Falcon 9 Milestones Vindicate SpaceX’s ‘Dumb’ Approach to Reuse
As a spaceship The vehicle gathered all the attention this week, the company Falcon 9 rocket 9 continued to have taken impressive steps.
The two have occurred during the relatively anonymous launches of the company’s starlink satellites, but are nevertheless notable because they highlight the value of reuse in the first stage, that SpaceX has been launched in the last decade.
The first milestone occurred Wednesday morning with the launch of the Cape Canaveral Starlink 10-56 mission in Florida. The first step which launched these satellites, Booster 1096, was to carry out its second launch and managed to land on the Just read the instructions drone ship. Surprisingly, it was the 400th time that SpaceX has executed a landing on a drone ship.
Then, less than 24 hours later, another Falcon 9 rocket launched the Starlink 10-11 mission from a nearby launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. This first step, Booster 1067, has returned and landed on another drone ship, A lack of severity.
It is a special booster, after having made its debut in June 2021 and launched a wide variety of missions, including two crew dragon vehicles at the international space station and some Galileo satellites for the European Union. Thursday, the rocket made its 30th flight, the first time a Booster Falcon 9 reached this level of experience.
A decade of manufacturing
These milestones intervened a decade after SpaceX began to succeed with reuse in the first step.
The company first made a controlled entry of the first stage of the Falcon 9 Rocket in September 2013, during the first flight in version 1.1 of the vehicle. This has proven the viability of the concept of supersonic retropulsion, which was, until this moment, just theoretical.
This involves lighting the nine merlin engines of the rocket while the vehicle moves faster than the speed of sound through the upper atmosphere, with external temperatures exceeding 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Due to the blunt force of this return, the engines of the external ring of the rocket wanted to be flared, the head of the propulsion of society at the time, Tom Mueller, told me for the book Back to school. The success of the first try seemed improbable.
He remembers looking at this launch from the Vandenberg Space Force base in California and observing the start of the school year as a camera on board the founder of the founder of SpaceX Elon Musk followed the rocket. The first step did all along the way, intact.
“I remember watching the video live and having seen the light of the engine on the ocean,” said Mueller. “And shit was there. The rocket went down, landed in the ocean and exploded. It was unreal. It worked the first time. I said to myself, prepare the barge. Prepare the landing legs. This shit works.”
It would take much more DIY and experimentation, but in December 2015, SpaceX had won its first rocket on a pad along the Florida coast. The first Drone Landing ship followed in April 2016. A little less than a year after that, SpaceX reflects a Falcon 9 stage for the first time.
Silence skeptics
Many people in the industry were skeptical about the approach of SpaceX to reuse. In the mid -2010, European and Japanese space agencies sought to develop their next generation of rockets. In both cases, Europe with Ariane 6 and Japan with H3, space agencies have opted for traditional and consumable rockets instead of pushing towards reuse.
Consequently, these two competitors for the launches of commercial satellites are now about a decade of delay on SpaceX in terms of launch technology. If the ambitious rocket of Starship succeeds, this gap could widen more.
