[AR] Re: Re spacex falcon 9 landing
- From: Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2015 20:17:32 -0700
On 12/25/2015 10:30 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:
Falcon 9 is certainly *ahead*, but otherwise, it's perfectly reasonable
to compare the two -- it's just a bit difficult. If your goal is cheap
orbit, then whether it's better to go suborbital first and then progress
to orbital, or to go expendable first and then progress to reusable, is
a perfectly reasonable question, although not simple to answer.
Fortunately, we have talented funded organizations pursuing both
approaches, so we'll see. With luck, it will turn out both are viable
paths. But yeah, the current "SpaceX is better! No, Blue is better!"
wrangling is way premature - it's far too soon to say.
Remember that SpaceX doesn't *have* an operational reusable rocket yet
-- just an initial proof of principle, achieved with some difficulty.
Many would say that Elon is doing things the hard way, losing much of
the benefit of reusability by treating it as a later add-on.
On the other hand, I'm really impressed with how (apparently) little
SpaceX has spent, both in hardware development and in booster
performance margin, to add on the now-demonstrated capability to recover
till-now expendable boosters intact. (I'd guesstimate the total cost in
the high tens to low hundreds of millions - can you imagine how many
billions a similar demo would have cost at MSFC?)
The current capability may end up being a long way still from a
profitably reusable booster stage. But they didn't break the bank
getting this far; chances are good that (absent some show-stopper in the
inspection data, or a market crash) they can afford to continue
developing the capability.
Henry
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