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SES-10 Launching to Orbit on SpaceX's Flight-Proven Falcon 9 Rocket

200 points by loourr 10y ago

kilroy123 10y ago
I wonder if they'll really save money right away doing this. I imagine they'll spend a lot on inspections and getting things 100% right. Either way, it's an amazing achievement.
- tomlock 10y ago
  I also wonder this! CRS-8 was launched on the 8th of April this year, so given that the launch of SES-10 is slated for Q4 2016, that means there's like, 6/7/8 months for the turnaround. But I'm hopeful that we'll see an assembly line of rockets landing, being inspected, and being launched, sometime in the future :)
  - rst 10y ago
    The delay between landing and relaunch has less to do with refurb on this particular booster, than with the series of tests that they're doing on other returned boosters to convince both the customers and their insurance companies that they generally come back in re-flyable condition, which have been happening on and off for months. Among other things, a different booster has been put through at least three full-length test-fires at their proving ground in Texas. It isn't clear how much refurb will be required generally, beyond replacing some of the surface thermal protection that came back visibly dinged up. (Well, at this point, SpaceX knows what it took to refurbish one, but I'm not aware of any public statements about it yet.) But they're certainly acting like the propulsion systems don't need much -- the very first returned booster (the one now on permanent display outside the SpaceX factory) was re-fired on the launch pad within weeks of return, without having ever left the Cape, just to prove that they could.
    - colechristensen 10y ago
      They would have launched sooner, but public opinion is swayed too much by failure. Engineers and money men don't really care, failure is interesting and valuable. Unfortunately, so is public opinion and support... and every perceived failure has a million armchair rocket scientists shitting on SpaceX because people loove to do that sort of thing... so they have to be unduly careful about it.
      - avian 10y ago
        If that would be the case, SpaceX wouldn't tweet explosion videos on every failure or have live streams of their launches. They would take the approach of Blue Origin that only publishes carefully edited marketing footage where everything always seems to go perfectly.
      - pastullo 10y ago
        This is really not about public opinion. SES insisted a lot with SpaceX to get the first re-used booster at a considerable discount. They were also the very first customer to fly on SpaceX. The delay in launching it comes from two reasons: a) because they had to do quite a lot of extra testing on the recovered booster to certify it again for flight and b) because SpaceX is actually overloaded with launches as they have the most cramped launch schedule of any other company.
    - walrus01 10y ago
      Considering the very deep nature of the three-way relationship between a commercial satellite customer (SES), a launch vendor (SpaceX) and an insurer (many companies), I wonder if they negotiated an agreement to essentially embed a thoroughly vetted employee of the insurance company inside SpaceX, working alongside and observing the team that is doing the returned rocket testing and qualifications, teardowns, test firings, etc. I would not be surprised if this is the case.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  That is the essential question, of course assuming this flight goes off without a hitch they will have new data about what it took to this this booster back to flight ready status, and then they can see what they did that they could do better, what tools they should make to improve efficiency and what tweaks to the design will lower the time to cycle it through. There are interesting precedents in the tooling jigs that Thiokol built to refurbish SRBs and the Rockwell folks used to do tile repair for the Shuttle.
  - simonh 10y ago
    When the first booster was recovered, Elon said something along the line of that they're a bit like the dog that chases a car and now they've caught one they have to figure out what to do with it. That's what's great about Elon, he just tells it like it is. I'm sure they did have some plans for what to do, but as you say it's a whole new process they need to do a lot of work on improving.
- foxyv 10y ago
  Probably like pancakes, the first is always a wash that you feed to your cousin.
- robryan 10y ago
  Even if they saved money on this one particular booster the costs of the technology and all the landing attempts/ successful landings will probably mean it takes some time to come out ahead overall.
- Patrick_Devine 10y ago
  There is a bigger question which was asked in the Economist this week (http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-25-08/space-2016#section-4 http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-25-08/spa...), which is can SpaceX create a big enough market where they can realize the savings of reusability? Right now satellites cost more than the price of the rocket, so if you shave off $10 million on a launch that's pretty much a drop in the bucket compared to the overall price. This isn't to take anything away from SpaceX. It's absolutely amazing what they've done. I only hope that they can open up the market enough for things like asteroid mining and space tourism.
