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It's difficult to overstate how important the milestone of catching the booster is. Now we have a reusable rocket an order of magnitude larger than anything we
by teractiveodular 2y ago
It's difficult to overstate how important the milestone of catching the booster is. Now we have a reusable rocket an order of magnitude larger than anything we've had before, and the cost of kg to orbit just nosedived.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoI'm not sure how critical "catching" the booster is to reusability, but it does save weight by not needing legs for landing, and perhaps the booster suffers less stress this way? Note that the booster is not really being "caught" although this is the word it seems we're stuck with. It's really more like landing on the arms, since it throttles to a hover at that point.
- mshockwave 2y agoI think saving weight is definitely one of the main issues, see those proportionally large legs on Falcon-9, I guess it simply doesn't scale on bigger vehicles like Starship / Heavy booster. Also, by catching the booster on site, they can even save the transportation and do the refurbishing on site, so even shorter turnaround time I guess.
- pfdietz 2y agoAlso, saving on damage to the landing pad.
- chasd00 2y agoThat’s a good point, they used the sprinklers on landing to mitigate damage to the pad and the booster was caught well off the ground.
- cubefox 2y agoAnother way to save weight would be to make the booster out of carbon fiber instead of steel. I wonder whether they will do that eventually.
- Denvercoder9 2y ago> I'm not sure how critical "catching" the booster is to reusability Not necessarily for reusability, but it helps significantly for rapid reusability: it eliminates the need to transport the booster from the landing site to the launch site. Given that it's 9m x 70m and weighs 270 tonnes, that's not an easy process.
- newsclues 2y agoEfficiency and cost are the goals, reusability is just one way to do that. Moving big heavy things less is another.
- cryptonector 2y ago> but it does save weight by not needing legs for landing That was the exact reason they went this way.
- shirro 2y agoSecond stage reuse seems the far more challenging problem. Other companies should have reusable boosters soon but if significant amounts of Starship continue to ablate on the way down they could be faced with a disposable Starship competing with smaller and cheaper second stages that are well sized for typical payloads. We already knew boosters can be flown back to launch sites reliably with high accuracy. We don't know if it is possible to make rapidly reusable thermal protection systems that can operate on an orbital vehicle of Starship's size until it is demonstrated.
- api 2y agoDidn’t they look at all kinds of ideas earlier like squirting some propellant or water out over the skin on the way down, and wasn’t steel chosen for its thermal robustness? Did they get into the problem and realize it’s a lot harder and abandon those things for tiles? Maybe they will have to sacrifice more payload mass for active or passive shielding or more fuel for powered deceleration. That would yield a less impressive lifter but with full reusability.
- chasd00 2y agoYeah for rapid reusability tiles aren’t going to work, too fragile. Iirc it was with a lot of reluctance they went with tiles and will have to make breakthroughs on the heat shielding to get where they want to be.
- stevage 2y agoThey're a long way from having a reusable super heavy booster. It's still copping a lot of damage on the landing.
- throwaway4aday 2y agotrue but don't forget this is test flight #5
- interludead 2y agoIt's a game change
- rtkwe 2y agoThey're still having some significant burn through problems on the upper stage fins during reentry it looks like. Way better than last time but the top part of the fin was glowing far a while after the main reentry finished.
- pfdietz 2y agoEven with a disposable upper stage, I believe Starship would be cheaper per kg than F9 or FH.
- rtkwe 2y agoMaybe. Kind of impossible to know until we see launch costs but you could make a much cheaper upper stage than they have if you wanted disposable. Trick with that is you need a payload heavy enough to justify it. Has SpaceX talked much about a disposable upper stage version of the system?