SpaceX Makes Aerospace History With Successful Launch, Landing of a Used Rocket (theverge.com) 260
Eloking quotes a report from The Verge: After more than two years of landing its rockets after launch, SpaceX finally sent one of its used Falcon 9s back into space. The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this evening, sending a communications satellite into orbit, and then landed on one of SpaceX's drone ships floating in the Atlantic Ocean. It was round two for this particular rocket, which already launched and landed during a mission in April of last year. But the Falcon 9's relaunch marks the first time an orbital rocket has launched to space for a second time. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk appeared on the company's live stream shortly after the landing and spoke about the accomplishment. "It means you can fly and refly an orbital class booster, which is the most expensive part of the rocket. This is going to be, ultimately, a huge revolution in spaceflight," he said. "It's been 15 years to get to this point, it's taken us a long time," Musk said. "A lot of difficult steps along the way, but I'm just incredibly proud of the SpaceX for being able to achieve this incredible milestone in the history of space."
I'm On a Boat! (Score:5, Insightful)
Major kudos to the SpaceX team! Thank you for letting me get to see the future.
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Baby steps man. Baby steps. The future isn't coming overnight.
Re:I'm On a Boat! (Score:5, Funny)
My direct flight to Australia from California in about 13 hours is just a boring rerun of Magellan's voyage, then? Except for the part where he got killed?
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A pipe with some fuel in it, that goes to the same place at the same speed as 60 years ago? This is what excites you?
My direct flight to Australia from California in about 13 hours is just a boring rerun of Magellan's voyage, then?
Are you saying your flight will be more newsworthy than Magellan's voyage? Now where's that TSA tip line... Also, I didn't know Magellan was Santa's half brother, 13 hours to sail halfway around the world I think you need some magic mermaids to pull your boat. Yes, the GP is kinda trolling but still... Musk is still putting cargo and satellites in orbit, I guess doing that cheaper is nice but if that was all we wouldn't care much. It's his ambitions for Mars that get people excited, but those are still way
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>I guess doing that cheaper is nice but if that was all we wouldn't care much
Speak for yourself. If he can pull off his plans we're talking an order of magnitude reduction in cost to orbit in the near future - that fundamentally changes a great number of things. Whether he's the one that takes things to Mars or not is irrelevant, he's opening the door.
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Just wait for Falcon Heavy (Score:5, Insightful)
With this huge milestone down, the next big one is Falcon Heavy - with 3 of these boosters landing for reuse.
We are on the cusp of a new age of space - prices are going to drop like crazy, and Mars just got a whole lot cheaper to reach!
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They seemed to be planning on a wet recovery for this set, with a ship in place and no news about helicopters. They might not bother with them until they're confident they can stabilize them for reentry and get the parafoils working. That at least one came down mostly intact is quite promising...
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Carbon fiber over an aluminum honeycomb core, which might be problematic, especially if it's vented to allow trapped air to escape. I expect they'll use the helicopter approach.
They just used a medium-heavy lift liquid fueled first stage on its second launch, they'll figure something out.
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Re:Just wait for Falcon Heavy (Score:5, Informative)
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.c... [nasaspaceflight.com]
"BREAKING news: Payload fairing LANDED SUCCESSFULLY. Fairing has thruster systems and steerable parachute. Was just shown pic of intact fairing floating in ocean."
Early versions rarely make profits (Score:3)
Interesting discussion. He made a comment there "economics don't make sense until next year". I assume that means the cost of refurbishment is currently more expensive than the value of the booster.
That would be more or less expected for the first iterations of any new project. Companies rarely make money on the early versions of a product because they are still working out the kinks and paying for the tooling and engineering. It will take them some time before it really starts to become profitable because they are still in the steep part of the learning curve and investment cycles. Normal and expected. If they are actually doing it and making a profit by next year then that is outstanding progres
Re:Just wait for Falcon Heavy (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the next milestone is rapid reuse :) Tweet from Musk this evening:
SpaceX has a backlog. It'll be nice to see if they can really up their launch rate and clear it all out.
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Eventually, mining asteroids.
Re:Just wait for Falcon Heavy (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm afraid that you'll need four launches to replace one heavy, and you end up with three week points in the apparatus.
Re:Just wait for Falcon Heavy (Score:5, Funny)
Well, at least it's not a month point....
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Re:Just wait for Falcon Heavy (Score:5, Informative)
With the heavy - will the side boosters always be able to land at the launch site, or will they need 3 drone ships?
