Airbus Unveils Its First Stage Reuseability Concept 100
schwit1 writes: The competition heats up: Airbus unveiled Friday its prototype design to recover and reuse the engines and avionics of its Ariane rockets. From the article: "The Airbus team concluded that SpaceX's design of returning the full stage to Earth could be simplified by separating the propulsion bay from the rest of the stage, protecting the motor on reentry and, using the winglets and turbofans, return horizontally to a conventional air strip. "We are using an aerodynamic shield so that the motor is not subjected to such high stress on reentry," [technical director Herve] Gilibert said. "We need very little fuel for the turbofans and the performance penalty we pay for the Ariane 6 launcher is far less than the 30 percent or more performance penalty that SpaceX pays for the reusable Falcon 9 first stage." Gee, for decades Arianespace and Boeing and Lockheed Martin and everyone else in the launch industry insisted it made no economic sense to try to recover and reuse the first stage of their rockets. Then SpaceX comes along and makes an effort to do so, without as yet even coming close, and suddenly everyone agrees it is economically essential to do it as well. Isn't competition wonderful?
It does make economic sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: It does make economic sense (Score:1)
Especially considering that the one thing that Airbus is good at is extracting money from governments by being horribly inefficient and costly.
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Something, Something, Something, Lockheed Martin.
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Something, Something, Something, Lockheed Martin.
That would be "in a monopoly venture with Boeing in ULA", gaming the system to extract more money from Uncle Sam.
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Why did you A/C this? It's dead on...
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Why reuse something when you can trick governments to pay for it again. ...
On the other hand, reused space vehicle components have caused some [wikipedia.org] problems [wikipedia.org] in the past.
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Neither of those was due to a reused component.
Re: It does make economic sense (Score:1)
Are you dense? Challenger happened because the suits at NASA went with the launch despite temperatures well below SRB specifications. Suits also pushed for segmented SRBs that had this failure mode, even though it wasn't the best engineering or financial decision.
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The failure was in the O-ring seal, a freshly made joint. The O-ring itself was in good condition other than being colder than it was rated for.
Video at bottom of article. (Score:4, Informative)
If you just want to see how it works, scroll down to the video at the end. They don't really explain it very well in the text.
"without coming close" is false (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this whole announcement to be saying: "Yeah, us too! Maybe a few years from now."
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Who said anything about something being FIRST? I wrote that it was the first PRACTICAL return stage. Different thing, man.
Who said anything about first private space vehicles? (Oops... I guess YOU did.)
But... um, no. You're the only one who did. Not me. Nothing to discuss.
And this is so insane I wouldn't be surprised you're collecting your urine in jars and getting the help to order cases of peanut butter.
http://www.spacex.com/news/201 [spacex.com]...
Uh... okay, pal. But you're the only one talking about this stuff here. Not us.
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I wrote that it was the first PRACTICAL return stage. Different thing, man.
No, you said they were first to "operate on the principle that it was practical," which allows both of you to be right on this point. Surely the folks at McDonnell were operating on the principle that it was practical, they just couldn't find a way to make it work, because single-stage-to-orbit is really f-ing hard, perhaps not even possible with chemical rockets. It was the shuttle era, and they were trying to make what everyone wanted the shuttle to be, a SSTO "space plane" just like Buck Rogers.
Elon had
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McDonnell didn't get their full-scale vehicle funded. The subscale worked just fine. In fact it worked to well that NASA decided it wasn't complicated and risky enough so they did the X-33. Which was total failure.
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No, you said they were first to "operate on the principle that it was practical," which allows both of you to be right on this point.
Well, then, allow me to amend my comment: they were the first to demonstrate that it was practical. Which they have. They haven't quite got it yet but they did show pretty clearly that it could be done. And with only a couple of trial runs. Pretty impressive, actually.
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No, it wasn't the first, no matter how many capitals you use, Elon.
Oh, bullshit! From the article you linked: The DC-X was never designed to achieve orbital altitudes or velocity, but instead to demonstrate the concept...
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""The DC-X, short for Delta Clipper ... was an unmanned prototype of a reusable single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle [wikipedia.org] built by McDonnell Douglas in conjunction with the United States Department of Defense's Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) from 1991 to 1993. Starting 1994 until 1995, testing continued through funding of the US civil space agency NASA.[1] In 1996, the DC-X technology was completely transferred to NASA, which upgraded the design for improved performance to create the DC-XA.""
