First land and fly rocket

Driving around today, I was thinking about how SpaceX has flown so many reusable, Falcon 9 rockets by landing them. The technical challenge is like the old 'Lunar' program. Apollo 11 was the first rocket to land and take off to orbit July 20, 1969.

Between Apollo 11 and SpaceX, NASA experimented with single stage to orbit, the DC-X. There was also the disastrously expensive Space Shuttle. Still in development, Blue Origin pops up and down and has yet to put a satellite into orbit.

SpaceX, block 5 did a hold-down engine test and assuming any problems are resolved, it will put Bangabandhu 1 (Bangladesh) into orbit this week. Block 5 was designed to be manned space flight qualified. There have been a series of engineering upgrades that can ONLY happen if you are launching these rockets frequently and gathering 'lessons learned.'

The only remaining NASA concern is fueling the rocket with the crew aboard which seems a little 'anal retentive.' Nothing about rockets is without risk but this one doesn't impress me. When an earlier Falcon exploded, the accident analysis identified a helium pressure tank as the root cause and it was fixed. That was all but impossible with the manned Space Shuttle that could not be flown unmanned.

Bob Wilson

 

I read the story too but perhaps the simplest approach is to launch more Falcon rockets so the total number of launches equal the134 Space Shuttle missions. We know there was one Shuttle launch failure and even after that failure, Space Shuttle missions continued after an engineering analysis and change. The one SpaceX launch failure was traced to a defective helium tank that was redesigned.

Bob Wilson