Elon Musk’s SpaceX is to land both Starship Booster on Droneship make NASA Crazy
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX is to land both Starship Booster on Droneship make NASA Crazy
No Chopsticks arm! No Catch tower!
SpaceX is working on another landing method for both Starship and Booster: Landing on a drone ship.
So, what is the real reason why SpaceX chose this landing method?
Let’s find out on today’s episode of Alpha Tech:
Since 2021, when Starship first appeared, Elon Musk and SpaceX have begun harboring bold plans to land the Super Heavy booster and the upper stage of Starship on a platform in the vast ocean.
However, a while later, this method seemed no longer feasible due to the emergence of the Mechazilla tower with its unique “chopstick” arms, capable of catching and landing the rocket in a special way.
Interestingly, recently, we have seen the prospect of sea landings return, particularly the use of autonomous drone ships to receive the massive Starship spacecraft.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is to land both Starship Booster on Droneship make NASA Crazy
Although this is just a small detail we found in the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) published by the FAA in June, it also indicates the development of this method in the near future. SpaceX may be exploring the potential benefits of landing both the Starship second stage and the Super Heavy booster at sea.
First, let’s talk about landing the Booster.
Through its Falcon rockets, SpaceX has slowly but surely refined and perfected the recovery and reuse of orbital-class rocket boosters – Rather than coasting 500-1000 kilometers downrange after stage separation and landing on a drone ship at sea, those boosters flipped around, canceled out their substantial velocities, and boosted themselves a few hundred kilometers back to the Florida or California coast, where they finally touched down on basic concrete pads.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is to land both Starship Booster on Droneship make NASA Crazy
Unsurprisingly, canceling out around 1.5 kilometers per second of downrange velocity (equivalent to Mach ~4.5) and fully reversing that velocity back towards the launch site is an expensive maneuver, costing quite a lot of propellant. For example, the nominal 25-second reentry burn performed by almost all Falcon boosters likely costs about 20 tons (~40,000 lb) of propellant. The average ~35-second single-engine landing burn used by all Falcon boosters likely costs about 10 tons (~22,000 lb) of propellant. Normally, that’s all that’s needed for a drone ship booster landing.
For return-to-launch-site (RTLS) landings, Falcon boosters must also perform a large ~40-second boostback burn with three Merlin 1D engines, likely costing an extra 25-35 tons (55,000-80,000 lb) of propellant. In other words, an RTLS landing generally ends up costing at least twice as much propellant as a drone ship landing. Using the general rocketry rule of thumb that every 7 kilograms of booster mass reduces payload to orbit by 1 kilogram and assuming that each reusable Falcon booster requires about 3 tons of recovery-specific hardware (mostly legs and grid fins) a drone ship landing might reduce Falcon 9’s payload to low Earth orbit (LEO) by ~5 tons (from 22 tons to 17 tons). The extra propellant needed for an RTLS landing might reduce it by another 4-5 tons to 13 tons.
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