SpaceX starts nine-day countdown to first flight of the new Falcon SpaceX is back in the orbital delivery game, with the first launch since its explosive mishap in June. Aiming for Falcon rocket static fire at Cape Canaveral on the 16th and launch about three days later — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2015 It has been a rocky six months for Elon's Musketeers since the June explosion, …
We all follow this story with interest.
... To land a rocket on it's tail is something that was written into science fiction in the fifties.
We've achieved so much with rocketry of this type, but I wonder whether the basic concept has legs for the next phase.
I'm not questioning whether it is possible.... only whether it can ever be viable as a 'launch and land' mundane solution, much as is the case with current aviation.
Even the shuttle pushed the limits.
But the concept had legs.
VTOL seems to be the best development route.
Clearly early days, but..... getting very high, and lobbing the next stage further, seems an enticing prospect.
Is this just a Matchless with titanium everything?
We place our bets, and wish them the all the best.
:)
I guess the additional weight & cost of carrying wings is greater than the additional weight & cost of a bit more fuel to land vertically. At least that seems to be the conclusion since there's a few companies trying this now, and no-one developing a winged first stage.
You can't really land it horizontally because the engines that it uses to slow down are on the bottom and can't tilt very far, so if it came down sideways, there wouldn't be anything to slow it down.
Unless you mean landing like the Space Shuttle, in which case they'd need wings, and landing gear, and probably some heat shielding (a good thing about coming down engine first, is that rocket engines are ok with high temps). All of that stuff would add a lot to the mass of the booster, so you'd need more fuel to get it up there, which would require more fuel to propel the fuel and so on. You'd basically end up with the shuttle again.
As for why they use engines to slow down and not parachutes, well, I assume they've done the maths and found that the amount of fuel they need to land is less than the mass of the parachutes they'd need. It doesn't seem intuitive, but they are rocket scientists
"As for why they use engines to slow down and not parachutes"
I suspect that parachutes would not allow the precision they need. At sea the landing target is very small. Their ultimate objective is to have it and back at the launch site where it can be refueled and reused with the minimum amount of processing or transportation.
Not very far. SpaceX gets revenue now for Falcon launches, which pays for further upgrades and development. Skylon brings in no money until the complicated engines and airframe are completed. Since those two parts have to be integrated, you can't start flying with an early version and upgrade over time.
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Amusingly, here's an earlier article talking about exactly that from the same author.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/20/us_air_force_x37b_space_plane_in_orbit/
Bezos launch and landing wasn't at all commercial.
Nor was it particularly hard. Sounding rockets go straight up and come straight down, so targetting a football field from 60 miles away and a few thousand mph in the wrong direction isn't one of the issues they need to address.
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