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I love this idea. One challenge I can imagine is that it'll be more expensive to ship the stage back to land by barge for refuelling / refurbish and relaunch. G

I love this idea. One challenge I can imagine is that it'll be more expensive to ship the stage back to land by barge for refuelling / refurbish and relaunch. Given that land is still pretty cheap in the USA, it's probably the case that it'll be overall less expensive to just buy up whatever they need for a "Cape Canaveral 2."

washedup 13y ago
The launch trajectories they follow when launching from Cape Canaveral don't allow them to buy land for the First Stage further down from the launch site. Many launches occur at Cape Canaveral because they allow for a safe trajectory over open water, where people are less likely to be hurt in case of unexpected performance.
msandford 13y ago
I would buy it for a couple of tests and once the systems have been proven to work go ahead and scrap the rig. The idea here is that initially there are many things that could go wrong and you want to make it safe for those things to go wrong, even very badly. Once the bugs have been worked out (if there are any) then you start bringing it back over land. The tricky part isn't going from 2m/s down to fully stopped and stationary on a launch pad, although I'm sure that's not easy. It's making sure you're completely in control through a whole bunch of maneuvers to transition from heading up very fast to heading back down at a moderate pace to a slowly descending hover. During some of those parts of flight you'll be moving very quickly to where a small sensor lag or instability could make differences measured in miles rather than inches. By putting the whole thing out to sea you eliminate huge swathes of risk be it human life, financial, PR, whatever. Even if you only did one rig landing and it worked you would gain huge confidence in the systems and you could potentially refuel it on the rig to some amount and fly it back to "base"

washedup 13y ago

The launch trajectories they follow when launching from Cape Canaveral don't allow them to buy land for the First Stage further down from the launch site. Many launches occur at Cape Canaveral because they allow for a safe trajectory over open water, where people are less likely to be hurt in case of unexpected performance.

msandford 13y ago

I would buy it for a couple of tests and once the systems have been proven to work go ahead and scrap the rig. The idea here is that initially there are many things that could go wrong and you want to make it safe for those things to go wrong, even very badly. Once the bugs have been worked out (if there are any) then you start bringing it back over land. The tricky part isn't going from 2m/s down to fully stopped and stationary on a launch pad, although I'm sure that's not easy. It's making sure you're completely in control through a whole bunch of maneuvers to transition from heading up very fast to heading back down at a moderate pace to a slowly descending hover. During some of those parts of flight you'll be moving very quickly to where a small sensor lag or instability could make differences measured in miles rather than inches. By putting the whole thing out to sea you eliminate huge swathes of risk be it human life, financial, PR, whatever. Even if you only did one rig landing and it worked you would gain huge confidence in the systems and you could potentially refuel it on the rig to some amount and fly it back to "base"