Elon Musk lays out SpaceX’s planned program for developing a reusable first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket.
Elon Musk lays out SpaceX’s planned program for developing a reusable first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket.
The article also gives some additional details about the company’s first effort to control the reentry of the first stage after launch last week.
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Elon Musk lays out SpaceX’s planned program for developing a reusable first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket.
The article also gives some additional details about the company’s first effort to control the reentry of the first stage after launch last week.
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Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
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Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
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He says that he’s going to bring back all 3 main segments from the heavy. As I understand their staging sequence, the core will be over mach 12 at separation and way way downrange. How are they going to bring that back? Now, if he says he will land that on a boat, that’ll make more sense.
“How are they going to bring that back?”
As I understand the plan, they will reserve about 10% of first stage fuel in order to expend it on the return trip. Once the upper stages have separated, the first stage will have significantly less mass to slow down, speed up in the reverse direction, and land at/near the launch-site.
Likewise for the other two sections of the Falcon-9 Heavy.
The article informs us that SpaceX has successfully overcome one of the main concerns about getting a first stage back down into the atmosphere, and that it can survive coming back down through the lower, denser atmosphere. Rockets are designed to take stresses from forces pressing on the nosecone. As far as I know, successfully coming back down without a nosecone has not been done before. They have also learned more about the amount of fuel that is necessary to do this. The lack of stability at the end worries me, however, but that should be easier to overcome than returning to the lower atmosphere.