  - colechristensen 10y ago
    Mansa Musa can be considered the wealthiest man in history. On a pilgrimage to Mecca he gave gold to the poor everywhere along the way and traded great values of it too. He inadvertently destroyed many economies for a long time with the influx of capital. Asteroid mining is going to do much the same thing, but the changes will be permanent. It's not a matter of "if" but "when". Lots of sophisticated technology needs to be developed and the up-front cost is going to be in the billions... but once it's done and regular, lots of economies for materials are going to be shattered. Satellite programs cost so much _because_ rockets cost so much. You can't justify putting a cheap satellite on an expensive rocket, but as the launch cost goes down, you get to being able to launch cheaper and cheaper satellites. If SpaceX fails, someone else will succeed. The cat is out of the bag.
  - walrus01 10y ago
    Building many identical satellites in an assembly-line like fashion cuts down on costs significantly. Large geostationary satellites are currently based on standard buses (like the Boeing 702 and its variants), but each satellite is generally a bespoke product. Larger quantities of the same thing like the second generation Iridium network and the o3b MEO satellites are very interesting from a per-unit cost perspective.
    - Patrick_Devine 10y ago
      Right. It definitely looks like we could be in for a shakeup in the industry. The question still remains though; what is the total size of the market for all of those satellites? How many could we place in MEO/GEO/GSO before the market is completely saturated? I honestly have no idea. I would think the LEO satellite market will eventually be dominated by less powerful vehicles, although if SpaceX can survive long enough to open up other markets (like Mars tourism and mining), maybe those smaller rockets get cannibalized by payloads being co-launched on larger vehicles.
- TylerH 10y ago
  The first rocket launch cost a total of $63 million or so, IIRC. This one, I've read, is being done for about $15-20 million less. Still tens of millions of dollars, but quite a bit of savings, especially for the first time SpaceX has done this (considering the risk involved).
- marvin 10y ago
  I think I've read that the cost of an empty Falcon 9 first stage is somewhere $10 million. They would have to spend a lot on inspections in order to not save a lot of money. IMHO, a lot of the skepticism I've previously read about SpaceX's reusability program is just inherited from the Space Shuttle program. I.e. ""if the US government can't do it, how can a small-ish private company do it"?
  - emp_zealoth 10y ago
    Ugh, the space shuttle was such an abomination it blows my mind it was allowed to continue siphoning resources for so long
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    When SpaceX and SES were negotiating in press releases, SpaceX said that eventually they'd offer a 30% discount for a re-used first stage. That's $20mm. The first stage has to cost significantly more than that.
- JustUhThought 10y ago
  "Either way it's an amazing achievement." What the what. We've gone from "holy ish, sci-fi reusable rockets and we's living la vita future!" to qualified approval..? No. No. This is not about satellites. This is about the primary cost component for transporting a colony to Mars. And it's already destroying the competition pricewise, and this will widen that gap enormously. Did the Spanish Govt say, well, that's nice and all, but spices are still pretty pricey? Maybe we don't go back? No. They didn't. They said, "Awesome, lock that ish down. We want a monopoly. And bring us more funny trinkets to show off to our landlocked friends to make us giggle and feel superior." So yes, it's a huge, amazing fucking achievement.
  - Diederich 10y ago
    Well said. This is one of those things that will get a specific mention in the history books for a long, long time.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      Previous generations remember where they were for the Moon landing, just as I'll always remember where I was for the first successful Falcon 9 first stage return.
castratikron 10y ago
Just wanted to say that the phrase "flight-proven" is genius marketing.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Better than "Certified Pre-Owned Rocket" :-) I agree with the folks who have tweeted they should start adding launch "check marks" to the paint but that assumes that they will launch it w/recovery and then do it again.
  - colechristensen 10y ago
    They'll definitely want to do extensive destructive testing on the first twice-used rocket if they can land it (or maybe put it in a museum and do that on the second) There is a lot to learn about how the structure reacts to repeated launches (and undoubtedly engineering iterations to improve future models' reusability)
  - Animats 10y ago
    The title of this article should have been "Used Rocket".
    - ChuckMcM 10y ago
      I think it would be funny if Gwen Shotwell put "Used Rocket Salesperson" on a business card.
- paulvs 10y ago
  "Flight-proven" as opposed to those inferior non-flight-proven rockets we're so used to. In a few years, perhaps flying your cargo on an un-flight-proven rocket will be the risky option. I applaud SES for being the early adopters, and SpaceX for always pushing the boundaries.
  - rst 10y ago