Depends on the payload, they get more capacity with drone ships and if it's heavy enough they'll just be expendable. But given that the Falcon Heavy has a far higher max capacity than the heaviest current heavy lift vehicle (Delta IV Heavy) most launches should be able to land all three at the launch site, I imagine that's the main plan to drive costs down. Launch, land, refurb, fuel, launch again. Using the barge will have a much longer turn-around time, risk of bad weather conditions both on landing at on return to port, exposure to salty spray from the ocean etc. while going back to the landing site will give you almost the same conditions as when launching. If SpaceX manages to make them durable and have a short turn-around they could become a real workhorse doing launch after launch after launch.
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Launch, land, refurb, fuel, launch again.
That's the sticky wicket: how much refurb? (Too much and -- like the Shuttle -- it negates the benefits of reuse.)
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Musk said goal is 10 launches without refurb, 100 with.
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musk says a lot of things.. how about 9 out of 10 successfull landings first.
What's your track record? (Score:2)
Crickets...
Re: What's your track record? (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus, you doubters are dense. At least pick at SpaceX over their faults instead of spouting off with this bs.
If the guy only gets two throws per booster, the market is going to get rocked. If it's 10, the Big Boys are dead. 100 is almost unpredictable because there's no way to test the elasticity of the market that far out.
At some point, the boosters get too many flights. Take the old ones, and use them as the expenable middle stick in the big F9H or as a single stick throw. Or boost them all the way and make space station volume from them (STFU if you don't know about SkyLab or the other Apollo Application projects).
Pick on SpeX over their ability to sustain a culture of quality while maintaining innovation and risk taking. Big companies don't do this well, and I haven't heard a good story about how this will happen.
Or any other valid attack vector...
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Don't blame the kiddies if they don't know about a project that was abandoned and left to deorbit due to budget cuts not long after it was put in orbit. Compared to Mir it's a tiny footnote. Compared to the ISS it's ignorable. True, NASA did good work with it but they were unable to use it as it was planned.
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I am surprised that SpaceX is not planning to develop a space tug instead of throwing away the second stage after every flight.
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They are planning to make the second stage reusable within the next few years. Developing an S2->space-tug conversion would be a detour from Elon's laser focus on reusability.
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Take the old ones, and use them as the expenable middle stick in the big F9H or as a single stick throw. Or boost them all the way and make space station volume from them
You can't use a standard F9 booster as the "middle stick" in a Falcon Heavy, only as a "side stick". The center core of triple-stick rocket experiences a LOT of extra dynamic loading that doesn't occur in a single-stick configuration. It has to be radically redesigned to handle these loads.
In the post-launch press conference for this flight, Elon was asked about FH development progress. He said (paraphrasing here): "It seems like such a simple thing... just strap three rockets together and off you go. But n
Enough with the cynicism (Score:5, Informative)
musk says a lot of things.. how about 9 out of 10 successfull landings first.
Yes he says a lot of things and he backs a huge number of them up. His company managed to launch and land a booster twice and they did it successfully on their first try at landing a used booster. Gives pretty good confidence that SpaceX can replicate the results. More work to do of course but unlike snarky slashdot posters, he's actually doing the work. What have you done to advance human kind today?
This is a huge stepping stone. Your cynicism is misplaced.
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Yes he says a lot of things and he backs a huge number of them up.
But then he says shit like hyperloop and super-speed tunnel boring and colonize Mars.
The shuttle was a learning curve (Score:2)
It's also a bit of an argument against those people who push for mass production of a bleeding edge technology. Instead of having the dream of a few perfect space vehicles we had a number of space vehicles with exactly the same fault that had to be fixed or worked around at exactly the same time.
Space X are not in the situation of making a pile of id
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Space X are not in the situation of making a pile of identical rockets whether they want to or not
But that's the flaw in the traditional government-contract directed method of designing something.
Re:Just wait for Falcon Heavy (Score:5, Interesting)
F9 boosters are only travelling at about 2,300 m/s (64km AMSL) at MECO, compared to the space shuttle's 8,200 m/s (120km ASML) during reentry, so it's understandable that more work needed to be done to get the space shuttle flying again. Personally, I think you should be comparing the F9 booster rebuild to the SRB recovery and rebuild - what SpaceX are doing there is order of magnitude more complex.
That said, there's no real point in comparing the two - they don't have much in common apart from the fact they're both launch systems.
