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I wonder if you could use an air "force field" to capture the rocket. e.g. a circular arrangement of air turbines, dynamically adjusted to smoothly capture and
by arman0 11y ago
I wonder if you could use an air "force field" to capture the rocket. e.g. a circular arrangement of air turbines, dynamically adjusted to smoothly capture and land the rocket. Has something like this been tried?
- cryptoz 11y agoI'm not sure if that's ever been tried, but it certainly won't work for SpaceX. The landing system has to be able to work on any solid, flat surface in the solar system, such as the surface of Mars. There are no force fields on Mars. Edit: Every thread on HN or reddit usually has people suggesting other methods of landing rockets that require huge, specialized infrastructure. The primary goal here is to land on Mars without large or complex infrastructure. So even if you think you can devise a cheaper or 'better' system, if it doesn't work on Mars, it doesn't work at all.
- shiftpgdn 11y agoThe amount of CFM of air needed to lift a rocket booster would be immense. Back of the envelope math suggests somewhere around a football stadiums worth of air per second.
- phkahler 11y agoIt seems to me that they'll have to use the rocket engine to slow the rocket down regardless of how it is recovered. Once that's being done it is just a matter of increasing precision in order to set it down with no additional complexity. That said, there is complexity in having higher performance valves and such to get a fast system response, but still that's improved performance of existing equipment as opposed to adding more stuff.
- oh_sigh 11y agoNo.