    It'll take more than a few years for anyone other than SpaceX, and perhaps Blue Origin, to start recovering entire boosters -- it's a lot harder than you might think to retrofit on an existing rocket, and those two companies are the only ones to have designed rockets from scratch for it (though Blue is ... ahem ... a little while yet from even starting to actually build their orbital launcher). Other launch providers are obviously watching, and the Indian space program, at least, is developing technology intended to feed into an eventual reusable design. But some of the others with announced plans still won't be trying to recover an intact stage, but only pieces, particularly the engines (detached in flight from the rest of the stage). That's the case both for Vulcan, the next-generation rocket from United Launch Alliance (the Pentagon's preferred provider), and for the Ariane-6 -- both of which won't initially launch with even that level of reuse, but only get it in follow-on work. (The reuse strategies for these are called SMART and Adeline, respectively, if you want to Google for them.)
walrus01 10y ago
It is really interesting to see that this is a very 'ordinary' commercial geostationary launch customer, and not a government funded research satellite. This is oversimplified, but traditionally, rockets that are in beta test mode are tested like: 1) static pad tests/firings of engines 2) all-up launch of the full rocket, carrying a boilerplate satellite with some instrumentation, maybe some cubesats or low cost small R&D satellites tagging along 3) one or two launches of government science payloads, or government-funded weather satellites, something like that 4) commercial launches begin
- kirrent 10y ago
  Not contradicting anything you've said seeing as the first few launches of the falcon 9 followed your rough outline, but SES was SpaceX's first GTO launch so they've clearly got an appetite for a bit of risk.
  - doikor 10y ago
    I guess its ok for SES as they say the insurance premiums didn't go up at all for using the reusable rocket. So they are just saving money with the same risk for SES in both cases.
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    Also I read elsewhere that SES is in a "unique" situation here. They are still building up their fleet of satellites, so if they lose one now it's not like it is some kind of company ending setback or will allow a competitor to launch ahead of them.
- Symmetry 10y ago
  I think the only reason it would make sense to do (3) before (4) is that the government paid for your development and wants to be the first to use it. Because they're more typically unique government payloads are typically much more expensive to lose in the case of a failure than another couple of commsats going into a constellation.
johnm1019 10y ago
Hopefully someone can support/refute this: my off the cuff guess why this happened is because the discount on the launch price is about equal to the cost of building the satellite. So if it works, everyone is happy. If it explodes, they can build another one and aren't out any money (but are out time), and the launch costs for the next one are covered by SpaceX or insurance - however they have it set up.
- gliptic 10y ago
  Payloads are insured and the insurance cost in this case is reportedly more or less the same as on a new rocket. That makes it a no-brainer.
  - weaksauce 10y ago
    Are the opportunity costs of not having the satellite up there for the duration of however long it takes to build and launch a replacement insured as well?
- Symmetry 10y ago
  My sense is that satellites range in price from $100 million or so for the sort of standard commsat that it's going to be launching this time to $10 billion for custom government spysats or top tier research satellites. But the really expensive ones usually go up on something like the Atlas V which is now at ~100 launches without a failure.
Ffaine 10y ago
Whenever see a news about SpaceX it gives me goosbumps. I hope it will land successfully again.
IgorPartola 10y ago
So knowing nothing about this subject, why do they pursue landing rockets, or at least landing them vertically? It seems like the hardest possible way to handle this problem, as opposed to for example what the shuttles did. Can anyone explain the reasoning behind this?
- DanielStraight 10y ago
  Why land? Fuel makes up a very small percent of the launch cost of a rocket. Landing also allows a much better experience for cargo and crew return, and it makes it possible to bring equipment to other planets or moons. Why vertical? Vertical landing is much more flexible. You can land on a barge at sea. You can land on the launchpad itself. You can land on a planet or moon with no atmosphere.
  - nicolapcweek94 10y ago
    > You can land on a planet or moon with no atmosphere. IE: Mars, the ultimate SpaceX goal, which has just enough atmosphere to be annoying but not nearly enough to make parachutes work, so they had to find another way to land a big enough payload to transport 100 tons of stuff there
    - andars 10y ago
      The first stage will not land on Mars.
      - nicolapcweek94 10y ago
        No it won't, but they're definitely gonna reuse the tech they're developing to land the S1 on Earth to land the MCT on Mars And to land the BFR S1 on Earth, which I'd guess would be a bit too much for parachutes even with Earth's relatively thick atmosphere, if what people have been saying on Reddit is right September 21st can't come soon enough!
      - JshWright 10y ago