Re:Just wait for Falcon Heavy (Score:4, Insightful)
The only way to view this that makes sense is to view it as a cost proposition of dollars per pound lifted to a given orbit. An expendable Falcon 9 flight already costs less per pound to low earth orbit than the same flight using the Space Shuttle. SRBs alone could not complete the mission, it's the whole Shuttle system that you have to cost. A reusable Falcon 9 lowers that cost. The question becomes how great an economic efficiency SpaceX can develop, based on how low they can drive the cost of recovery and reuse and their fixed costs.
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Some people (Score:5, Insightful)
become politicians and try to enslave the population others take their money and move humanity forward. Imagine if more billionaires did this .
Re:Some people (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be the first to encourage people to innovate. But you're painting your portrayal of politicians with a rather wide brush. While we have some deplorable examples of politicians, we also have some who made a major positive contribution to the world.
Then we can talk about lawyers. You might not like them, but the alternative to using them is that we duke everything out or have shooting feuds to settle our disputes.
Re:Some people (Score:4, Funny)
Then we can talk about lawyers. You might not like them, but the alternative to using them is that we duke everything out or have shooting feuds to settle our disputes.
Okay, but what's the argument in favor of keeping lawyers?
Re:Some people (Score:5, Funny)
"Okay, but what's the argument in favor of keeping lawyers?"
Their physiology is closer to human than the standard lab rat, and researchers are less likely to feel remorse during Stage I trials of anything.
Re: Some people (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny. Ancient Athens did not have lawyers. They still had trials and courts and arbitration. Each side of a case represented himself. You don't need lawyers when the law is simple and short enough for the common citizen to understand.
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Get rid of government, and who do you suppose will keep the rich and powerful from killing anyone who gets in their way? And committing myriad lesser evils as well. That's after all what used to be business as usual.
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Congratulations to the SpaceX Team (Score:2)
Truly amazing and a real milestone in humanity reaching for the stars.
Well done!
Crazy Elon's Used Rocket Emporium (Score:5, Funny)
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Recovered twice now also. Wonder if they plan to use it again, later....
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Elon sayid he wants to fly each rocket hundreds of times, so yeah it's safe to say they plan to use it again, if at all possible.
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Probably not this one. It's already an older design, and too much work. Newer (block 5) designs are coming up that should be a lot simpler to relaunch.
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As Elon said at the post-launch press conference, [facebook.com] they plan to save this one and donate it to the Cape as a museum piece.
Not yet (Score:2)
Re:Not yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Bet your ass that rocket was gone over with a fine-toothed comb, at great expense.They won't have proven the economy of re-launching rockets until it's routine with zero to very few accidents and the finance numbers are in.
Be happy that Elon made those goalposts out of fiberglas so you can move them all by yourself.
Re: Not yet (Score:2)
When Elon Musk walks on Mars you'll complain (Score:3)
that he didn't run.
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"those poor bastards had to wear space suits to walk on Mars - he didn't even terraform it for them first"
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Do you honestly believe that it cost more to go over that stage with a fine-toothed comb than to manufacturer a brand new one and go over that with a fine-toothed comb? Or do you think that SpaceX simply build an F9 booster and then say "yup, that looks about right - it'll work"?
Glad to have had a very minor part. (Score:2)
BaeuHD is a dupe (Score:2)
And so is this story. I posted it earlier:
https://slashdot.org/submissio... [slashdot.org]
Always listen to experts (Score:2)
From Robert A. Heinlein, Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Good thing that Elon Musk listens to experts. I believe those experts are telling him that he can't go to Mars.
After so many years of reading science fiction it's nice to see some of it becoming science fact. Please keep pushing ahead Elon.
Re:Always listen to experts (Score:4, Interesting)
Excellent advice when you have an author looking after your interests who will ensure things work out in the end. But in real life, if you believe that, you should get to work on your perpetual motion machine now.
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But in real life, if you believe that, you should get to work on your perpetual motion machine now.
Or the EM drive!
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Just FYI, that particular line wasn't from one of his stories, it was part of the "collected wisdom of Lazarus Long", which were meant to be just interesting bits that described his (Heinlein's) mindset.
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I'm not trying to compare myself to an great scientists or claim that I'm an expert, but that's kind of how I deal with requests from my boss. He'll come up with a "stupid" idea and I'll proceed to shoot it down, and he's happy with that because as he's told me "I know you'll come back with a working solution after telling me it's impossible"*
It's just my method of problem solving - it comes across as very negative - but at the same time as coming up with problems my mind is thinking about how to solve or w
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>that breaks the laws of thermodynamics
That is usually an issue with a particular potential solution, not with the entire solution space for a particular problem.
