Quote of the Day
Read the whole thing. He expects the booster to ultimately have a one-hour turnaround time.
In the late 1990s I expressed the thought that, if he wanted, Bill Gates could afford to finance a manned Mars mission. My friend, Eric Engstrom, claimed it would cost more money than what Gates had. I hadn’t done any number crunching but was skeptical of that claim. It seemed Eric was using NASA numbers. I had briefly worked on a shuttle orbiter project and saw enough of NASA bloat to be very suspicious of NASA numbers. NASA, being a government entity, was going to spend something on the order of at least ten times more than what private enterprise would require.
Among other things, the technology NASA was using was absurd. Part of the extreme expense was that they would not allow technology that did not have the required reliability numbers. Fair enough, except to get those numbers required something like 20 years of use. The integrated circuits they had the numbers on were no longer manufactured! The circuit boards had to be double sided! Multiple layer circuit boards came out in the 1960s. But since the Shuttle was designed in the 1970s there wasn’t enough reliability data on them to make NASA happy. When I was working on my little project in the late 1980s NASA would not allow replacement parts to be anything other than what the original design used.
You should not be surprised that SpaceX is running technological circles around NASA efforts.
See also these videos:
This post was heavily inspired by an email from pkoning with the subject line of “SpaceX magic” and this link: SpaceX arm ‘catches’ Super Heavy rocket booster | Fox Business Video.
Years ago I read an article that talked about how NASA could have a cheap space station with very little reengineering of the Space Shuttle fuel tank. Which NASA considered disposable and allowed to burn up.
I’ve been a tank watcher since Starhopper. (if you know, you know)
SpaceX (Musk) has been told “That can’t be done, it’s impossible!” since it’s founding.
Government is almost never the solution to the problem.
Sometimes Government can be the Jockey. Usually it’s just the saddle.
More like the hobble.
It pleases me that someone else knows that “hobble” can be an object.
Sweet! That was nice. What a wonderful step in the right direction.
Now if we can just get passed the whole electric car-lithium mining-global climate change power grab?
Might get some real advancements going.
To be fair, if I had a goal of establishing a Mars colony, I wouldn’t try to get government funding and all the strings that comes with it. I’d find some way for rich people who can’t do math to pay me to signal their virtue as loudly and as profitably as possible.
Indeed, because if you have to pay lip service to DEI and government union contract rules and all that nonsense, you’ll never get anywhere.
You got to give it to him. He certainly has managed to do all that very well. Plus.
Now, if he could only get Starlink down to $20 bucks a month.
Was that the gantry from which the rocket launched?
That was the most accurate reentry yet.
Something NASA believes is STILLscience-fiction.
Yes, yes it is.
Put this in perspective…they launched a 10 million pound 22 story skyscraper to 100km altitude and flew it back to where it was first built and caught it in mid-air with accuracy of a few centimeters!
They caught a freakin’ building floating in mid-air!
If you had said this was possible ten years ago, people would have looked at you like you were a tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist!
I repeat: They caught a freakin’ building floating in mid-air!
While we may live in interesting times, sometimes they are quite exciting! I do love living in the future. I didn’t get flying cars; I got flying skyscrapers!
I’ve suggested before that building a 50 ft high impenetrable wall around D.C. and periodically air-drop in supplies of whiskey, Wagyu beef and hookers and otherwise just ignore it completely would be best for America.
I realize NASA is based in D.C., but it seems doing the same with its Florida and Houston locations would get us to Mars a whole lot sooner.
Rescue the Smithsonian museums and the Library of Congress and the National Archives. Ensure no politician escapes and then use one thermonuclear bomb. Cheaper and cleaner in the long run. Monuments can be rebuilt.
Nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Affirmative.
I’ve been trying to figure out reasons why they might use this technique, instead of the previous one of landing the booster on its feet onto a pad or a barge. I have a few guesses (first posted on “vineofliberty.com”:
One is that landing on a pad requires support legs on the booster, strong enough to hold it, and that’s parasitic weight. Another is that landing on a pad creates backspash from the engine exhaust, and for a booster this big that would be a lot of heat and shock to handle. A third is that a stable landing when supported by legs at the bottom of a long skinny object requires it to land accurately vertical, while this approach grabs it above the center of gravity so the location is critical but the angle not so much. But I haven’t yet seen a discussion that answers the question.
A reply arrived suggesting other possibilities:
“But “because it’s cool” and “try that one on for size, Bezos” can’t be discounted, either.” (Boris) Yup.
I read someplace it was, IIRC, “It always better to leave mass on the ground.”
So… parasitic mass is, for all intents, correct.
To further explain, legs on the booster are replicated and maintained 100s or 1000s of times.
Also, I would imagine booster legs would be less wind tolerant.
Every pound on the first stage costs you several pounds of payload. I read landing legs would have weighed upwards of ten tons. That’s a lot of payload to give up when you can leave the legs on the ground.
Admittedly, the technique is insane. But Musk convinced the engineers to find a way to do it. What’s a little scaling up? It’s just catching a Saturn V. How hard could it be?!?
The tower uses those arms to stack the stages in the first place, so you know they can take the load. Add a bit of differential GPS and a ‘Return To Start’ navigation system so the booster knows exactly where to go to be caught. The trick was rotating during the capture phase so the landing lugs would be caught by the arms correctly.
An absolutely amazing example of what good engineers can create when given the chance.
Just remember…ten years ago the response to the suggestion would have been “You want to do WHAT?!?”
Both in response to landing and reusing first stages by parking them on a barge 300 miles offshore let alone flying back a skyscraper and catching it like a football.
ULA and many people were laughing at SpaceX and claiming their launches were a failure because they forgot what business they were in. Their business is getting payloads to orbit. The customer doesn’t care about the details beyond bolting the payload to the top of the tall explody thing. They’re paying for the service. What do they care if the explody thing provider wants to crash their first stage into the sea or play around with it after it separates? They didn’t buy the first stage; they bought its services. Service fulfilled. Who cares what happens afterwards?
The other launch providers were acting like the booster was the product and the service rather than the product that provided the service. It was funny to them until SpaceX started succeeding. Then the accountants stepped in, saw how much money that would save per launch, especially when Falcon 9 first stages starting flying in the way the Shuttle promised but never delivered on, and had themselves a serious brown trousers moment. Unless you’re a government willing to fly at a loss to grease palms back home, anyone seeking value or cost control in space launch is bolting their stuff on top of stuff made by SpaceX. And even then governments are having a hard time competing with it!
Then the dude who made that happen said, “Let’s build a big freakin’ rocket out of stainless steel and snatch it out of thin air like Mr. Miyagi catching a fly with chopsticks. Then refly the entire stack.”
They would have been lining up white coats for you for that. Ten years ago.
Not now.
SpaceX is to spaceflight what the Internet was to proprietary networking and communications protocols. All it takes is money, a little crazy and no one in the way to say “Impossible!”