3 ms·

That would be a lot of extra launch weight just to return the first stage, not to mention the danger of having filled boosters on the rocket the whole launch.

• curtis 8y ago
  They're boosters, they can boost themselves, so it seems like you could make them delta-V neutral. Atlas V regularly launches with solid fuel boosters which are much larger and more powerful than an Electron, so it seems like there's no fundamental reason it wouldn't work. The economics is a different story, of course. Atlas V is slated to be replaced by Vulcan sometime in the next few years anyway. Vulcan has a re-use story, but it involves only re-using the engines, not the entire stage. Full stage re-use like Falcon 9 has the same problem as Atlas V, there's no way you could deep throttle the main engines enough to land an empty stage. It seems unlikely that anybody (most especially ULA who are very conservative) will turn Electrons into bolt-on boosters for an existing stage design. But integrating small electrically pumped rocket engines into a new design might be considered a lot less risky. Especially with SpaceX having fundamentally changed the economics of the heavy launch business.