You also *do not* want to dunk liquid fuel rocket engines with their turbopumps, etc, into salt water...
The space shuttle SRBs were basically very strong tubes, the whole thing was scraped clean inside and refilled with propellant. The design of a solid rocket booster is much simpler than something with nine bipropellant liquid engines. On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 7:28 PM, Craig Schmaderer <[email protected]> wrote: > You can't use parachutes on something that large and traveling that fast. > Rockets would be a lot easier if you could. It was somewhat successful with > the spaceshuttle but they basically had to rebuild them anyways after they > scooped them out of the ocean. They were also much smaller and solid > boosters. The cost of the fuel is nothing compared to the cost of the > rocket. > > Craig schmaderer > Skywave Wireless, Inc. > > > > > On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 7:00 PM -0800, "Eric Kuhnke" < > [email protected]> wrote: > > Parachutes large enough to slow the speed down sufficiently, and landing > legs robust enough to handle a 2 meter/second landing would probably be > heavier and cause more drag than keeping some residual fuel for the powered > landing. > > > > On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 6:46 PM, Jay Weekley <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Seems like that's a waste of fuel when you can use parachutes. >> >> On December 21, 2015 8:11:18 PM CST, Chuck McCown <[email protected]> >> wrote: >>> >>> Pretty cool. Launched, delivered goods to orbit. Landed first stage >>> vertically back at the launch site. >>> First time ever for that complete chain of events. >>> >>> Too bad it was a night launch. The landing video is not very good. >>> >> >> -- >> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. >> > >