Get back to work and come up with another solution to the same problem. :)
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I don't know where you are getting that from. The most high profile expert (Aldrin) has already told him and anyone else who wants to listen how to get there most effectively.
about the IP perspective ... (Score:3)
A great deal of technology went into the success of the re-useable rocket. I'm curious to know how much of that is shared. In bioscience, for instance, there is much sharing of information, presumably for the public good. Does Musk share his discoveries with other space programs?
We at Slashdot all have an interest in patents and copyright. We are of many opinions but seem generally antagonistic toward locking up Intellectual Property. Should space exploration developments be shared? How would that effect or offset the expensive research necessary to pull off this re-useable rocket success?
Re:about the IP perspective ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Musk share his discoveries with other space programs?
No. As has been pointed out on multiple occasions, SpaceX is doing little or no new science. They are doing groundbreaking, revolutionary engineering, but they're not discovering new things about the universe in order to do it, so there isn't anything to share of the nature you're referring to.
Beyond the engineering, they are also doing highly effective management. Management so effective that ULA partisans have claimed repeatedly that it's impossible. They're producing quality rockets, with continuously improving quality, with team sizes far smaller and far more effective than ULA can currently field. It may be that someone has written and published something about how they do that, but as with all things managerial, it's effectively impossible for an organization that isn't run that way to remake itself into an organization that is run that way.
SpaceX is successful not for what they are discovering, but for what they are not doing. They're not operating with a cost-plus contract with the US government, which has the same effect on an engineering project that an unlimited budget has on a movie (see Michael Bay), and they're not operating with a bloated, dysfunctional management structure. Those two simple things allow them to pull off what are being called engineering miracles, but they're not miraculous. It's just that our standards have become so absymally low thanks to decades of bumbling by Lockheed, Boeing, and yes, NASA, that when we encounter competence, it appears amazing.
When you get right down to it, Elon Musk doesn't have anything to share that would do any good. The Atlas and Delta rocket families already work, after all. Elon Musk could talk about the design decisions he made that made the Falcon 9 far cheaper, but Lockheed and Boeing have reams and reams of PowerPoint presentations about why those were the wrong decisions. They simply can't back down from that now.
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Well, they do share some new and useful data with NASA, for example their R&D on the PICA-X ablative heat shield and data collected from retro-burn landing that might be used for Mars landings in the future.
Of course there are also the ITAR restrictions on what information can be publicly shared on rocket technology.
But yeah, it's mainly working with engineering and economics that are available to everyone, a lot of off-the-shelf components in fact, just a better use of them.
It's not like there's an ino
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Re: Reusable - like the shuttle? (Score:5, Informative)
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The shuttle was an expensive learning system. Technology has advanced much since. The costs for orbital shots is much cheaper than two decades ago.
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Re:Reusable - like the shuttle? (Score:5, Informative)
"But they skimped on the maintenance, allowing tiles to get loose. Over time they loosened and fell off, resulting in major catastrophe."
Neither crash was caused by tiles falling off the Shuttle.
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Did have some quite close calls, mind you.
Re: Reusable - like the shuttle? (Score:5, Informative)
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"But they skimped on the maintenance, allowing tiles to get loose. Over time they loosened and fell off, resulting in major catastrophe."
Neither crash was caused by tiles falling off the Shuttle.
Challenger was caused the SRB's manufacturer cutting corners meaning that the O-Ring didn't function properly at low tempretures.
Columbia was caused by Insulation falling off the main fuel tank during launch and damaging the heat shield on one of the wings. This was largely because regulations required them to use a more environmentally insulation on the fuel tank which couldn't maintain the same structural integrity of the previous insulation. To quote Kermit the Frog "It isn't easy being green"
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Challenger was caused the SRB's manufacturer cutting corners meaning that the O-Ring didn't function properly at low tempretures.
Minor quibble: the O-Ring performed as designed - it was just that the launch was ordered when the environment out outside of acceptable launch criteria. It was way too cold outside. The engineers who knew the system were frantically urging not to launch. Managers chose to ignore the experts and design limitations.
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The problems with tiles were not due to deferred maintenance. They were engineering problems with the adhesives, etc.
It also took a lot of work to refurbish the engines on the Shuttle. They had to be completely removed from the craft after each and every mission, disassembled, and a lot of parts replaced.
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The adhesive worked fine for the FIRST flight. It was only over time and use that it failed.
The way you correct any problem caused by use of a vehicle is called MAINTENANCE. The proper maintenance routine for a shuttle would have involved testing the tiles to see if the adhesion was still good, and/or replacing them.
