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Comment by redmajor12 | Hacker News Reader

So is it cheaper to dump the booster in the ocean then land it back at the tower and then have to dispose of it?

The booster always follows a trajectory for an ocean landing until it passes a bunch of safety checks, and then it diverts to the launchpad. This way a failure early on can't cause it to crash on land.

What probably happened is it failed a safety check (e.g. a sensor read out of range) and so it didn't divert to the launchpad. It's cheaper to dump the booster in the ocean than to build a new launch tower if it's destroyed in a failed landing. They have an assembly line for boosters, but only one fully complete launch tower at the moment.

The launch tower takes multiple months to build. The orbital launch mount and launch tower and quick disconnect hardware is all custom and expensive and huge. They call it “Stage 0”. Losing that is an order of magnitude more of a setback than losing a Stage 1.

I guess they didn't optimize the towers to be fast-buildable :) because there are several obvious ideas.

The 2nd tower at Starbase is much more modular than the first and is being built at quite a rapid rate.

They’re building one at the Cape, too, but they’re still a multi-month process.

Construct additional pylons?

Why not to use the Mechazilla for adding the next section of tower on top of existing one? So we transport parts to the tower, assemble relatively thin sections of tower nearby, the lifter moving along the tower brings the sections on top of existing ones, and we have a few places for optimizations here. The proponents of The Boring Company may see some parallels here.

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