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I'm sure SpaceX will land their Falcon 9 sooner or later but I think this goes to show that being able to hover makes things a lot easier. Real rockets can't b
by Symmetry 11y ago
I'm sure SpaceX will land their Falcon 9 sooner or later but I think this goes to show that being able to hover makes things a lot easier. Real rockets can't be set to any throttle like in Kerbal Space Program, most can't throttle at all. The Merlin's ability to throttle down to 70% is impressive, and the BE-3's ability to throttle down to 25% is very impressive.
- sandworm101 11y ago"Throttle" is a term for rocket engines, not rockets. Being able to throttle a single engine to 25% doesn't matter so much if you can instead shut down 3 of 4 engines and throttle the remaining. For a single-engine booster, 25% is still way too much thrust if you are shooting for orbit. A modern booster is 90+% fuel. So the empty or near empty returning booster will need an engine running at around 10% of launch thrust at the moment of landing. That's pretty much what SpaceX is doing by shutting down 8 of 9 engines and throttling the last to 80ish%.
- vectorjohn 11y agoIt's not pretty much what SpaceX is doing. Even down to 1 of 9 engines and throttled as far as they can (they can go to about 70%), it has too much thrust to hover. So the amount a single engine can throttle is indeed important. SpaceX plans to solve it by extremely accurate timing so they don't need to hover.