4 ms·
It doesn't necessarily make it harder. There's a burn to slow the booster down for re-entry, and having the side boosters do a lot of the work means more fuel /
by gnode 8y ago
It doesn't necessarily make it harder. There's a burn to slow the booster down for re-entry, and having the side boosters do a lot of the work means more fuel / delta-v can be saved to slow the core booster.
The FH is apparently capable of 8,000kg in a reusable GTO launch ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Capabilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Capabilities ), and this satellite was only 6,000kg. So it looks like there would be plenty of fuel available to slow the core down well below the survivable maximum.
- ravedave5 8y agoIt's the same steps but it is harder, the center booster was going faster than any other core that has been recovered. The recovery itself was ~300 miles further out than any other recovery. Swinging a bat at a 10mph ball is the same technology as swinging at a 90mph one. I don't think anyone would say that they were equally as easy.
- gnode 8y agoMy point is that it's less a question of technical difficulty / tolerance, but more fuel / delta-v / mass cost. In the case of a bat swing, to bat the ball faster, your muscles need to be stronger, and the ball and bat need to withstand greater pressures. In the case of a vehicle travelling through space / thin atmosphere, it only needs more fuel to burn to slow it down. Analogously, you don't parallel park a car from 70mph, having travelled somewhere on a highway. Here's a graph a booster's speed over time, showing the reentry burn: https://i.stack.imgur.com/xFYIh.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/xFYIh.png ( from https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/20246/what-is-this-debris-on-the-crs-10-reentry-at-t630 https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/20246/what-is-this... )