpaceX.
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About half of the financing comes from NASA. Admittedly SpaceX can still waste money like in any way they like, but at that point it would be appropriate if NASA reduced the money they put in since there clearly is too much of it floating around.
Doesn't work that way, you can't go to Apple and say you make too much money so sell me an iPhone for half the price. Your choices are:
1) Buy something else
2) Not buy it
3) Create it in-house (since you're NASA)
There are alternatives, but not cheaper ones. Leaving the ISS stranded is not an option. And in-house you get a massive government project with pork to every district. But if you want to start your own rocket company, remove the bloat and undercut SpaceX on price just do it and NASA will be happy to a
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About half of the financing comes from NASA. Admittedly SpaceX can still waste money like in any way they like, but at that point it would be appropriate if NASA reduced the money they put in since there clearly is too much of it floating around.
Doesn't work that way, you can't go to Apple and say you make too much money so sell me an iPhone for half the price. Your choices are:
1) Buy something else
2) Not buy it
3) Create it in-house (since you're NASA)
There are alternatives, but not cheaper ones. Leaving the ISS stranded is not an option. And in-house you get a massive government project with pork to every district. But if you want to start your own rocket company, remove the bloat and undercut SpaceX on price just do it and NASA will be happy to award you contracts. What are you waiting for?
In business, I have literally seen cases where a customer tells the supplier they are making too much money, and forces a price-reduction on them.
Just because you cannot do it with Apple doesn't mean large companies and consortia cannot.
(note: Not arguing about whether NASA should, only that it is done)
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You could very easily re-word that to say "We think we can get your product cheaper from someone else, and if you don't drop the price we will do so." It only works if that's actually true, though. When you try to force suppliers who are offering competitive prices to take a cut you get a lot of resistance.
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Just to clarify: I've seen contracts where any cost-saving incurred by the supplier is partially passed on the customer - this is a trait in contracted manufacturing, where you get goods produced as a set, and if the supplier manages to optimise production, the savings are shared.
Meanwhile, if the supplier cannot hit the target costs, they don't bear all the expenses (only most of it)
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Apparently, it's an affair that many Slashdotters believe they are participating in.
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Also at this point recovery isn't factored into the cost of the launch... It's just gravy. They charge $50M because they assume the booster is a write off.
Once, they start recovering these with regularity, the pricing structure will sudd
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With all due respect, they can waste their money in whatever fashion they want to - the primary mission is to launch something, if they accomplish that and then want to land the next 100 boosters so Elon Musk can make his own private modern version of Stone Henge out of them, thats his affair.
Actually, I think SpaceX's primary mission is to go to Mars. The commercial launch business is just to fund the Mars R&D. I'm guessing it's also why SpaceX continues to be privately held - their long-term goal isn't to "maximize shareholder value," it's to put people on Mars.
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You misunderstand - the primary mission each time SpaceX launch is to launch something. What they do after the payload is safe is unrelated to the primary mission.
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"Wouldn't it be nice if ((Insert Company Name Here)) were to actually, you know, pay dividends with that first dollar that they earned? Just a thought, but so far the one dollar they recovered is going to a frame, but it's totally profit if we wanted to but we don't want to so..."
Try having more than about four weeks patience here. They landed one, they're just about to land another. Why does an extra four weeks delay in getting a rocket to refurbish and relaunch matter to you so much?
Drone Ships (Score:1)
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I agree. Still, considering how cleanly the last landing went, I think they may have made some substantial improvements in the landing system during their hiatus. I'd give them much better odds than on the previous attempts. Whether they can keep it upright long enough to refuel to fly back to land... well that's a whole different kettle of fish.
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I really doubt that their first "intent for reflight" rocket will have its maiden reflight from the drone ship. They're surely going to go over it with a fine-toothed comb on land before relaunch.
The concept of refueling at and relaunching from the drone ship is pretty exciting for the future, mind you. If they really can get the reliability that high and the maintenance that low, it'd enable all sorts of things.
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What's the alternative? Think long and hard on the logisitics of getting a giant "pencil tube" 41m long and 3.6m wide (224 x 12 feet) from a position balanced on end on a platform hundreds of miles away from shore in the open ocean, back to a (logistically) inland landing facility. What sort of infrastructure do you need? And is it worth investing in it if the long term plan is to fly it home anyway?
Besides, all the hard flying has been done already. It's not like you're doing another second-stage to or
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The drone ship is a ship. It moves - it sails to and from port. There are cranes in port. They've already loaded and offloaded rockets from the barge in the past.
Each "hop" is strain on your rocket, new risk, and using up the lifetime of parts that have limited lifespan. Last I heard they were only hoping for a couple dozen flights out of each rocket.
That said, flying back has been mentioned in the past as part of the plan. But for the first go-around, that's very unlikely. They're going to want to give
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Whether they can keep it upright long enough to refuel to fly back to land... well that's a whole different kettle of fish.
Do you actually know that that is the plan? I assumed they'd return the first stages by sea. They need the drone ship because in some configurations and for some missions they can't spare the fuel to fly back to the launch site.
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It's been a long time so I can't swear to the veracity, but I'm pretty sure that was the plan - land on the drone ship to refuel for the flight home. Figure - after landing at sea you really only have two options:
- refuel it so it can fly home under it's own power
- try to balance a 12-story pencil on it's end for the duration of a several hundred mile sea voyage to land (or alternately build all the hardware for a massive robotic "tilting gantry" into the barge so that it can be grabbed along its whole len
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It's not to be "balanced" for the return journey - the plan has always been to weld steel shoes to the deck to hold it in place. And it's very bottom-heavy. It's not at all at risk of falling over.
The way to transport it off the barge is called a crane, it's already been done, and it's not tricky.
The "compelling reason" is because rocket launches are complex procedures in the best of circumstances, that's anything but the best of circumstances, and they don't even know if the thing is flightworthy. And t
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Oh, and as for the size of the crane you need? This size [dailymail.co.uk] (right hand side, yellow - the cab is in white for a size comparison). And as for how you transport them? Like this [quoracdn.net]. Same way as they already do.
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Drone on drone action? (Score:1)