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This seems a bit like removing landing gear from aircraft and telling airports to shoulder the added cost of accommodating them. You've simply shifted complexit
by kibwen 2y ago
This seems a bit like removing landing gear from aircraft and telling airports to shoulder the added cost of accommodating them. You've simply shifted complexity elsewhere. I understand that people are dazzle-eyed over the science fiction appeal, but IMO this feels like a distraction. The rocket's already reusable and already the largest rocket ever built, this doesn't add any fundamentally new operational capability while also burning a lot of engineering cycles and adding complexity and uncertainty.
- inglor_cz 2y agoNot a distraction at all. It is not just about shift of complexity from A and B. Anything that stays on Earth permanently can be built without particular regard to its weight, e.g. much stronger, much more resilient, with bigger safety factors etc. With any flight hardware, you need to make painful tradeoffs between reliability/sturdiness and weight. If anything out of the ordinary happens, massive steel chopsticks can take a lot more strain than a landing leg which needs to be carried to the edge of space and back.
- soulofmischief 2y agoWhat you're missing is the rocket equation. The less weight, the less fuel you need and the larger your payload. We should trust the decisions of these experienced engineers who are deeply familiar with the tradeoffs involved in spaceflight more than our own intuition.
- LorenPechtel 2y agoYup, the rocket equation is truly brutal. Anyone who thinks legs are superior to a tower hasn't played Kerbal Space Program--and remember that stock KSP is easy mode. You don't need anything like the mass ratio that Earth rockets need.
- pfdietz 2y agoRemoving unnecessary systems that have mass is a big part of making reusable rockets work. It's why propulsive landing is superior to landing with wings, for example.
- lupusreal 2y agoWhat you're describing with airplanes already happened. Large airplanes used to land on the water, which incurred a mass and aerodynamic penalty for the airplane but was very cheap to operate airfields ("fields"?) for; it only required a flat lake or harbor which was already there. The switch to landing gear allowed airplanes to be more optimized but requires more infrastructure expenditure for large aircraft.