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I never got the point of the DC-X. Chemical fuels never got and can't get significantly better than LOX/LH2 so the whole single stage to orbit thing is pretty much ruled out by mathematics, especially on some conventional looking vehicle like the DC-X or a related follow on. The contemporaneous (to the DC-X) NASP X-30 program looked like it had about the best possible chance of becoming a SSTO vehicle and it didn't go anywhere (literally). SSTO with chemical fuels is a pipe dream, the late-20th century v
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The SSME has (barely) enough performance to do it [spacefuture.com].
You could easily conceive something with even better performance than the SSME with chemical engines e.g. LOX/Slush LH2, TAN nozzle, etc.
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Interesting link there, thanks. I've read of other rockets which are almost SSTO (Titan II seems to comes to mind, but I can't back that up, and that sounds even more unlikely given the fuels it uses). So the question remains -- why hasn't somebody done it, at least as a demonstration? There no longer seems to even be any serious attempts as there were in the 90s. I would much rather have seen NASA spend money on a one shot SSTO demo than that lame single stick SRB launch for Constellation. I am left wit
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One issue is that the payload of an SSTO is going to be small compared to the size of the vehicle. One can think of using it to carry people or small payloads but making it big enough to launch a comsat or whatever is going to require a much larger vehicle than the ones we are used to. You saw his example with the Shuttle ET. It used 6 SSME engines. The actual Space Shuttle only uses 3 engines.
The other issue is how to recover the vehicle. This is what they were trying to demonstrate with the Douglas DC-X.
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The DC-X is akin to something like Grasshopper. It wasn't designed to withstand orbital reentry speeds which a wholly different ball of wax.
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It's not as much of a race as you might think.
From TFA, Airbus is going to be spending the next five years finishing Ariane 6. Then, AFTER they're done with that, they'll start serious work on reusability.
On the other hand, SpaceX is already flying the reusability testbed(s), and running the tests required to refine the software to the point that it words as intended.
So it looks like a race that SpaceX is pretty much guaranteed to win, what with the ten ye
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They may win as soon as July 22nd, when the Falcon 9 is scheduled to land at Vandenburg AFB. It'll be really interesting to see how 'reusable' the first stage is after the engineers have a chance to inspect it thoroughly.
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I think you're talking about the Jason-3 launch. That's actually a couple launches away, though it'll be their first landing attempt on the West Coast.
CRS-7 is launching June 26th (bumped back a bit, probably to let them reshuffle things to account for cargo that was supposed to be delivered on the last Progress) from Cape Canaveral. They are going to attempt a landing...maybe on land instead of the ASDS.
They've also got a geosynchronous sat launch in mid-July with the first "enhanced" F9 v1.1...that might
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>if X launches from Texas, is there a nice place to land the first stage?
I'm not 100% certain, but my understanding is that the plan is to, depending on the amount of extra fuel allowed by unused payload capacity, either fly directly back to the launch pad, or land on the floating barge to refuel and *then* fly itself back to the launch pad. Though I remember some talk about SpaceX leasing one of the more remote and durable launch sites at Cape Canaveral, Florida, so I imagine they plan to eventually la
Very "original" (Score:4, Insightful)
So its basically the Vulcan concept, a detachable avionics/engine package at the back and an expendable everything else. I suppose its an improvement from what we currently have but not by much. The only real difference from Vulcan is that instead of being snagged out of the air by a helicopter it glides back to some location under some power. I suppose I can see why Airbus and ULA are going for such concepts, they should be pretty cheap to develop (though I am sure they'll try to squeeze every dollar they can out of their respective benefactors), are relatively low risk and will still let them justify big launch bills with tank/upper stage replacement. But if SpaceX can pull off a Falcon first stage recovery even a majority of the time they'll blow this and Vulcan out of the water. Fuel is cheap, replacing tanks and stages is expensive.
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Agree. And assuming the Falcon Heavy flies as planned, there isn't much justification for SLS either. For the price of a single launch, you could fly at least 2 or 3 Falcon Heavies, and end up putting more mass on orbit. Since we're pretty experienced with rendezvous and docking, there's less need for such high throw-weight, even for large, complex missions.
