Technically their goal was to have as little maintenance as possible between launches so you refuel again and launch. That’s the plan anyways.
They will definitely refire the engines, possible a full duration test fire, but possibly only a static fire lasting only a few seconds on this. It’s been said the engines are rates for 40 firings since the Merlin was built with reusability in mind, so they shouldn’t have to do much there.
The more difficult part and the larger unknown is the structural aspect of the core. The welds, the bolts, the tank walls themselves, etc. Never before has a rocket that experiences so much acceleration been recovered and tried to use again. Before you say the shuttle, low G acceleration was inherent in the design of the rocket to keep the astronauts alive. During reentry only a max of 4-5 g’s would be experience. The falcon 9 first stage experiences over 9 g’s of acceleration when landing. What does that do to a core?
From what I’ve read there are, in general, two schools of thought on reusability.
The first is that it’s a boondoggle, a waste of time since it’s so expensive ala space shuttle, and you can’t be guaranteed that it’s any safer and a massive rebuild should be undertaken(hence the high cost).
The second is that you’ve already proven the rocket can fly and undergo the stresses of launch. If it can survive through that, then it’s essentially a test launch and any further launches will be safer up to a point where things start breaking and maintenance is required. The question is what needs maintence, and how long do you know it will last? That is the hard question and is the difference between a rebuild every launch, and a rebuild every 10 or 20 or 50 launches.
That’s the question SpaceX is trying to answer right now both by heavily inspecting( I don’t know how, not a structural engineer) the landed cores, and by reducing the amount of stress and damage received during reentry. That is the reason the last 2 barge landings were sketchy. The more they slow down pre-reentry, the less heating the core received(heat scales as velocity cubed, so every m/s matters) the better shape the landed core will be in. Jcsat barely landed, and I guess they wanted to push that further and that’s why they ran out of fuel with eutal sat. Recovering cores in tip top shape is their top priority.
I guess we’ll know after the first few re–uses of the rocket sections. If they all work well then its a good outcome, but if one or all fail then its time to have a re-think maybe. Time will tell, but I hope they are able to re-use them safely.
Red Dragon is, for SpaceX, only the first in a series of missions as part of the company’s long-term plans for human expeditions to, and settlement of, Mars.
Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, said at a conference last month that he plans to send missions on “every Mars opportunity from 2018 onwards,” a reference to the launch windows that open every 26 months.
The first human mission, Musk said then, could launch as soon as 2024, landing on Mars in 2025.
NASA’s High Dynamic Range Stereo X (HiDyRS-X) was used to capture the recent Orbital ATK’s QM-2 solid rocket booster test. It records multiple high speed video exposures at the same time, giving researchers an unparalleled look into the flames for analysis.
SpaceX just released a new YouTube video with very pretty shots.
In other news their new raptor engine was recently shipped to Texas for testing. This is huge because this is the reusuable engine of the future that will power Mars rockets. In rocketry, an engine is 70-90% of the time and resources of developing the rocket itself due to its complexity. The fact that there is already a full scale test prototype is huge and indicates spacex is further along than anyone really though. It’s pretty exciting.
Also Mars architecture announce in <2 months on Sept 27th ish.
I’m late! I’m late! I’m late for a very important…oh wait.
If you’re reading this with <9 hours after I posted then you can make the date!
There’s another SpaceX launch tonight at 1:26 EST time, 10:26 pst, and I apologize again for not knowing the UTC time. I don’t trust google’s time translate thing either. It’s failed me before and made me miss my date by an hour.
The payload will be Jc-Sat16, another Japanese communications satellite aiming for a GTO insertion.
There will be a landing attempt following a ballastic reentry including a reentry burn, but no boost back burn. The barge will be 650km or so offshore of Florida.
In other news, my sim is coming along nicely and I’ve knocked out numerous bugs in it because drag is a…nnoying. The only issue I have now is that I’m coming in about 100km short and 90 seconds too late…and I’m not sure how to come in faster other than lowering my reentry burn time, or throttling the engine lower. However as far as I know the reentry burn is performed at 100% thrust so I don’t really know. It could be too much drag still but it seems pretty reasonable as my terminal velocity is right around 120-150 mph(60-70 m/s).
The orbcomm first stage is going vertical at Hawthorne today!
Im thinking about heading down there to snap a few pictures to share…There will be others with fancier cameras than my phone but I’ll share what I got!
So purdy!
