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Doubtless they will take their time in the beginning, and learn exactly what it does take to relaunch. (They'll have plenty of time, as their current sole custo
by jccooper 12y ago
Doubtless they will take their time in the beginning, and learn exactly what it does take to relaunch. (They'll have plenty of time, as their current sole customer probably won't want more than four a year for at least a few years.) The Shuttle was originally also intended to be quickly reused, but it failed spectacularly at doing so. However, the Dragon is not the STS, and SpaceX is not NASA. It's a much simpler and less compromised vehicle, and when they discover pain points during recycle, I expect they will be engineered away, and quickly too. I wouldn't bet against it being "gas-and-go" in 2-3 years (by which I mean requiring no more than the usual pre-flight checks.)
- XorNot 12y agoWell they don't have to deal with the air force asking pony's and unicorns that they'll never actually want to use or pay for either.
- jccooper 12y agoYeah, that's where the "compromised" is from. STS was killed in the cradle by politics, and operated its whole life as a zombie. A nearly impossible and quite capable zombie, but still a zombie. An amazing feat to be sure, but it would have been better to let it go once it became clear it could meet nothing like its original goals. An STS2 might have been a decent system, but running the original so long seems to have damaged the very concept of reusability in NASA and other space agencies. But even the best possible government-designed-and-operated system just doesn't have the right incentives to be really efficient like the SpaceX system is aiming for. The incentives being "making money" and "Elon really wants to go to Mars".