this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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That is darn cool! And it makes the booster lighter, as it doesn’t need the giant legs to land on.
And makes turnaround much faster since it's already back on the launch pad.
Though it does make it so a damaged launch pad from either an abnormal launch or landing can stop all launch progress until things are rebuilt. We've seen the very reliable Falcon 9 damage the drone ships with a hard landing.
Would be interesting to see more than the two launch towers created to create more redundancy.
I wonder how fast a turnaround would really be. Can all the checks be run on the launchpad and how likely are repairs that cannot be done there?
They're assuming zero maintenance and all that's needed is refueling. I think if they have any anomalies they'll need to pull the booster to another location for inspection/repair.
That’s an extremely bold assumption.
The space shuttle was designed originally to be rapidly reusable, but its shortest turn around time was still measured in weeks, not days.
And its main engines only produced water as a by product, no soot or carbon deposits to worry about.