Is anyone playing catch-up to SpaceX?

On Wednesday, August 19, 2020 at 5:12:05 AM UTC+2, Greg (Strider) Moore

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fly reused rockets" despite the evidence in their face. And their proposed
solution for Vulcan is what I'd expect from them. Yeah, they're right,
engines are the most expensive parts and the tanks are cheap, so if you
recover the engines, you've recovered like 80-90% of your 1st stage costs..
But... catching it in mid-air, then attaching new tanks and all seems like

Let see, what is the success rate on mid-air intercepts of things heavier and more bulky that film cartridges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-air_retrieval

Better than I thought, but still way too many failures being reported to consider the tech (or technique) to be any more than a Hollywood stunt.

It would probably be safer (and cheaper) to just leave the engines attached to the booster and make the parachutes deploy in such a fashion that the fuel tanks get to act as a crumple zone.

Retrieving hundreds of kilograms of fast moving metal in mid-air can not be the best solution. I suspect it can't even BE A SOLUTION.


Compare that to the Falcon 9 setup: fly, land, tip over, retract legs, roll
over to your assembly building, do some quick look-see, put on the next
payload, roll out and launch. It's geared and designed from the start to
operationally be cheaper. Even if you land on one of the drone ships, I've
got to imagine that's far cheaper than trying to catch a set off falling
engines in mid-air (have we ever caught anything that big?), return them to

Wikipedia article mentions target drones from the early Cold War era. Empty mass of 680 kgs. Sounds big. But it is a whole aircraft with all its wings and fuel tanks and stuff slowing its fall down. An rocket engine or a block of them is just heavy machinery going terminal velocity.

land, inspect them, attach new tanks, and roll it back out to the pad.

I think the next step honestly is what SpaceX claims it will do with
Starship and I suspect Blue Origin will do, land the 1st stage at the pad
and eliminate a bunch of steps.

I'm interested to see what Starship turns out like. I suspect there might still be a lot of feature-slippage as the reality of the difficult of the task becomes apparent.



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--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
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Regards
Frank