7 ms·
Stuck the landing! Congratulations! 10/10. Would land again.
by lvs 11y ago
Stuck the landing! Congratulations! 10/10. Would land again.
- rfrank 11y agoamazing
- kibwen 11y agoCompletely amazing! I'm sure I heard a "holy shit" or two there in the audience. :) EDIT: One question for the rocket scientists here: exactly how reusable do they expect these returned first stage rockets to be? What is the process of certifying that a returned rocket is fit to fly, and what components are most likely to need repairing/replacing with each launch?
- dmoy 11y agoA follow-up question to that would be - how much $$ do you save per launch by reusing the first stage?
- jacquesm 11y agohttp://www.space.com/21386-spacex-reusable-rockets-cost.html http://www.space.com/21386-spacex-reusable-rockets-cost.html ~75%.
- bryanh 11y agoThe money quote: > Musk said that a rocket's first stage accounts for three-quarters of its total price tag, so a vehicle with a reusable first stage can be produced at far less cost — assuming the hardware is fully and rapidly reusable. ~75% savings seems like a "best case scenario" number.
- jacquesm 11y agoGood enough for me. Even if it is only 25% in practice they'll own the market.
- mikeash 11y agoThey're already insanely cheap compared to most competitors. This should take them to being ludicrously cheap.
- jacquesm 11y agoLet's see who tries to imitate them and do a re-use, some real competition is what's needed next. Now for second stage re-use ;)
- TeMPOraL 11y agoAnd then for the crew capsule reuse... oh wait :). Seriously though, now I'm just waiting for updates on BFR / Mars mission development progress.
- mikeash 11y agoI think SpaceX is sufficiently motivated by their man at the top that they'll keep doing great things even in the total absence of competition. But it would still be great to see others go this way, to see different approaches tried and such. It sounds like some other launchers were looking at reusability plans before (Ariane had plans for some wacky thing that would fly back just the engines) but now that it's been demonstrated to work I imagine it will become much more serious.
- Tossrock 11y agoULA is already trying to imitate them with their announced 'Vulcan' concept, where the engines eject and parachute back, but that's (many) years away from actually happening.
- escape_goat 11y agoIf I understand correctly, even if they can only reuse the rocket motors, that would still be most of the 75% figure.
- __d 11y agoAside from the cost savings, the other goal of reusing boosters is to reduce the time between launches. The challenge for SpaceX is to inspect the booster, integrate a new second stage & payload, and relaunch in a few weeks. With a few years of work, it should be almost like a cargo jet turnaround. ULA's Vulcan plan is to parachute the engines and pumps back, catch the rope with a helicopter, inspect and reattach to a new set of tanks. That seems likely to be a little more complex to me.
- lmm 11y agoThe catching with a helicopter part is complex, but not time-consuming - either it works or it doesn't. The rest is probably if anything easier - I'd imagine SpaceX will have to tear down the booster entirely for inspection, at least for the first few hundred. These things are (or will be) built to be disassembled and reassembled, attaching engines and pumps to a new tank is not going to be a long and complex process.
- simonh 11y agoThe other important factor is how many times you get to re-use the stage, because that tells you the saving per launch. If you get to re-use it once, then on each flight you save 37.5% of the launch cost. If you re-use it again twice (3 launches of the first stage) you save 50% of the launch cost per flight (each flight costs you 1/3 of the first stage cost). And so on. That's not factoring in refurb and re-fueling costs, of course.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoLots. There's really not a lot of costs that can add up for reuse of these stages. It'll require a bit of cleaning up, a few new bits and pieces replaced and added, and a lot of inspection work. But most of the cost of the stage is in manufacturing the engines and tanks, so it should add up to enormous savings, even if it's relatively costly to reuse each stage compared to the theoretical limits. Edit: the flip-side is that the reliability and robustness improvements from reusability may be as big a win as cost. Currently it costs tens of millions of dollars to launch a rocket to orbit, which means it's almost never done except as part of a paid launch. Moreover, despite the seemingly high number of launches very few of those launches represent expanding the test-envelope much, every single launch is typically straight down the middle of the performance envelope, to maximize the chance of success. That results in learning very little about these vehicles despite how much they've been flown. By introducing reuse and dropping the cost of flight it may become possible to do real test programs, which would make it possible to determine the flight envelope characteristics of vehicles and help lead to improving designs over time.
- jacquesm 11y agoAnd with the amount of redundancy built in they might even go with 'acceptable loss' in terms of engines that cut out early in flight. Which makes you wonder how many engines they could lose and still complete a mission.
- mikeash 11y agoFalcon 9 is designed to withstand losing one engine and still make it to orbit. Reusability makes it more interesting. There's a lot of extra fuel on board now which could be used to make up for lost engines if you're willing to throw away the first stage.
- twistedpair 11y agoGood point. Orbcomm already paid off the booster. Now SpaceX can take it up for a joy ride for only a few hundred grand of gas and really fly the fins off it. I bet they relaunch this booster on their own dime as a demo.
