Rocket Lab - Reusability Plans for Electron Rocket via Helicopter Catching
rocketlabusa.com
rocketlabusa.com
By the way, this is nearly identical (minus the helicopter) to the method that John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace (now Exos Aerospace https://exosaero.com/) used for recovering their Stig reusable sounding rocket back in 2011/2012. I'm a little sad that none of the media reports are mentioning that, as it's clearly a direct forerunner and Exos Aerospace is still doing flights.
Here is the ballute: https://www.universetoday.com/93281/armadillo-launches-a-sti...
Here is the guided parachute return: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV7zL07Tof8
And here is an Exos Aerospace flight earlier this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G9dJ3IQQVk
I love Carmack and rooted for Armadillo. But ballutes are 50 year old tech (Gemini’s escape system had them.) Armadillo’s real innovations were in other areas and doing things faster and cheaper. Carmack would have been an interesting fit at SpaceX if he hadn’t gone to Oculus.
Recovery of rockets that have been to space, even just suborbitally, is not trivial.
"finally" seems a little harsh since their first commercial launch was less than a year ago. Seems like they've been working on it for some time and as mentioned in the presentation, RocketLab is usually pretty careful about what they announce.
They seem really smart with the strategic moves they've been making so I'm excited to see this play out.
In part of the reuse presentation, he said, "this is a cap I'm about to eat because I've said publicly a few times the various things that rocket lab would never do so [i.e. reuse] unfortunately I find myself in the position of eating my hat." Here: https://youtu.be/joONWIGtcdY?t=501
Rocketlab has been able to execute very effectively, which is why I appreciate them. It had long bothered me that they didn't put their obviously impressive engineering prowess to bear on the reuse problem, and I'm very glad that they've come around.
But it's been done[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery...
Having the booster survive the re-entry heating and aerodynamic loads while only using passive methods to slow it is the hard bit.
Looks like the video got truncated after the livestream.
"[The helicopter] would be gigantic. The rotor diameter would be over 120 meters (400 feet). Its empty weight would be over 200,000 kilograms (450,000 pounds), with a useful load of nearly 250,000 kilograms (550,000 pounds), for a gross weight of a whopping 453,000 kilograms (1,000,000 pounds)"
Has anyone been able to economically refurbish engines fished out of salt water? I know that NASA and SpaceX both failed at this, why would the Electron be better suited for saltwater recovery?
2. Is that a retro burn in the animation or reentry heating?
3. Are they gonna catch those discarded battery packs too? Should be easier than a whole first stage.
4. If they nail this, catching everything by helicopter shouldn't be that much harder.
There is a limited supply of Mi-26s in the world, and I bet nobody these days will be eager to even lease theirs.
Why none out of those "new age" launch companies uses the simplest solution? Parachutes and solid fuel rockets for soft landing.
b) because you can't turn a solid rocket off once you've landed
c) and because of the rocket equation any added mass costs so much more, if they could afford the mass for solids for landing they could just add more liquid fuel and do the spacex thing, that would likely use less mass
b) you just have to size them right for the rocket mass and terminal velocity with a parachute
c) definitely, but propulsive landing also does not come with fuel as the only mass penalty. You also have to add mass of heavy hydraulics and sensors into consideration.
Most of the Soyuz deceleration is done with parachutes, I'm not sure how that scales to a whole first stage.
Your main engines are gimballed for guidance, that mass cost is already paid
Their rockets are carbon fibre, aluminum-lithium, and steel alloys with such overkill corrosion rating that they should stand strong acids, not simple seawater.
And mass cost of hydraulics for propulsive landing != hydraulics for regular gimbal steering. Those should be very different in their power and mass. Not only they have to steer the gimbal much faster and harder, but also aerodynamic elements on the rocket, fuel throttle, and those legs they land on.
If you are really interested, try doing suicide burns in Kerbal Space Program. KSP is great for disspelling "why don't they just" questions.
2. Calculate thrust and fuel reserve of solid rockets to reduce the speed of the rocket stage just below the speed at which it can survive hitting the ground
Such schemes were used in Soyuz for half a century, Zenith for 30 years, and other parachute landing system for tanks and other military hardware.
Just the fuel for retropropulsive landing is already a major blow to falcon heavy or 9's payload. How much of a payload hit do you think this will be?
Just like the landing systems for airdropped military hardware.
... the helicopter recovery of stuff falling by parachute from space bit has also been done before with the Corona capsules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2YQqAnEN_0