200 points by loourr 10y ago

I wonder if they'll really save money right away doing this. I imagine they'll spend a lot on inspections and getting things 100% right. Either way, it's an amazing achievement.

tomlock 10y ago
I also wonder this! CRS-8 was launched on the 8th of April this year, so given that the launch of SES-10 is slated for Q4 2016, that means there's like, 6/7/8 months for the turnaround. But I'm hopeful that we'll see an assembly line of rockets landing, being inspected, and being launched, sometime in the future :)
- rst 10y ago
  The delay between landing and relaunch has less to do with refurb on this particular booster, than with the series of tests that they're doing on other returned boosters to convince both the customers and their insurance companies that they generally come back in re-flyable condition, which have been happening on and off for months. Among other things, a different booster has been put through at least three full-length test-fires at their proving ground in Texas. It isn't clear how much refurb will be required generally, beyond replacing some of the surface thermal protection that came back visibly dinged up. (Well, at this point, SpaceX knows what it took to refurbish one, but I'm not aware of any public statements about it yet.) But they're certainly acting like the propulsion systems don't need much -- the very first returned booster (the one now on permanent display outside the SpaceX factory) was re-fired on the launch pad within weeks of return, without having ever left the Cape, just to prove that they could.
  - colechristensen 10y ago
    They would have launched sooner, but public opinion is swayed too much by failure. Engineers and money men don't really care, failure is interesting and valuable. Unfortunately, so is public opinion and support... and every perceived failure has a million armchair rocket scientists shitting on SpaceX because people loove to do that sort of thing... so they have to be unduly careful about it.
    - avian 10y ago
      If that would be the case, SpaceX wouldn't tweet explosion videos on every failure or have live streams of their launches. They would take the approach of Blue Origin that only publishes carefully edited marketing footage where everything always seems to go perfectly.
    - pastullo 10y ago
      This is really not about public opinion. SES insisted a lot with SpaceX to get the first re-used booster at a considerable discount. They were also the very first customer to fly on SpaceX. The delay in launching it comes from two reasons: a) because they had to do quite a lot of extra testing on the recovered booster to certify it again for flight and b) because SpaceX is actually overloaded with launches as they have the most cramped launch schedule of any other company.
  - walrus01 10y ago
    Considering the very deep nature of the three-way relationship between a commercial satellite customer (SES), a launch vendor (SpaceX) and an insurer (many companies), I wonder if they negotiated an agreement to essentially embed a thoroughly vetted employee of the insurance company inside SpaceX, working alongside and observing the team that is doing the returned rocket testing and qualifications, teardowns, test firings, etc. I would not be surprised if this is the case.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
That is the essential question, of course assuming this flight goes off without a hitch they will have new data about what it took to this this booster back to flight ready status, and then they can see what they did that they could do better, what tools they should make to improve efficiency and what tweaks to the design will lower the time to cycle it through. There are interesting precedents in the tooling jigs that Thiokol built to refurbish SRBs and the Rockwell folks used to do tile repair for the Shuttle.
- simonh 10y ago
  When the first booster was recovered, Elon said something along the line of that they're a bit like the dog that chases a car and now they've caught one they have to figure out what to do with it. That's what's great about Elon, he just tells it like it is. I'm sure they did have some plans for what to do, but as you say it's a whole new process they need to do a lot of work on improving.
foxyv 10y ago
Probably like pancakes, the first is always a wash that you feed to your cousin.
robryan 10y ago
Even if they saved money on this one particular booster the costs of the technology and all the landing attempts/ successful landings will probably mean it takes some time to come out ahead overall.
Patrick_Devine 10y ago
There is a bigger question which was asked in the Economist this week (http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-25-08/space-2016#section-4 http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-25-08/spa...), which is can SpaceX create a big enough market where they can realize the savings of reusability? Right now satellites cost more than the price of the rocket, so if you shave off $10 million on a launch that's pretty much a drop in the bucket compared to the overall price. This isn't to take anything away from SpaceX. It's absolutely amazing what they've done. I only hope that they can open up the market enough for things like asteroid mining and space tourism.
- colechristensen 10y ago
  Mansa Musa can be considered the wealthiest man in history. On a pilgrimage to Mecca he gave gold to the poor everywhere along the way and traded great values of it too. He inadvertently destroyed many economies for a long time with the influx of capital. Asteroid mining is going to do much the same thing, but the changes will be permanent. It's not a matter of "if" but "when". Lots of sophisticated technology needs to be developed and the up-front cost is going to be in the billions... but once it's done and regular, lots of economies for materials are going to be shattered. Satellite programs cost so much _because_ rockets cost so much. You can't justify putting a cheap satellite on an expensive rocket, but as the launch cost goes down, you get to being able to launch cheaper and cheaper satellites. If SpaceX fails, someone else will succeed. The cat is out of the bag.
- walrus01 10y ago
  Building many identical satellites in an assembly-line like fashion cuts down on costs significantly. Large geostationary satellites are currently based on standard buses (like the Boeing 702 and its variants), but each satellite is generally a bespoke product. Larger quantities of the same thing like the second generation Iridium network and the o3b MEO satellites are very interesting from a per-unit cost perspective.
  - Patrick_Devine 10y ago
    Right. It definitely looks like we could be in for a shakeup in the industry. The question still remains though; what is the total size of the market for all of those satellites? How many could we place in MEO/GEO/GSO before the market is completely saturated? I honestly have no idea. I would think the LEO satellite market will eventually be dominated by less powerful vehicles, although if SpaceX can survive long enough to open up other markets (like Mars tourism and mining), maybe those smaller rockets get cannibalized by payloads being co-launched on larger vehicles.
TylerH 10y ago
The first rocket launch cost a total of $63 million or so, IIRC. This one, I've read, is being done for about $15-20 million less. Still tens of millions of dollars, but quite a bit of savings, especially for the first time SpaceX has done this (considering the risk involved).
marvin 10y ago
I think I've read that the cost of an empty Falcon 9 first stage is somewhere $10 million. They would have to spend a lot on inspections in order to not save a lot of money. IMHO, a lot of the skepticism I've previously read about SpaceX's reusability program is just inherited from the Space Shuttle program. I.e. ""if the US government can't do it, how can a small-ish private company do it"?
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  Ugh, the space shuttle was such an abomination it blows my mind it was allowed to continue siphoning resources for so long
- greglindahl 10y ago
  When SpaceX and SES were negotiating in press releases, SpaceX said that eventually they'd offer a 30% discount for a re-used first stage. That's $20mm. The first stage has to cost significantly more than that.
JustUhThought 10y ago
"Either way it's an amazing achievement." What the what. We've gone from "holy ish, sci-fi reusable rockets and we's living la vita future!" to qualified approval..? No. No. This is not about satellites. This is about the primary cost component for transporting a colony to Mars. And it's already destroying the competition pricewise, and this will widen that gap enormously. Did the Spanish Govt say, well, that's nice and all, but spices are still pretty pricey? Maybe we don't go back? No. They didn't. They said, "Awesome, lock that ish down. We want a monopoly. And bring us more funny trinkets to show off to our landlocked friends to make us giggle and feel superior." So yes, it's a huge, amazing fucking achievement.
- Diederich 10y ago
  Well said. This is one of those things that will get a specific mention in the history books for a long, long time.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Previous generations remember where they were for the Moon landing, just as I'll always remember where I was for the first successful Falcon 9 first stage return.

