I found in Kerbal that parachutes work ok for landing small upper stages engine, but for large lower stages unless you have a lot of fuel left to control the descent the tend to burn up during re-entry.
Elon Musk just landed a rocket, making it re-usable, making space travel SO much cheaper. Heās the Edison of our day.
Pod
1645
How much cheaper does this make rocket travel?
And not rain on any parades, but theyāve yet to reuse it. :p
Elon Musk is the only CEO iām aware off that cares about our collective future. He is a good man.
Razgon
1647
Thatās really not true. There are a ton of major Ceo who does. Bill Gates for one, Warren Buffet for another. Thereās also the whole āGive pledgeā
People like Bill Gates are more concerned with hands-on helping than loftier goals, which may be less sexy than building spacecraft.
Letās go easy on the blanket accolades there. Heās certainly a guy with bold ideas and good business savvy, but he hardly seems noble. Heās going to make himself filthy rich with all of this, and he tapped public funds to get all this going.
Aleck
1649
And made his initial nut on Paypal, which (as a payment processor) is kind of the absolute opposite of actually creating products that make the world a better place. I love what heās doing with Tesla and SpaceX, but starting out as a financial payments processorā¦ Meh.
Well, he helped revolutionize the financial payments sector and thereby helped online businesses and small/medium businesses really take off in creating new opportunities. Yeah, pretty horrible.
ā Alan
Itās more the things he talks about, and the āreasonsā he gives, which, for a CEO, often are not about the money (sure he wants/needs money to do stuff, as we all do) and more about concerns over the future, as in actually having a future to pass on. That is quite rare for a CEO, and he has often risked his whole personal wealth to push his concerns.
Anyway, i dont LOVE him, but i think he and i could sit down and have a chat and unlike most other CEOās iāve spoken too, we would probably finish up without me wanting to slap him around a bit. Thatās a āgoodā CEO in my book ;) Bob Dudley on the other handā¦ātypicalā CEO.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/14/bp-pledge-shareholder-anger-ceo-bob-dudleypay-deal
JD
1652
I mean: seriously. Transfering money to some person or business in a different country or even continent was such a ridiculous process at times. I remember when I had to do it through Deutsche Bank. As they work globabally, youād think that would be an easy thing to do. Nope. Youād have to fill out a full-page form which, among other things, required you to provide the physical address of a particular branch bank of the bank the recipient had her/his/its account at. Why the hell? Oh, and it would cost 30 or 40 bucks to do something that was done entirely electronically.
The notion that PayPal didnāt make like easier and better for many is hilarious.
Some pretty stunning 4k footage of auroras from the ISS (Youtube)
ShivaX
1654
And possibly more importantly how much does it increase the chance of catastrophic failure? I mean sending a rocket into space isnāt like driving your car to the store, there are some crazy forces involved and any weakness tends to result in really large explosions and the loss of payloads.
I assume the risk is outweighed by a recyclable system or they wouldnāt be bothering, but all it really takes is one failure to scare people off.
MikeJ
1655
I think launching unmanned payloads is an area where people canāt afford to be that risk-averse. I suppose if you have a really expensive payload, maybe you pay a premium to send it up in a new rocket - which is still cheaper than a disposable rocket because the launch company expects to recover some of the value. For cheaper payload, it might be more feasible to send up multiples.
Reusable rockets isnāt really the new part. The solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle were reusable, for example. Whatās new is the ease and lower cost of doing so due to landing the rocket where they want it rather than needing a recovery team sent to fish them out of the ocean.
MikeJ
1657
I recall reading also that the SRBs also hit the water pretty hard, which could warp them. Also, being submerged in seawater wasnāt too great either.
Edit: Wikipedia says they were normally going about 50 mph when they hit.
Rocket fuel is cheap, Elon Musk once said: less than a percent of the cost of a launch, generally. (A Falcon 9 costs about $60 million, all told, and the fuel is about $200,000.)
In the same speech, he remarked that the cost of the first stage hardware is somewhere between half and three quarters of the total cost of the rocket. Bringing it back makes for a pretty good savings.
The rocket or the launch?
Timex
1660
The liquid fuel tank was not re-used though, and cost about $75 million a pop.
Also the SRB cost quite a lot to refurbish, whereas it seems the Falcon 9 first stage is a lot more practically reusable.
