SpaceX Landed a Rocket on a Boat Five Years Ago
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
SpaceX landed a rocket on a boat five years ago:
Five years ago today, SpaceX successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket first stage on a boat.
[...] After nearly a dozen failed attempts, subsequent landings soon filled a SpaceX hangar full of used rockets. This caught some SpaceX engineers off guard. "It even surprised us that we suddenly had ten first stages or something like that," Hans Koenigsmann, one of SpaceX's earliest hires, said a few years afterward. "And we were like, well, we didn't really account for that."
[...] Yet the economics pretty much require landing downrange of a launch site. That's because over the course of a launch, a rocket gradually leans from a vertical to horizontal orientation as it prepares to release its second stage on an orbital trajectory. At this point it requires tons of propellant to arrest this horizontal velocity and reverse course back to the launch site. It is much more fuel-efficient to have the rocket follow a parabolic arc and land hundreds of kilometers from the launch site.
This is borne out in the performance data. A Falcon 9 rocket that lands on a drone ship can lift about 5.5 tons to geostationary transfer orbit, compared to 3.5 tons for a rocket that lands back at the launch site. Had SpaceX not figured out how to land the Falcon 9 first stage on a drone ship, it would have eliminated about 40 percent of the rocket's lift capability, a huge penalty that would have negated the benefit of reusing rockets.
[...] In the 2000s, SpaceX very nearly died on multiple occasions as a fledgling company with its Falcon 1 rocket. In the 2010s, SpaceX iterated on the Falcon 9, first winning contracts for NASA launches and commercial satellites. These missions, in turn, gave SpaceX engineers the breathing room to experiment with recovering and refurbishing used rockets. Today, thanks to this, they're able to fly first stages rapidly and at significantly reduced costs.
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