SpaceX #5: Reusing Boosters
At one point in his book on SpaceX, Liftoff , Eric Berger quotes Elon Musk on the next challenge he set for the company: “One of the hardest engineering problems… is making a reusable orbit rocket.” Booster reuse was high on SpaceX’s priorities. To that end, they tried attaching parachutes to the top stage of the rocket to slow it down when it fell back. The idea was doomed because the speed of re-entry was too high and the stage burnt up long before the parachutes could deploy. As Musk said with hindsight: “We were very naïve… We were huge idiots.” Why was SpaceX so obsessed with reuse? Cost reduction was just one reason. Remember Musk’s intention to make human flight to Mars affordable? “If an airline discarded a 747 jet after every transcontinental flight, passengers would have to pay $1 million for a ticket.” If the rocket would burn up on re-entry, what was the way out? A heat shield was the first step, to protect the rocket. The second step was a neve...