They did in fact replace tiles all the time, they simply failed to put in a good testing program, not understanding the issue of a loose tile hitting the left wing of the shuttle, damaging i
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Foam insulation saturated in water ice.
Re:Reusable - like the shuttle? (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition to the corrections to your post concerning the tiles, the Shuttle orbiter was basically a second stage (at best, a 1.5 stage). A significant minority of the dry mass of the system. The SRBs were also "recovered", but A) they landed in saltwater, B) "landing" is being generous, they hit *hard*, C) solid rockets aren't just a "refill and reuse", you have to disassemble and recast. The net result is that reuse didn't really save any money on the SRBs.
The Shuttle's TPS was a big maintenance problem (not an issue for Falcon). The SSMEs were also pretty high maintenance. Shuttle had to build a whole huge ET each launch. And NASA has such huge amount of heavy infrastructure overhead.
It's hard to say how well reuse of Falcons will go at this point. But it should at the very least fare far better than the Shuttle system.
It's also worth noting that Falcon is only the start of SpaceX's plans. While they've learned what to do and what not to do from the Shuttle program, they want their experience with F9 and FH to influence their design of ITS and its support infrastructure.
Re: Reusable - like the shuttle? (Score:2)
Not even close. There are several engines with higher thrust to weight ratio while having significantly more thrust, like F-1 or RD-170. The latter is the most powerful liquid fuelled engine ever built and actually also reusable, even though it never happened. SSME was more efficient (higher specific impulse) thanks to hydrogen fuel.
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The one that broke up over Texas was due to tiles being damaged. They did not fall off but were struck allowing heat to destroy the shuttle. The other was due to a failing o-ring. A lot of things to go wrong with possible catastrophic consequences.
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Ice came off the external tank and damaged the carbon fiber left wing leading edge.
No tiles involved, but don't let being wrong stop your rant.
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Not ice. Insulating foam.
Cold was a factor in the failure of the SRB o-rings in the first shuttle disaster, maybe that's what you are thinking of.
Re:History? (Score:5, Informative)
The SRBs fell, uncontrolled, into the ocean and were re-filled with firecracker stuff. It was always only marginally economical to reuse them. In contrast, the Falcon 9 is a liquid fueled rocket with on-board avionics, which soft-lands in a usable state. Its engine has been tested after landing, without any refurbishment at all.
The new goal is to turn around a booster and re-fly it in 24 hours.
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The new goal is to turn around a booster and re-fly it in 24 hours.
Which means it'll have to be the more difficult task of returning the 1st stage to the launch site as recovering it from the drone ship will take much too long.
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Which means it'll have to be the more difficult task of returning the 1st stage to the launch site as recovering it from the drone ship will take much too long.
They'll launch it from the drone ship :)
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I dunno, I watched the webcast and that leeward fin will definitely need a new paint job. So, like I said, I dunno about 24hr turn around so far.
In the press conference after the launch, Elon Musk specifically said that the grid fins would be made from titanium instead of aluminum on the final revision of the Falcon 9 so it would not suffer from that problem.
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It's quite possible they're not aiming to reuse the same components on the same booster. It would be just as efficient to replace certain items (grid fins, legs, etc) an already refurbished component. Those components could be refurbished and swapped into a subsequent booster for relaunch.
Quite frankly, I don't think it matters if a booster contains the same reused parts or whether it contains reused parts from a different booster. The aim is to get a quick launch turn-around.
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See above. The SRBs didn't so much land as hit the ocean at highway speeds, bob around in corrosive saltwater, have to be fished out, taken back, fully disassembled, recast, fully assembled, with a large fraction of the parts replaced.
If you want the airplane equivalent, it would be as if every plane flight, instead of landing, crashed into a mucky swamp and banged the plane up badly, ruining half the parts, and the whole airplane had to be broken down, large chunks of the plane replaced, and oh, instead o
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Here's NASA's description of the process of retrieving & refurb'ing the SRBs
https://oce.jpl.nasa.gov/pract... [nasa.gov]
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A much simpler problem to solve and solids don't have the same performance.
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It's a tough thing to try and translate the Shuttle's SRB refurbs across to SpaceX's goals. We all know the costs of complete Shuttle refurbs was prohibitive - boosters were a part of that, the throwaway main tank, tiles and engine inspections, etc. It was man-rated, and that made it more expensive of course, but the Shuttle was a very complicated machine. We never really got the launch cadence to a point where things could get cheaper, because it cost upwards of half a billion every time we launched. I wou