• BombOmOm@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    That is darn cool! And it makes the booster lighter, as it doesn’t need the giant legs to land on.

    • mipadaitu@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      And makes turnaround much faster since it’s already back on the launch pad.

      Though it does make it so a damaged launch pad from either an abnormal launch or landing can stop all launch progress until things are rebuilt. We’ve seen the very reliable Falcon 9 damage the drone ships with a hard landing.

      Would be interesting to see more than the two launch towers created to create more redundancy.

      • progandy@feddit.org
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        16 days ago

        I wonder how fast a turnaround would really be. Can all the checks be run on the launchpad and how likely are repairs that cannot be done there?

        • mipadaitu@lemmy.world
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          16 days ago

          They’re assuming zero maintenance and all that’s needed is refueling. I think if they have any anomalies they’ll need to pull the booster to another location for inspection/repair.

          • Zron@lemmy.world
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            16 days ago

            That’s an extremely bold assumption.

            The space shuttle was designed originally to be rapidly reusable, but its shortest turn around time was still measured in weeks, not days.

            And its main engines only produced water as a by product, no soot or carbon deposits to worry about.

      • death_to_carrots@feddit.org
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        17 days ago

        Well, if your infrastructure is mission critical, then you need one more as spare.

        In this case a new one a qarter mile to the side with a redundant power supply. Mission control could be smack in the center between the launchpads.

        Of course someone®©™ has to make sure, that the whole facility is only utilized in such a way that n-1 launchpads is considered 100% usage.

        Rant/advice over from someone working in a data center, where spare machines are always in use, because someone©®™ said moar power is more important then reliability.

          • death_to_carrots@feddit.org
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            16 days ago

            Well, N towers are supposed to be enough. That’s the reason you should have N+1 in the first place.

            Also this assumes that you can repair/replace a tower faster than it takes on average a tower to fail.

  • IMNOTCRAZYINSTITUTION@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    woah. is this real? never seen anything like it. aren’t those rockets like 200 feet tall too? wow, might just be stoned but this is really blowing my mind.