No one was landing booster rockets again after launch in the 60's...
- Most of the launch tankage was discarded after each flight
- Boosters were basically rebuilt after each flight
- Cost per pound to LEO wasn't remotely competitive with 60s vintage expendable systems like Soyuz
SpaceX has a new, simpler and much better design. Even when flown fully expendable, the F9 is highly cost competitive. With the first stage landing, most of the launch tankage and 9/10 engines can be reused.
SpaceX is poised to dramatically reduce the cost of going to space for the first time since the advent of spaceflight.
I specifically mentioned the main engines. And we can't really compare with the F9 when, once again, it has never been reflown. A lot more of the Shuttle was intended to be reusable than ended up being the case - who's to say how that will play out for the F9?
> Cost per pound to LEO wasn't remotely competitive with 60s vintage expendable systems like Soyuz
Soyuz is an excellent system, but it didn't have anything like the lift capacity of the Shuttle. The Shuttle wasn't cheap, but it was designed for a particular set of requirements - some of them reasonable, some of them less so - and for a much higher launch rate than actually happened, for a variety of reasons.
The shuttle main engines required a lot of maintenance and inspection after each flight. That's to be expected at the start of a program, but they never got away from that.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that. They’re both impressive feats in their own right.
Moon travel is not a common everyday thing now, because the original effort wasn't geared for that - it was primarily to put a man on the moon as fast as possible, before the Russians did it.
If the aircraft industry worked the same way and airlines had to throw away a 747 after each flight, it wouldn't be an every day thing like it is now.
SpaceX are essentially setting up the future building blocks for far more affordable and common space flight now. It is a longer path, and IMO no less difficult than what NASA was doing back in the 50's and 60's.
What exactly is the breakthroughs/discoveries that Spacex have made that will justify the claim.
Please note that landing the rocket does not count. Because I don't think it involved something new, some new technique that was unknown before.
The breakthrough is actually doing it. A lot of space engineers were saying before Falcon 9 that what SoaceX were trying to do was impossible.
Hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to see now what steps were required to pull this off and that clearly those steps were possible. But if it's so clear, why wasn't it done before? The ottoman line is only Must and SoaceX were prepared to get the job done. Nobody else was even trying.
That is not a breakthrough.
The only other player in this space is Blue Origin, and they are still working on their commercially-viable engines. Everybody else throws away their rocket after the launch.
Are you saying only SpaceX is capable of doing this? Seriously?
- Building an engine capable of multiple restarts while facing into a supersonic headwind, which are necessary for any kind of successful propulsive landing.
- Designing a mass-thrifty first stage simultaneously lightweight enough to be able to accommodate the added weight of landing equipment, but strong enough to handle the tensile stress and buffeting of atmospheric reentry.
- Developing ultralight landing legs to enable stable landings at low mass cost.
But most of the innovation has been in the realm of integrating existing technology in new ways. They brought together cold gas thrusters, grid fins, and thrust vectoring - none of which were new - into a complete package capable of precisely controlling the flight of a 15-storey first stage from the upper atmosphere to the ground. It's the act of getting technologies to work together that is often the source of the greatest gains.
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"Answer my question despite my imposition of arbitrary criteria that intentionally make it unanswerable"
If you want something where SpaceX has blazed trail in science as well as engineering then there's thir work on CFL and more importantly supersonic retro propulsion. It turns out that the bow shock created by the engines is enough to serve as an ersatz heat shield and it protects the rocket when it would otherwise be destroyed during reentry. NASA's studying the data they've recorded for the purposes of applying it to Mars EDL. It's given them a chance to investigate an entirely new EDL technique which is important seeing as the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator seems to be going nowhere.
Source pls. Google search yeilds no results.
Landing is a critical prerequisite to reuse: we can't reuse what we discard.
But the important reusability breakthrough comes in a few months when they do the first reflight of an orbital booster.
Landing rocket boosters is a very big deal in practical terms as this should reduce the cost of going to space to a point where it becomes more accessible. The shuttle was an attempt to achieve the same, but while being a technological marvel, it failed to reduce costs (quite the contrary) and was abandoned. Everyone else so far at best managed to keep the cost of one-time use rockets low, but SpaceX should have a break-through there, and that is why this matters so much.