And eventually, SpaceX will come out with their new super-heavy (based on the Raptor engine) which will outclass SLS anyway, as they announced back in 2 [wikipedia.org]
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Of course there's a justification for SLS: jobs in congressmen's congressional districts.
Quite likely. The question is what congress will mandate has to be developed next to keep those people employed.
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Yes, that's why it's nickname is the "Senate Launch System". ;-)
The tragedy is, most of the people working at those jobs are really smart, highly skilled professionals who could do a lot of good for the amount of money we'll spend on them. Instead, we're going to waste both the money and their talents on a project that will at best enable an asteroid mission before it gets mothballed.
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"you could fly at least 2 or 3 Falcon Heavies"
And that assumes you believe NASAs "$500 Million per launch" statement (Buwahahahahhhahhhahaaa). SLS has more than earned its "Senate Launch System" title, with billions already spent and at least $22 Billion required just to get the first two of them off the ground with no real indications on how much it will cost to develop any actual mission hardware or finish the heavier versions of it.
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Space is VERY risky and unforgiving both because of the environmental extremes and because of the huge amounts of energy involved in getting there and getting back - so by nature any responsible program is sufficiently risk-averse that it does not choose lots of additional complexity and many more operations without very solid justification.
Which is another reason NOT to put a $10,000,000 payload on top of a $2,000,000 rocket and send it up in a single launch. Skylab was almost lost due to malfunctions of the Saturn that launched it.
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The Skylab malfunction was with the Skylab module itself, not the Saturn V vehicle underneath it. "The station was damaged during launch when the micrometeoroid shield separated from the workshop and tore away, taking one of two main solar panel arrays with it and jamming the other one so that it could not deploy." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]. Your point holds though, just not the right example.
Re: Very "original" (Score:2)
Sounds logical.
Re:Very "original" (Score:5, Interesting)
When I think of "reducing costs", adding a couple turbofans to something doesn't jump to mind. Even if it gives them a better mass ratio than Falcon 9, that's a second powertrain to build and maintain. And then they have to rebuild the tank and re-mate it (although it saves some transportation costs).
Might prove more economical, but I doubt it.
Yes, and yes. That was then... (Score:2)
everyone else in the launch industry insisted it made no economic sense to try to recover and reuse the first stage of their rockets.
Yes, that was then - long ago. Things are different now. For instance, who in the 90s, knew you could get 8GB of computer storage at less than $15 those days? It's reality now.
Re:Yes, and yes. That was then... (Score:4, Informative)
Aircraft technology isn't stagnant by any means: a modern 777-ER can carry the same number of passengers 50% farther for a third less fuel than the original 747-100. But that just proves your point, that breathless Moore's Law comparisons are moronic when talking about airplanes, cars, rockets, and bridges.
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Aircraft technology isn't stagnant by any means: a modern 777-ER can carry the same number of passengers 50% farther for a third less fuel than the original 747-100.
Well whoopee-do. That's the computing equivalent of saying 'But DOS 23.5 can now use ONE MEGABYTE of RAM, not the mere 640k you had to live with thirty years ago!'
Now where are the vertical-takeoff hypersonic airliners I used to see on TV as a kid?
Re:Yes, and yes. That was then... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's my point. Progress happens in all fields of engineering, but computer engineering happens at such a radically different tempo that it's not a useful comparison.
Space, as it turns out, is really hard. There are two basic kinds of techological miracle: working with microscopic quantities of matter and energy, and working with vast amounts. Science fiction authors of the '60s assumed that mega-scale engineering would continue at the incredible pace set during the 20th century, but it turns out we were just getting to the hard part. But they drastically underestimated what we'd be able to do with micro-scale engineering.
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But aviation has gone backwards. When I was young, anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare could fly across the Atlantic in comfort at twice the speed of sound, and military pilots in a close approximation to space suits would be flying above them at nearly twice that speed.
Now we gush about how new airliners save a few bucks on fuel so airlines can make more profit as they cram more and more of us into the same little metal tube.
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What's progress? Is progress defined in terms of how fast we can get a handful of millionaires from New York to Paris, or in terms of turning an ocean into an insignificant obstacle for average citizen of the developed world? Today
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Turns out that the ability to fly to Paris at Mach 2 was a pointless waste of effort and money.
i reject this idea. i don't want to live in your world. i live for cool stuff. the concorde is still cool stuff.
