SpaceX Rocket Lands Perfectly

[Dalton]

Live Video

The first stage of the rocket landed pretty close to dead-center on the drone landing barge. Amazing shot. It's the future!

[Sea Skimmer]

It's only the future if they can make the rest of the economics work out on a useful basis. Remember the cost of adding this stuff is a 40% reduction in first stage burnout velocity which turns into a tremendous reduction in payload to orbit for the overall rocket size. And meanwhile most of the recovered mass is just sheet Aluminum.

The alternative approach being taken by other companies of simply ejecting the engines and parachuting them back without any great complexity makes a lot more sense to me if you want a reusable rocket. Its not like any of these ideas are new, but earlier generations of rocket motors needed far too much work to even be worth trying to reuse. This is a big reason why the shuttle never worked out, most complex rocket engine ever was required to make the thing fly and then you had to tear it apart at the end.

[Iroscato]

How viable would something like Skylon be as a launch vehicle? I would link but I'm on the mobile and ever so lazy, but it looks amazing from where I'm standing...

[Sea Skimmer]

If Skylon worked it would crush all conventional rocket boosters for payloads under 15 tons, though with some variance depending on the desired orbit. Last hard news I saw on Skylon though was the USAF saying they think its engine concept could work (not that it will but it doesn't violate anything they know) but that they in very friendly terms suggested it will burn off its own tail, and that the designers should reorient it to a two stage to orbit system.

The burn the tail off problem is why some of the same people originally designed HOTOL with the engines in the tail, but this led to a configuration that was completely unstable once the payload was launched. Which killed the project, but not until somehow they'd spent millions and millions of pounds on it. This is a factor in why I've always been very skeptical of Skylon. In any case the engine remains unproven with a radical new design, in the face of the most violent flight regime that can exist. As in at hypersonic speeds the air is basically decomposing and exploding...constantly, as you fly through it. It actually corrodes the skin off of your flight vehicle. Spacecraft face some of this on reentry, but for much shorter periods of time and with very heavy thermal protection systems. Skylong looks amazing because it's an absurdly absurdly ambitious program, and even if it does ultimately work it will first need to secure an enormous funding increase. That's not really on the horizon right now, though a successful flight demonstration of the engine might invite private money into the fray. The odds of the European governments funding it are low, particularly with Ariane 6 on the table.

[Guardsman Bass]

I'll second Sea Skimmer - it's a good engineering feat, but it's not the future of launch vehicles unless Musk can affordably turn around the rockets and launch them against on a schedule. And he's over-promised before, like with the Falcon Heavy (which was promised back in 2013).

[TimothyC]

It's only the future if they can make the rest of the economics work out on a useful basis.

To elaborate, Musk is looking at a 10-20 reuse life, with possible refurbishment, which is actually at the floor for the economics. ULA's "Save the engine" plan has a projected payback of just 3-5 reuses, but falls behind full-reuse if Musk can get to the full life, as ULA doesn't plan on using the engines much more than 5-10 times.

I am not 100% sold on the planned reuse rates from either company, however I think competition can be a good thing, and at this point will help cut launch costs. Just so long as we don't end up with a situation where the production lines are built large enough for either line to handle all of the launches, while only being run at 1/3 to 1/2 capacity.

[matterbeam]

I'm not quite sure, but is that the first video recording of a launch from liftoff to orbit, direct?