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SpaceX Dragon spacecraft for low cost trips to the Moon.
Just saw this discussed on Nasaspaceflight.com
Elon Musk on SpaceX’s Reusable Rocket Plans. February 7, 2012 6:00 PM Quote:
Then for the Falcon 9, the payload would be reduced from 10 mT to 6 mT. If the reduction in payload really is this high, then maybe it would be better to recover the first stage at sea. The loss in payload is coming from the reduction in the speed of staging as well as the need to retain a portion of the fuel for the return to base. Recovering at sea would not have these disadvantages because you could let the first stage make its usual trajectory at returning to the sea but use just small amount of propellant for the final slowdown before the sea impact. In this article Musk does mention that returning back to the launch point allows the turnaround time at least for the first stage to be just hours. But will we really need that short a turnaround time at this stage of the game? A turnaround time of a few days would seem to be sufficient. Perhaps the idea that retrieval at sea would be so expensive comes from the experience of the shuttle with the SRB's. But these were quite large and heavy at ca. 90 mT dry compared to that of the Falcon 9 first stage at less than 15 mT. Also, it is well known the labor costs for the shuttle were greatly inflated compared to a privately funded program. The only additional requirement is that you would need a cover that could be extended to cover the engine section and would be watertight. Bob Clark |
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