Re: Yes, and yes. That was then... (Score:2)
It's a phenomenon I call delusional optimism. People see the exponential growth that the semiconductor industry experienced for most of their life, and assume it's typical. Exponential growth in a finite world is transient. The generation just now being born won't be so delusionally optimistic.
Warning signs of lack of engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
This has the look of a paper concept that nobody's put any engineering work into yet. Some possibly show-stopping engineering challenges:
1) The air-breathing engines are dead weight dragged most of the way to orbit. And turboprops and turbofans are pretty damned heavy compared to rocket engines: for many applications, the weight of fuel and tankage is so much greater than the engines that engine mass is irrelevant, but that's not the case here. SpaceX's design makes use of engines that need to go to space anyway.
2) Looking at the videos, the design relies on folding propellers that deploy in flight. This is ... not an easy thing to do. I'm not aware of any aircraft larger than a duck that uses this technique, even on carrier-based aircraft where space is at a premium.
3) While rocket engines are pretty lightweight compared to turbine engines, it's still a lot of weight to fly back home. The video shows a flyback aircraft with very short stubby wings. In addition, the wings can't be asymmetric lifting airfoils or they'd push the rocket sideways during lauch: the have to be flat boards. The return vehicle is likely to have a very high stall speed, making landing a challenge.
4) The video shows no details on how this propulsion module is attached to the fuel tank above it. This is difficult: enormous fuel and oxidizer pipes need to pass through the nose of the propulsion module, along with gigantic clamps attaching it to the fuel tank... but this surface is exposed to re-entry heating on the flight back. How do you route plumbing and avionics through your heat shield?
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This has the look of a paper concept that nobody's put any engineering work into yet.
Hey now, don't be a downer! It works in Kerbal Space Program!
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I'm not aware of any aircraft larger than a duck that uses this technique...
pGeese, eagles, condors... So there!
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There's plenty of aircraft that have folding propellers, as long as you're willing to include rotors. Most naval helicopters have them, as do the V-22 Osprey. You don't see more of them, because propellors aren't nearly as big a space hog as the wings, which often fold. If you're willing to include motor gliders than there's also plenty of aircraft that deploy the folding propellor during flight.
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Good examples, though these props will be operating at *much* higher speeds and stresses than a motor glider, and the Osprey's props don't unfold in flight. Well they're not supposed to anyway.
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Well, sorta. This flyback proposal is based on an Ariane 5 style rocket, which has solid boosters which drop off early and an oversized LH2-LOX "main stage". Whether you call the main stage a first or second stage is semantics: the important point is that it goes all the way into space, and most of the way into orbit. See this launch [youtube.com] of Ariane 5, where main stage separation happens at a velocity of 7 km/s (out of about 8 km/s needed to reach
Re: Warning signs of lack of engineering (Score:3)
You seem to know a good amount about the design of rocket systems. I have a question for you. If reentry is so difficult, why not split stages earlier, before it becomes such a challenge? Aren't the currently used stage timings optimized assuming no reuse? What if you optimize for cost, and assume first stage recovery, but require a more manageable (earlier) split?
Re: Warning signs of lack of engineering (Score:4, Informative)
I don't do this for a living, so don't take me too seriously. The smaller you make the first stage, the more work must be done by the second stage, which means *it* must be bigger, increasing the useless mass that makes it into orbit. Also, the smaller the first stage is, the less it costs, so it's less valuable to recover...
You're absolutely right that there's an optimization problem to be solved here, and that a rocket optimized for first stage recovery might look very different from a stock Ariane 5 with wings on the bottom. But this rocket *does* look like a stock Ariane 5 with wings on the bottom, which makes me worry that they haven't done the math.
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2) Looking at the videos, the design relies on folding propellers that deploy in flight. This is ... not an easy thing to do. I'm not aware of any aircraft larger than a duck that uses this technique, even on carrier-based aircraft where space is at a premium.
Look to the world of motor gliders - notably the Stemme S10 [stemme.ag].
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I am dubious about the added weight as well but the turbine engines would not require a stored oxidizer saving some weight. I assume their fuel would be stored in the small wings.
Simplified? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The Airbus team concluded that SpaceX's design of returning the full stage to Earth could be simplified by separating the propulsion bay from the rest of the stage, protecting the motor on reentry and, using the winglets and turbofans, return horizontally to a conventional air strip."
