The Shuttle was an abomination any way it's diced and/or sliced. At $1B per
mission, +/- a quarter $B, reuse of any part or component was pretty much
moot. Would be been better to keep flying the Saturn 5 at $1/4B per
vehicle. I saw an artist conception of the SIC stage parachuting into the
ocean in a McNally Encyclopedia of Space in my local(Auburn) Library in the
early 70's. Chutes were stowed in the 4 aft fairings where the BSM are
housed. and keep the tanks pressurized for impact resilience as per Sea
Dragon study. At least get the F-1's back. And NO, not 20/20 hind sight,
it's politics superseding engineering edict.
Trillions wasted (plus 14 lives) over 30 years that could of been used to
robotically explore the solar system and colonize the moon etc.
<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=icon>
Virus-free.
www.avast.com
<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=link>
<#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 9:28 AM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Mon, 23 Mar 2020, Uwe Klein wrote:
Wonderful demonstration of engine-out fault tolerance, but it does look
like the rocket is showing some wear and tear after 5 flights...
Is the same set of refurbished hardware flown repeatedly
or
is it a flow of various parts refurbished, stored and then
assembled into a "reused" booster?
It's hard to be sure from the outside.
That said, the latter approach is unlikely to produce significant cost
savings -- certainly it didn't for the shuttle SRBs. NASA had an ulterior
motive for touting "reuse" of the SRBs even if it didn't save money, but
no such motive is evident for SpaceX. Odds are that it's pretty much the
same set of hardware flying repeatedly.
Henry