castratikron 10y ago

Just wanted to say that the phrase "flight-proven" is genius marketing.

ChuckMcM 10y ago
Better than "Certified Pre-Owned Rocket" :-) I agree with the folks who have tweeted they should start adding launch "check marks" to the paint but that assumes that they will launch it w/recovery and then do it again.
- colechristensen 10y ago
  They'll definitely want to do extensive destructive testing on the first twice-used rocket if they can land it (or maybe put it in a museum and do that on the second) There is a lot to learn about how the structure reacts to repeated launches (and undoubtedly engineering iterations to improve future models' reusability)
- Animats 10y ago
  The title of this article should have been "Used Rocket".
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    I think it would be funny if Gwen Shotwell put "Used Rocket Salesperson" on a business card.
paulvs 10y ago
"Flight-proven" as opposed to those inferior non-flight-proven rockets we're so used to. In a few years, perhaps flying your cargo on an un-flight-proven rocket will be the risky option. I applaud SES for being the early adopters, and SpaceX for always pushing the boundaries.
- rst 10y ago
  It'll take more than a few years for anyone other than SpaceX, and perhaps Blue Origin, to start recovering entire boosters -- it's a lot harder than you might think to retrofit on an existing rocket, and those two companies are the only ones to have designed rockets from scratch for it (though Blue is ... ahem ... a little while yet from even starting to actually build their orbital launcher). Other launch providers are obviously watching, and the Indian space program, at least, is developing technology intended to feed into an eventual reusable design. But some of the others with announced plans still won't be trying to recover an intact stage, but only pieces, particularly the engines (detached in flight from the rest of the stage). That's the case both for Vulcan, the next-generation rocket from United Launch Alliance (the Pentagon's preferred provider), and for the Ariane-6 -- both of which won't initially launch with even that level of reuse, but only get it in follow-on work. (The reuse strategies for these are called SMART and Adeline, respectively, if you want to Google for them.)