Interesting definition of "simplified" they're using. They're not even recovering the entire first stage, and they're basically bolting a jet airplane onto it to achieve that much. Propellant is as cheap as dirt, they're avoiding paying tens of thousands of dollars in propellant by instead paying for jet aircraft maintenance and operations and an entirely new set of cryogenic tankage and a substantial amount of aerospace vehicle structure for each flight. SpaceX is just making the first stage a bit bigger (and looking at things like additional propellant chilling to increase density) so it has the extra capacity required.
"We are using an aerodynamic shield so that the motor is not subjected to such high stress on reentry"
Thus solving an issue that SpaceX has already shown isn't actually a major problem...they have been regularly bringing entire intact first stages through reentry and down to sea level for some time now.
As for SpaceX not "coming close"...their second attempt actually brought the vehicle to a halt on the landing pad, though with mangled landing gear, and the reasons for the control issues during the final burn are well understood. They are extremely close...odds are quite good that their third attempt (in a bit under 2 weeks) will be a success.
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Thus solving an issue that SpaceX has already shown isn't actually a major problem...they have been regularly bringing entire intact first stages through reentry and down to sea level for some time now.
But, at this point, no-one knows how much work will be required to refurbish those stages and fly them again. Until we actually have one land intact, rather than inpieces, we won't know. It could turn out that this method is actually cheaper than SpaceX returning the entire stage, though I doubt it myself.
30% launch cost reduction is huge (Score:2)
30% launch cost reduction is a huge deal. It is considered good ROI in many areas, so things which previously could only break even become financially viable, and in fact a risk worth taking.
Here's to hoping they keep true to the 30%!
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Reusing the engines would be a significant cost reduction, but they're going about it in a particularly complex way, and their level of reuse still falls short of their competition's. By their own statements, they throw away 20% of the economic value of the stage. SpaceX just needs to make the first stage a bit oversized for the second stage. That costs them a somewhat larger vehicle (which is reused for multiple launches, so this cost only has to be paid once) and propellant (which accounts for 1% of a lau
the more the merrier... (Score:4, Interesting)
Is the airbus project worth anything? I have no idea. But the more money thrown at this issue the happier I am really.
We need to get into space and we've allowed our space programs to atrophy.
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If we had that attitude, we'd have remained in the water with the rest of the fish.
You can stay here if you want. No one is forcing you to leave the planet.
Re: the more the merrier... (Score:2)
I would actually love to see more research being done shopping these lines. The complete failure of biosphere as a self-sustained ecosystem shows we have a lot to learn before independent colonies become realistic.
Re: the more the merrier... (Score:2)
Sorry, I'm on my phone. "Shopping those lines" was supposed to be "along those lines".
Yeah (Score:3)
So they bolt on a pair of wings, add some propellers that have to be deployed from a casing that protects them during launch, oh and another stage separation event, a mechanism for separating the fuel tank from the engine.
And that's supposed to be simpler than some hydraulic landing legs and grid fins?
And carrying all those additions to space doesn't cost them any extra fuel?
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So they bolt on a pair of wings, add some propellers that have to be deployed from a casing that protects them during launch, oh and another stage separation event, a mechanism for separating the fuel tank from the engine. And that's supposed to be simpler than some hydraulic landing legs and grid fins? And carrying all those additions to space doesn't cost them any extra fuel?
Are you raging against this because it is a bad idea? Because it isn't an American idea? Because it wasn't thought up by golden boy Elon Musk? Or is it all three? The idea of landing the first stage like an airplane is a well understood process and it sure as hell seems simpler and more straight forward to me than what Musk is trying to achieve, which is to land a rocket standing up at the mercy if the wind; and simpler is usually better.
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A first stage is not an airplane. Making it land like an airplane entails adding most of an airplane to it...wings, jet engines, unfolding propellers, substantial, steerable landing gear, various covers and other mechanisms that open and close in flight, mechanisms to detach the disposable tanks, etc. This is not making things simpler.
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A first stage is not an airplane. Making it land like an airplane entails adding most of an airplane to it...wings, jet engines, unfolding propellers, substantial, steerable landing gear, various covers and other mechanisms that open and close in flight, mechanisms to detach the disposable tanks, etc. This is not making things simpler.
And making a long cylindrical object landin end up on a platform in any kind of wind is simple?
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I'm not raging against anything.
I don't see why I should care if it was an 'American idea' even if I thought that was a meaningful distinction.
