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.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.