SpaceX landing highlights promise, challenges of rocket reusability

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[h=4]SpaceX landing highlights promise, challenges of rocket reusability[/h]Landing makes less far-fetched the idea that rockets could operate more like aircraft.

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SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Monday, Dec. 21, 2015.


The first stage of a SpaceX Falcon rocket stands on Landing Zone-1 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Tuesday. The media got a closer look at the rocket that SpaceX successfully landed the night before.(Photo: Craig Bailey/FLORIDA TODAY)


CAPE CANAVERAL — In more than 65 years of launches from these shores, a<span style="color: Red;">*</span>rocket<span style="color: Red;">*</span>landing anywhere near its launch pads meant something had gone terribly wrong.
Not anymore.
SpaceX’s landing Monday night of a Falcon 9 rocket booster at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station was the first of what the company believes will be many more controlled rocket flights up and down, starting with a dozen or more missions planned next year.
Each recovered booster is one that could be flown again, making less far-fetched the idea that rockets could one day operate more like aircraft, no longer being discarded after a single use.
USA TODAY
SpaceX launches Falcon 9 rocket, lands booster back on land




“I imagine that we’re going to have a whole fleet of booster rockets accumulating quite rapidly,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said after the 14-story Falcon booster touched down upright and intact, during a mission that delivered 11 commercial satellites to orbit. “Then we’ll figure out how to make the reuse as easy as possible, so that really no work is required between reuses, apart from refilling the propellant tanks.”
SpaceX’s ability to achieve that type of efficiency will determine whether Monday’s landing was the “revolutionary moment” Musk described or a historical footnote.
Other companies also are pursuing similar goals, most notably Blue Origin, founded by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, which last month landed a smaller booster during a suborbital test flight in Texas and plans to reuse larger rockets.

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Aerial view of Falcon 9 first stage landing at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Monday, Dec. 21, 2015. Video courtesy SpaceX.

United Launch Alliance has<span style="color: Red;">*</span>begun designing a new rocket, Vulcan, whose main engines would be dropped from the first stage and recovered in mid-air.
While the recent landings nailed by SpaceX and Blue Origin were remarkable engineering feats, it will take much longer to prove that reusable rockets are the promised game-changer for the launch industry.
NASA’s space shuttle, for example, was initially promoted as being able to fly almost weekly, but only flew a handful of times a year after extensive refurbishment.
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How much work will it take, and at what cost, to ready SpaceX or Blue Origin rockets for additional flights? How frequently can they fly?
“Their ultimate goal is to have (rockets) operate a little more like an airplane, where you can take off and land many times,” said Henry Hertzfeld, research professor of space policy and international affairs at George Washington University. “But this hasn’t been done, really, in the space area, and we have to wait and see if they can do it, and how much cheaper it really will be, if at all.”
“The only example I can really think of is the shuttle,” he added. “Each time it landed it was practically rebuilt.”
Musk is optimistic that Falcon re-flights will become “pretty straightforward,” though it will take a few years to get to that point.
Doing so makes sense, he said, because of the roughly $60 million cost to build a Falcon 9, only about $200,000 is propellant that can’t be recovered. The bulk of the cost is embedded in the big first stage and its nine Merlin engines.
“That means that the potential cost reduction over the long-term in probably in excess of a factor of 100,” Musk said.
USA TODAY
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If launches cost a fraction of what they do now, the thinking goes, customers will consider missions that they wouldn’t otherwise do. Examples could be more launches of lower-cost satellites or more frequent resupply of space stations.
“It’s probably the best Christmas present that the American space community could have asked for,” said space policy consultant James Muncy, founder of PoliSpace. “You’ve just dramatically changed the economics, and people will start figuring out different kinds of payloads to launch and different kinds of things to do.”
NASA is studying<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Falcon boosters flying back to Earth to help plan for spacecraft landings on Mars.

Falcon 9 lands right above the "X" at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>(Photo: SpaceX)

"It was a great accomplishment, the first step on the important road to more economical space flight, and through its demonstration of supersonic retrograde propulsion, also important to the technology of landing future heavy payloads on Mars," said Michael Griffin, CEO of Schafer Corp. and a former NASA administrator.
Musk expects the just-landed Falcon 9 stage to be tested again on the ground, but kept for its historical value rather than launching again. He hopes a booster recovered on a future flight can fly a second time as soon as next year.
Who will take a chance and put their spacecraft on top of it?
Beyond questions about how much refurbishing rockets will cost and how often they can fly is the reality that satellites are expensive —<span style="color: Red;">*</span>often worth hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes more than a billion —<span style="color: Red;">*</span>and their owners are loathe to accept extra risk.
“You have to convince your customers to fly on a used rocket versus the competitor’s shiny new one,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He said Musk’s vision for reusability is elegant, but not obviously cheaper.
“I don't think we'll know —<span style="color: Red;">*</span>I don't even think Musk will know —<span style="color: Red;">*</span>until we are a lot further down that road,” said McDowell. “I hope he's right.”
Follow James Dean on Twitter: @flatoday_jdean
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