It's not that they weren't intending to try, but that the chances ofI actually think they have a good chance for several reasons. First off, recovering it should
success were thought to be poor, and the chances of actually achieving
significant cost savings were thought to be minimal.
be relatively straigh-forward. The Shuttle SRBs have shown that you can parachute recover
stages in the ocean. The Merlin engine is a pintle engine, possibly even a FSO-pintle (though
I'm not postive). If it is FSO, or if they design it right, and fish it out quick enough, they should
be able to avoid most of the potential damage from the sea-water. Anyhow, I'll comment a
bit more on this later.
It's like the retrieval and refurbishing of the shuttle SRBs. It doesThere's a different between refurbishing a liquid booster and an SRB. The steel shells on an SRB
work. It saves NASA very little money, possibly none at all. It's a lot of extra trouble and considerable extra grief for the engineers, and the only real gain is being able to boast about reusability.
are actually a very small part of the overall cost of launching an SRB. All of the cleaning out of
the system and liners, readding insulation, recasting the propellant, etc. is actually far more
expensive than the actual shell they're recovering. OTOH, for a liquid booster, if they take care
to design the system so sea-water can't get into the most sensative parts, most of the cost will
go into a new ablative nozzle, cleaning out the engine, and doing some test firings to make sure
it is still function. IMO it is obvious that a sea-recovered liquid is going to be more economical
than a sea-recovered solid. Also, the smaller size, and using private salvage boats should reduce
a lot of the cost too.
If the Falcon actually functions correctly on its first flight, I'd put my money (if I were a betting
man) on the reusability actually being fairly beneficial economically.
Chris wrote:
Kevin reiterated his suggestion that our meetings need something more effective at attracting visitors -- perhaps a short lecture or demonstration. ERPS members are well qualified to present such talks. Perhaps a monthly event could be tried.I've found this approach to be at least semi-succesful for my Space Development Club here
at BYU. I've been so busy this semester that I dropped the ball on advertising after the
kickoff meeting, but we still get a decent turnout for the mini-lectures all the time.
~Jon
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