3 ms·
"Or with his idea to make the whole rocket reusable, until SpaceX accepted reality and pivoted to at least partial reusability?" What do you dislike about this
by inglor_cz 4y ago
"Or with his idea to make the whole rocket reusable, until SpaceX accepted reality and pivoted to at least partial reusability?"
What do you dislike about this particular idea? It is not inherently wrong, it is "only" very technically challenging.
What SpaceX did was not a pivot, rather introduction of an intermediate step because full reusability proved too hard at that point. But they never gave up on the ultimate goal of full reusability and the Starship rocket that is now under development is intended to be fully reusable.
- 411111111111111 4y agoIt's not that I dislike the idea. it's just simply impossible to do so with combustion engines/rocket engines that carry any load. The energy expenditure to reach LEO is too stressful to materials known to man, and the tiniest issue causes full destruction. It will always be more effective to recreate relevant parts instead of full disassembly, in-depth quality assurance and then reassembly
- inglor_cz 4y ago"impossible", "always" These predictions do not tend to age well. I am not an aerospace engineer, but Starship seems to be fairly hopeful. Already Falcon 9 shows that you do not need to fully disassemble engines etc. to be sure that they are OK. A static fire with enough sensors will do, and nowadays they don't even do that. If you look at the table of booster reuses of Falcon 9, failures happen, but they are infrequent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_boosters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...