this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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Is there a benefit to catching the booster instead of having it land? Was this one extra tall? Sorry in advance if these are dumb questions.
There's two main benefits: faster reuse and more payload to orbit.
A Falcon 9 landing on a drone ship needs to be transported back to shore. That's multiple days before the engineers even get their hands on it to prepare for the next flight. The design goal of Starship is to launch a Ship into orbit, return to the tower, be restacked, refuelled and launched again in the same day. Will they actually get it to the point where that's possible? Remains to be seen. Until now, they had no way to see what real stresses a Starship booster goes through in a flight. They're gonna rip this one apart down to the spacers in its bolts to examine it. With the flight and physical inspection data, they'll make what improvements they can to the already built boosters and design future boosters to be more resilient. SpaceX has, by now, a well proven track record of doing what others think is insane to even attempt. If anyone can launch the same rocket twice in a day, there's no one better to give it a try.
The increased payload comes from not having the mass of the landing legs. The Falcon's landing legs weigh several tons. Starship, being 3x the diameter and 10x the mass, would need titanic landing legs. That's a lot of tonnage you won't be taking to orbit. Catching on the tower means that all but a fraction of the landing hardware's mass isn't on the rocket itself. As an additional benefit, the landing hardware needs to be built only once. Every Falcon has its own landing legs, but every Starship they ever build could land on the one tower they have now. That won't be the case, they're planning to build multiple towers, but the sentiment remains the same.
Not to mention the landing legs being single use - they have to replace them each landing.
Do they replace the entire legs between flights, or just the crush core?
It was just the crush core iirc but that required servicing the entire leg.
Hopefully it means a reduced mass since the booster doesn't need any landing legs which means more performance. The idea is that boosters should be quickly reusable, basically landing and being refueled before flying again. That would take more time with a separate landing location
Those landing-legs that would be required add a lot of extra weight and in case of the Falcon 9 are a common mode of failure.