Malestones Falcon 9 approach “dumb” Spacex to reuse
As the Starship of Spacex The vehicle caught the attention this week, with the company’s Workhorse Falcon 9 missile still hit some of the remarkable miles.
Both occurred during the relatively anonymous launch of the company’s Starlink satellites, but they are still significant because they emphasize the value of reusing the first stage, which Spacex has been a pioneer over the past decade.
The first turning point on Wednesday morning came with the launch of Starlink’s 10-56 mission from Cape Canaral, Florida. The first stage that the satellites launched Booster 1096 made their second launch and successfully in Only read the instructions. Driver’s ships. Interestingly, it was the 400 mines that Spacex executed a drone.
Then, less than 24 hours later, another Falcon 9 missile launched a 10-11 missile from a launch pad near the Kennedy Space Center. This first step, Booster 1067, then returned and landed on another drone, Lack of gravityHuman
It is a special enhancer who played his first game in June 2021 and launched a wide range of missions, including two crew dragons to the International Space Station and some Galileo satellites for the European Union. On Thursday, the missile made its 30 mines, the first time a Falcon 9 amplifier reached that level of experience.
A decade in construction
These milestones began to succeed about a decade after Spacex began to succeed.
The company first performed the first phase of the Falcon 9 rocket in September 2013 on the first flight of the vehicle. This proved the concept of supreme backwardness, which was only theoretical until then.
This includes flammation not the Marilyn Missile Engine, while the vehicle moves faster than the sound speed in the upper atmosphere, with an outer temperature of more than 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Due to the explicit force of this restore, the rocket’s outer ring engines wanted to be destroyed, the company’s propulsion chief at the time, Tom Muller, told me for this book AgainHuman success seemed impossible in the first attempt.
He recalled that watching the launch from the Vandenberg Space Base in California and viewing Rentry as a camera inside the private Jet Spacex Elon Musk. The first stage made the whole way intact.
“I remember watching the live film and I saw the engine light in the ocean,” Muller said. “And the sacred shit was there. The rocket came down, landed in the ocean and exploded. It was unrealistic. It first worked. I liked to prepare the barge. Prepare the landing legs. It works.”
This will be a good and more test, but by December 2015, Spacex landed its first missile on a pad along the Florida coast. The first drone was followed in April 2016. Slightly less than a year later, Spacex re -collected the Falcon 9 stage for the first time.
Turn off the doubts
Many people in the industry had doubts about the Spacex approach to reuse. In mid -2010, both the European Space Agency and Japan sought to develop the next generation of missiles. In both cases, Europe with Aryan 6 and Japan with H3, space agencies chose traditional and costly missiles instead of pressure on reuse.
As a result, both of these competitors have been lagged behind Spacex for a decade for a commercial satellite launch. If the ambitious missile is successful, the gap can be expanded further.
