Why Rocket Reusability is Crucial for the Success of the Space Industry
Why SpaceX is doing what they are doing.
Written October 2024
Elon Musk is well-known for his eccentric and ambitious personality.
The most followed man on the planet, His companies have a reputation for being some of the most hardcore, successful companies in the world.
October 13, 2024, marks arguably one of the greatest engineering achievements in the history of spaceflight. The Starship launch system built by private space company SpaceX, is the largest, heaviest, most powerful rocket ever built. Today, October 13th, SpaceX successfully landed their Booster back on the tower it launched from.
First of all, this Rocket is massive. Over 40 stories tall, it will be even taller in further design iterations. This rocket comprises of two stages, the lower called the Superheavy, and the upper payload stage called Starship. The rocket is made mostly out of stainless steel, and is powered by 33 raptor engines, which combined produce almost 17 million pounds of thrust. This is bigger and way more powerful than the Saturn V rocket that landed astronauts on the moon, even bigger than the Soviet N1 that was going to land cosmonauts on the moon before it got scrubbed.
Thoughout the rest of this column, I’ll try to explain just how significant this landing really is for the future of spaceflight.
The biggest problem humans have had with spaceflight ever since the industry started in the 60s, is that every rocket was expendable. When a rocket goes up, nothing comes back down. It has to jettison stages as it goes up to save on weight, and every stage either burns up in the atmosphere, or falls back into the ocean. This predictably makes space travel extremely expensive, because the cost of the payload itself equals the cost of the entire rocket used to get the payload in orbit.
Expendable Rockets were the status quo for decades, until SpaceX, a private space company ran by now Billionaire Elon Musk, pulled off a landing of the falcon 9 rocket booster. This was crazy at the time, and dramatically cut the cost of launches, because building one booster would launch 30+ payloads into orbit, not just one payload.
Elon was not satisfied however, because the second stage still wasn't expendable. They could recover the massive fairings by catching them with a net attached to a ship, but the rest of the second stage would burn up on reentry, meaning that the cost to launch a satellite to orbit was still inflated because the cost to build the second stage on every launch is still very high.
SpaceX couldn't really see a way to recover the second stage of the falcon 9 system. Putting a heat shield on the falcon was too heavy, and would cut payload to orbit by too much.
Instead, they set off on the most ambitious solution possible. Building the largest, most powerful rocket ever, capable of deploying hundreds of tons into orbit. The catch was, this ship was also built to be fully reusable.
SpaceX had some qualms about building landing legs on the booster, and landing it on a landing pad. Not only would the legs be pretty heavy; burning precious fuel would be better spent getting the ship a little further before hot staging. If the booster landed on a pad, SpaceX would then have to lift the ship back onto the Launch tower, and do more refurbishments. Also, having landing legs that hydraulically deploy meant more parts on the ship that could break.
So SpaceX had a brilliant idea. What about skipping the landing leg system altogether. If they already need load points built into the ship to move it around, why not land the ship right on the tower, and catch it with the tower arms. This is an insane proposition. A gust of wind could hit the ship and knocked it a few feet to the left, resulting in an explosion. The ship needed to come in perfectly, with almost no error, and the engines had to light at the perfect time, otherwise … boom.
How did they control their flying stainless steel building and get it to land perfectly in front of the tower? How did they control the speed of this massive pop-can so it came to a stop right as the grid arms come in contact with the tower arms? Aren't they risking the many millions of dollars of infrastructure that would be damaged if the ship blew up?
Also what kind of company just full sends something like this on the first try?
A unique company like SpaceX has the drive and ambition to grab the future by the balls in this epic display of engineering genius. They figured out the answer to every major question, and put together an engineering and manufacturing phenomenon that was able to pull off one of the coolest, brain-breaking, jaw-dropping feats I personally have ever seen. That morning, they started off launching the Starship rocket and booster, hot staging, performing a boost back burn, reentering the atmosphere, relighting the engines, gimbaling them to control the massive booster perfectly in front of the massive launch tower, (aptly named Mechazilla) and catching the booster with the tower arms.
5 years ago, nobody ever dreamed any of this was even possible, with the exception of our good friend Elon.
This is Insane, but it worked.
Very cool SpaceX