- gozur88 11y agoDepends on the procedure they ultimately decided to use for the prep. Originally the the shuttle main engines had to be taken apart, with every part inspected before the next launch. If they have to do something like that there's not much point. But if they can get it to point where it's a matter of gassing it up for the next flight, that's a huge savings. Fuel is a few hundred grand for a rocket that costs sixty million dollars. It's nothing, basically.
- mikeash 11y agoHopefully it won't be anything like the Shuttle. The Shuttle was bleeding edge in a dozen different ways. The engines were extremely high performance and that made them fragile. SpaceX seems to build things a lot more low-key. They don't use fancy propellants, their engines aren't particularly efficient, and overall they seem to go more for robustness and simplicity. (Simplicity doesn't really apply for a crazy-ass landing scheme. But aside from that....) Obviously it remains to be seen, but I think it's likely to be a lot more gas-and-go than the Shuttle.
- gozur88 11y agoYes, I expect you're right about that, and furthermore I expect SpaceX will be willing to make substantial design changes in support of that effort.
- jacquesm 11y agoNARS but probably comparable to shuttle engines and body.
- kibwen 11y agoThe first stage rocket doesn't go nearly as high or as fast as the shuttle though, no? AFAIK the shuttle had to have its heat shield replaced after each return trip, and it landed aerodynamically rather than via rocket power. I'd presume that the powered descent of the first stage means that it doesn't need any sort of heat shielding, at the expense of more stress on the engines, thus requiring a bespoke inspection process.
- jacquesm 11y agoIt doesn't have a heat shield because it simply doesn't go fast enough relative to the atmosphere to need one, it does not 're-enter' the atmosphere at nearly the same horizontal speeds the shuttle did (from full orbital velocity down to landing speed). Even so, the stresses from heating up, cooling down, launch and landing are such that they will likely magnaflux that whole thing from one end to the other just to be sure there aren't any defects, especially until they have more experience, they'll pick it apart and inspect each and every bit to see how well it performed. Later on when they have much more data they might decide to swap out parts only every so many launches if possible.
- cornholio 11y agoThe Shuttle engines operate on hydrogen which burns very cleanly. RP-1 will leave the engine dirty with coking, so they definitely need to clean re-assemble each engine. On the other hand, the solid boosters of the Space Shuttle were severely damaged by the impact and corrosion of the sea water, after "recovery" they were essentially a source of parts for new boosters. Overall, I really hope they can improve re-usability above what the Space Shuttle achieved.
- jacquesm 11y agoThey did re-light the engines, curious how many times in a row they can pull that trick before contamination becomes a problem.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoHow reusable this first stage is? They'll have to study it meticulously to find out. But what they're aiming for is to be able to just refuel it, mount new payload on top, and relight it in the span of hours.
- kibwen 11y agoThat's an impressively ambitious goal. Has SpaceX mentioned any willingness to use returned first stage rockets to launch astronauts? That would be the ultimate expression of their confidence in this approach, though understandably it may be a long ways off.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoCan't find any direct quote about it, but I imagine they're thinking about it and considering it in not-so-far future, given that the new Dragon, which is going to be certified to carry astronauts, is designed to be capable to perform an abort at any time during the mission - which means it's supposed to be able to escape from the blast of an exploding first stage :).
- mikeash 11y agoIt's funny, with most vehicles you want to avoid being on a completely new, untested one. Think about it: would you be comfortable flying on a brand new 787 that had never been flown before, not even once? I sure wouldn't. Before long, maybe rockets will be like that too.
- kibwen 11y agoYou know, that's a very good point. :)
- robotresearcher 11y agoDepends if the first flight almost destroys the vehicle. It'll be very interesting to see how well this rocket stood up to the flight. Since orbital rockets are within epsilon of just blowing up every time any way! Incredible project. Reusable rockets. It's science fiction coming to life again, like the 1960s.
- tokipin 11y agoThis is in the "to be optimized" bracket. If they can get any kind of consistency landing even heavily strained rockets, they can reframe/readjust/redesign as necessary (like adding more support in areas etc).
- teleclimber 11y agoExactly. Now that they got one back they can actually start the process of figuring out what needs to be done to make the first stage as reusable as possible. It's a long road, but they can finally make some headway now.
- xvf33 11y agoYup, congrats to the whole team. Damn amazing achievement!
- byw 11y agoHistory is made!
- lcr94 11y agoHumanity just made progress! Amazing.
- fitzwatermellow 11y agoCongrats! Massive step into the era of reusable rockets.
- igravious 11y agoGot my daughter out of bed at T-5 to watch the launch sequence and possibly history being made. Thrilling to watch it with her, tried to give her an idea of how momentous this is. Wonderful. Congrats to all at SpaceX!
- jonkiddy 11y agoI had the whole family watch. They'll remember this moment for a long time to come. Well done!