alk3997
500 Club - QQ All-Star
This is certainly a topic I never thought I'd see on QQ. But, since you brought it up...
This was a really impressive technological achievement. The ability to propulsively brake at (roughly) Mach 3 was completely new.
However, while a really impressive technological achievement, the landing, by itself, does not change anything in regards to number of launches or cost per lbs of getting payload into orbit. It is, absolutely, an enabler but not sufficient.
Remember we launched and landed Space Shuttles for over 30 years with 133 successful missions. In many many of those years, if we were off in either sink rate or in touchdown distance we would work on improving systems or training to make sure we landed correctly. So, we had precision landings as well. I won't go into details but we also could have landed completely autonomously with a slight modification involving the landing gear.
In those 30 years only 5 orbiters were used, each costing well over $2B a piece. We reused everything except for the main ascent hydrogen and oxygen tanks (which together made up the external tank) which we threw away (burned up). And, yet, it still wasn't cheaper to reuse in spaceflight. The difficulty is that the margins between success and failure are so low that you don't want to launch until you are sure that every piece is going to work right. Even then some pieces don't.
So, the real technological achievement will be if SpaceX can manage to relaunch affordably. Until they do that, the game hasn't changed. Unfortunately, it's also true that until they've done that a few times, even SpaceX doesn't know how much it will cost. We all saw the Falcon 9 FT land perfectly, but what was the condition of the 9 Merlin engines? Did any dirt get into the engines at landing? Don't know. How much refurbishment will they take? That adds costs, as we found out many many decades ago. Each check and each refurbishment takes time and effort. Time and effort equals manpower and manpower costs money. The propellants are cheap, the human factor costs money.
Only time will tell if this was a really cool stunt or if this was the start of reducing the costs for spaceflight. I have to admit being skeptical because of my past experience.
Anyway, tanks for pulling me out of my audio hobby job and into my real work
Time to go back to some audio mixing. Happy New Year to you all (or y'all from here)!!Andy
P.S. Getting back on topic (which is strangely off-topic) - My wife and I both have our names on the New Horizons CD that's onboard the spacecraft.
