Here is the target:
"Autonomous spaceport drone ship. Thrusters repurposed from deep sea oil rigs hold position within 3m even in a storm. " - Elon Musk
This is probably the biggest space thing since the Apollo moon landing. If they are successful, we will see moon bases, asteroid mining, and Mars bases.
And if they fail we will still see moon bases, asteroid mining, and Mars bases, and about the same timeframe.
This is soooo cool. Just like the science fiction rockets when I was a kid!
Mark my words, SpaceX will be the very first to get mining going outside our atmosphere. Nobody else is remotely close to them.
I know that a sea LAUNCH from the equator poses advantage because (terrestrial) rotational velocity is highest from there, even for a rocket at rest, but...I don’t understand the advantage of a LANDING at sea.
Other than it would provide safety advantage for crowded, highly-developed countries like, say, Japan, etc.
Anyone know?
> This would be 180,000 tons to 1.8 million tons.
That’s a whole lot of potential junk up in space. Much better chance for collisions.
-Hussein O.
Just WOW!
Translation: One of the other reasons that the shuttle was so expensive was that it had very large wings to give the vehicle a thousand miles of cross-range. The Air Force demanded this feature, which would have allowed the shuttle to return to its launch site after a single orbit, though it was never used.
...
That was so the Shuttle could snag Soviet satellites out of orbit and bring them back to Earth without being detected.
There was an analysis of a reusable launch system where the cost of developing the reusable launch system was $36 billion. If Spacex is successful they will have developed reusability for about $100 million.
...
And that people is the difference between a mammoth corrupt federal government and the private sector.
Ah , X marks the spot
“Autonomous spaceport drone ship. Thrusters repurposed from deep sea oil rigs hold position within 3m even in a storm. “ - Elon Musk
What’s interesting about what he said above is that during the second attempted (and first successful) water landing the first stage landed in the middle of a raging Atlantic storm right where they wanted it before the propellant ran out and it crashed into ocean.