The rocket cores should definitely be called that. SpaceX’s Grasshopper rocket did have a man in a cowboy hat onboard. That’s a full-size mannequin, BTW, though it looks more like Chuck Norris than Major Kong.
He’s a tough guy, but not* that* tough.
Missed it by that much
Banzaaaaai!
Hey y’all watch this!
Still in Beta
Caution, hot surface
Goodness gracious…*
Well, the latest landing attempt was not to be.
Yesterday, SpaceX launched the DSCOVR satellite on a high trajectory to Earth’s Lagrange point 1. That part went perfectly. They had hoped to perform a landing attempt on their drone ship platform, but high seas prevented it.
The initial launch attempt was last Sunday, and conditions would have been perfect then, but the Eastern Range tracking radar went down at an inopportune time and delayed the launch until Wed. Unfortunately, the weather deteriorated during that period, causing 60 mph winds and 30 foot waves at the platform location.
That was too much for the platform to handle, so instead of risking more damage, they went for a soft ocean landing. Despite the wind, they still achieved <10 m target precision and a vertical descent, so it’s looking really good for future attempts. They just need better weather.
The next two launches are big geostationary satellites and the cores won’t have landing legs (to save weight), so the next attempt won’t be until April with CRS-6 (cargo to the space station). So sad, but them’s the breaks. Their cadence has been pretty good so far this year, so hopefully they’ll keep that up.
SpaceX says they’re beefing up the drone ship to better handle the weather. I wonder what this’ll entail. There are hull designs, like SWATH (Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull) that are more resistant to wave action (most of the buoyancy comes from hull volume well below the water surface). Might be that or something else entirely.
Why are they so insistent on the vertical landing? Is it preparation for a Moon or Mars lander? For retrieval I would have thought that parachutes and airbags and landing somewhere uninhabited would be far easier and cheaper.
Even a water landing is heavily damaging to the booster, making it uneconomical to overhaul (yes, it was done for the Shuttle, but not economically). It’s about saving money primarily, technology advancement secondarily - remember that it’s Elon Musk in charge.
Liquid fuel rockets are unbelievably fragile. The Falcon 9 first stage is the same density as an aluminum soda can, including the engines.
SpaceX’s water landings were even more gentle than the Shuttle booster landings, but even so the rockets tip over and explode once the engines shut down. The Shuttle boosters survive because they’re made with a thick steel casing, and because (due to the nature of solid fuel motors) they’re open at the bottom, giving a cushioning air piston effect. They also have valves that release some air pressure (thereby letting water in) so that the booster can float vertically.
As ElvisL1ves said, even at that the Shuttle boosters we uneconomic to overhaul. There were still pieces that had to replaced, and the salt contamination cleaned.
You actually need surprisingly little fuel to enable powered landings. Like I said, the empty stage is like a soda can. It needs just a tiny bit of extra fuel for maneuvering and the final deceleration. The legs can be reasonably flimsy since they don’t need to support the fully fueled mass.
SpaceX actually did experiment with parachutes early on, but they never recovered anything with them, and they quickly realized that powered landing was the right answer for reusability.
They do also think that vertical landings will be good practice for Mars, but that’s a secondary consideration.