How much payload will Musk sacrifice in order to land his rocket? Gravity isn’t cheap. It will take a good bit of fuel to land that first stage. That fuel will come at the expense of payload.
BTW, NASA has been building and launching rockets for 50 years. What they have learned, they turn over to private industry. You know, people like Elon Musk and SpaceX.
Musk rubbed a LOT of people the wrong way by not giving credit to the people who figured out all of this space flight stuff.
All he is doing is refining what was discovered 40-50 years ago.
But he’s doing it in such a cool way
“Musk: It was a tiny design revision change from the supplier. The supplier made some mistakes and we didn’t catch those mistakes. Ran system through low pressurization tests, but didn’t run them through the high presssurization functionality tests. Didn’t get stuck in the low pressurization functionality tests. “
Quality control mistakes and inadequate testing are unacceptable when you have lives and billions of dollars at stake. They’ll be forced to add the same overhead NASA has been forced too.
Instead of reducing payload, they are making the rocket bigger. Notice they are talking about the Falcon 2 upgrade. I think about 1/3 of the fuel in the rocket will be used to return to the pad.
BTW, NASA has been building and launching rockets for 50 years. What they have learned, they turn over to private industry. You know, people like Elon Musk and SpaceX.
Yes, as they should.