I do like most of Elon's projects and I don't think he would have used a system like this because he's looking to build a rocket that could potentially land on Mars, but that's irrelevant.
I merely object to this design being presented as 'simplified' and having 'no need for extra rocket fuel'.
I personally find the SpaceX approach more elegant and I don't think that b
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I'm not raging against anything. I don't see why I should care if it was an 'American idea' even if I thought that was a meaningful distinction. I do like most of Elon's projects and I don't think he would have used a system like this because he's looking to build a rocket that could potentially land on Mars, but that's irrelevant.
I merely object to this design being presented as 'simplified' and having 'no need for extra rocket fuel'.
I personally find the SpaceX approach more elegant and I don't think that because we've had a hundred years of air flight experience that makes it any simpler or better of a solution.
I don't see the elegance. It is overly complicated. I have worked around tall structures long enough to know what wind will do to something like an antenna mast or wind generator mounting column floating in mid air under a crane and I don't expect it will do anything much different to a rocket trying to land end up. If Airbus can really add airplane parts to a rocket stage using ultra light high strength modern composts and land the thing like an airplane that and do it in a fairly broad range of weather co
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> So they bolt on a pair of wings, add some propellers that have to be deployed from a casing that protects them during launch, oh and another stage separation event, a mechanism for separating the fuel tank from the engine.
I do not think you know what a turbofan is based on what you stated.
> And that's supposed to be simpler than some hydraulic landing legs and grid fins?
Not simpler to build and package, but certainly far easier to land given that we have 70 years of experience building jet engines
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The article mentions "turbofans" but the video at the bottom of the link clearly shows external propellers (i.e., a turboprop). It's the article that's confused, not the grandparent poster.
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The way SpaceX is trying to recover the booster is like catching a bullet in your teeth. They have only a second or two of usable thrust, since the Merlin engines don't have enough throttle range to land at a nice gentle pace. But what if they developed a "Merlin DT" (Deep Throttle[TM]) and used that for the center engine? Even if the Merlin-DT was less efficient, it's only one of nine, so you could optimize it quite easily over the whole flight profile.
If you had that one center engine with enough throttle
Re: Yeah (Score:2)
It's already been shown that the SpaceX design can get within 105m of a landing pad. If it ends up being too difficult to finish the landing as is, adding more landing site sensors to improve prediction, and adding a catching mechanism should solve the problem. And note that all of these additions are one-time costs that don't have to be lifted to 100km. My money works definitely be on the spacex design.
Re: Yeah (Score:2)
*15m, not 105m
Economics (Score:2)
They're right that reusability doesn't make much economic sense at current flight rates. NASA and Boeing looked at recovering Saturn V stages in the 60s, and determined that they'd need about 60 launches for the development and operational cost of recovering and refurbishing the stages to become lower than just throwing them away. This would probably require less, as they wouldn't be dumping the stage into the sea and trying to clean it up, but it will still probably require quite a few years at current lau
Re: Economics (Score:2)
Note, though, that spacex is using payed-for launches to test its recovery system. Thus, the development costs are much lower than they could be.
Large government contractors (Score:2)
Large government contractors live or die suckling the tits of taxpayers... and their internal goal is NOT to solve the problems they're brought in to solve (the paperless initiative to reduce costs and ALSO as a side effect make all government records indexable and searchable for example) but to maximize billable hours.
It makes perfect sense to say it isn't economically feasible to make the first stage of spacecraft reusable; because for them it ISN'T an economically sound business model. It would reduce th
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Scaled already built a close air support prototype -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]. The world hasn't beaten a path to their door to buy them. I agree that the legacy aerospace contractors are crooks, but competitive modern fighters are extremely complex in every domain -- structural, propulsion, avionics. Ask the Russians and Chinese how well their 5th gen fighters are coming. I respect Scaled but Spaceship Two is a LOT simpler than a 5th gen fighter and it is not coming along so well.
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> Ask the Russians and Chinese how well their 5th gen fighters are coming.
Russia's aircraft are actually quite good. For example, he F-15 was developed in response to rumors of the MiG-25... but performance was inferior. The design of the MiG-25 is so good it is the basis for the MiG-31, and is also rumored to be the basis for a MACH 4-capable interceptor... same basic design but with modern materials and construction techniques. Also other Russian (Soviet?) military aircraft were historically superior