walrus01 10y ago

It is really interesting to see that this is a very 'ordinary' commercial geostationary launch customer, and not a government funded research satellite. This is oversimplified, but traditionally, rockets that are in beta test mode are tested like: 1) static pad tests/firings of engines 2) all-up launch of the full rocket, carrying a boilerplate satellite with some instrumentation, maybe some cubesats or low cost small R&D satellites tagging along 3) one or two launches of government science payloads, or government-funded weather satellites, something like that 4) commercial launches begin

kirrent 10y ago
Not contradicting anything you've said seeing as the first few launches of the falcon 9 followed your rough outline, but SES was SpaceX's first GTO launch so they've clearly got an appetite for a bit of risk.
- doikor 10y ago
  I guess its ok for SES as they say the insurance premiums didn't go up at all for using the reusable rocket. So they are just saving money with the same risk for SES in both cases.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  Also I read elsewhere that SES is in a "unique" situation here. They are still building up their fleet of satellites, so if they lose one now it's not like it is some kind of company ending setback or will allow a competitor to launch ahead of them.
Symmetry 10y ago
I think the only reason it would make sense to do (3) before (4) is that the government paid for your development and wants to be the first to use it. Because they're more typically unique government payloads are typically much more expensive to lose in the case of a failure than another couple of commsats going into a constellation.

johnm1019 10y ago

Hopefully someone can support/refute this: my off the cuff guess why this happened is because the discount on the launch price is about equal to the cost of building the satellite. So if it works, everyone is happy. If it explodes, they can build another one and aren't out any money (but are out time), and the launch costs for the next one are covered by SpaceX or insurance - however they have it set up.

gliptic 10y ago
Payloads are insured and the insurance cost in this case is reportedly more or less the same as on a new rocket. That makes it a no-brainer.
- weaksauce 10y ago
  Are the opportunity costs of not having the satellite up there for the duration of however long it takes to build and launch a replacement insured as well?
Symmetry 10y ago
My sense is that satellites range in price from $100 million or so for the sort of standard commsat that it's going to be launching this time to $10 billion for custom government spysats or top tier research satellites. But the really expensive ones usually go up on something like the Atlas V which is now at ~100 launches without a failure.

Ffaine 10y ago

Whenever see a news about SpaceX it gives me goosbumps. I hope it will land successfully again.

IgorPartola 10y ago

So knowing nothing about this subject, why do they pursue landing rockets, or at least landing them vertically? It seems like the hardest possible way to handle this problem, as opposed to for example what the shuttles did. Can anyone explain the reasoning behind this?

DanielStraight 10y ago
Why land? Fuel makes up a very small percent of the launch cost of a rocket. Landing also allows a much better experience for cargo and crew return, and it makes it possible to bring equipment to other planets or moons. Why vertical? Vertical landing is much more flexible. You can land on a barge at sea. You can land on the launchpad itself. You can land on a planet or moon with no atmosphere.
- nicolapcweek94 10y ago
  > You can land on a planet or moon with no atmosphere. IE: Mars, the ultimate SpaceX goal, which has just enough atmosphere to be annoying but not nearly enough to make parachutes work, so they had to find another way to land a big enough payload to transport 100 tons of stuff there
  - andars 10y ago
    The first stage will not land on Mars.
    - nicolapcweek94 10y ago
      No it won't, but they're definitely gonna reuse the tech they're developing to land the S1 on Earth to land the MCT on Mars And to land the BFR S1 on Earth, which I'd guess would be a bit too much for parachutes even with Earth's relatively thick atmosphere, if what people have been saying on Reddit is right September 21st can't come soon enough!
    - JshWright 10y ago