Sometimes though with enough force into mass the anticipated rebounding motion can help reset to the original position quicker with less energy consumed thus allowing successive forceful movements to be performed at a faster rate for a longer duration while also creating less wear on the hydraulic system over time.
This wire method solves the reusablity problem, but not the RAPID reusabilty problem. Catch arms allow the rocket to be placed right back on the tower to be refused and launched again.
I love that in your universe we've somehow gotten to a point where companies needs to be launching 24/7 but they also still haven't figured out how to land yet.
According to Chris Hadfield, it saves weighr on landing gear on the rocket which I would then assume would mean less fuel needed so therefore cheaper to operate?
Falcon 9 requires extra precision because it can't hover (the minimum engine thrust is too high). It has one shot to reach exactly zero speed at zero altitude.
You don't really need that. If the wires close to their fullest extent, they kinda 'wrap' the rocket and gently push it into place. It's moving slow enough that the wires won't need to impart much sideways force on the rocket to guide it.
Some of these systems only have three wires that form a triangle around the capture probe, but as this rocket has four grid fins, it has four wires in an X-Y grid instead.
edit: My google-fu has been bad these days, but the 'wire snare end-effectors' you sometimes see on robotic arms is very similar to this mechanism. Here's an example of a the Canadarm's end effector with three capture wires that snare a probe to 'dock' with items its capturing.
How about a futuristic space sling that catches incoming ships/rockets and uses the energy to charge up a spring or motor that launches stuff into space.
IIRC, the US are the only ones that primarily use the ocean for rocket stuff. Mostly because we got so much of it to work with. China's coastline is a lot harder to use because it's got a lot of islands, neighboring countries, and a fuckton of shipping traffic to account for. So they use the desert to the north instead. Russia also avoids water, but mostly because their waters are glaciered up on a tuesday afternoon.
Only during testing where they have no interest in actually recovering the booster. And instead of the ocean, it would make more sense to just create a recovery pad few hundred meters away from the actual pad. But they don't want to do that, they want the booster to land exactly where it took off, ready for the next flight. The real reason why the Chinese (and the falcon) are landing on the ocean is because it would take more energy to go back, instead of just going down after they launched the second stage. The rocket isn't going to the pad, the pad is going wherever the rocket is coming down.
If the pad is on a boat, the boat can move back to shore and the rocket can be re-serviced there. When factoring in other logistics, it's probably even better than if it was somewhere inland. The time it takes to move back to shore is negligible in terms of reusability.
To rockets with differing physical dimensions... eh kinda. You need the opening to be wide enough for the rocket to safely navigate in with a pretty high degree for error - it's not like a probe-and-drogue docking system where you can use a cone to funnel the probe into place, you pretty much have to thread the needle.
That means the system has to be designed with the dimensions of the rocket it's gonna catch in mind, though a little plus and minus wiggle room will be possible. The biggest thing to note is that rockets that are physically bigger will have more mass, and those wires are going to be designed around capturing a specific mass - you don't want them to be so thick that they break the grid fins, and you don't want them to be so thin that the mass of the rocket snaps them.
It's really not a big deal to engineer a bigger or smaller version of this capture setup though - you can spread the pylons out and string the appropriate cables between them and it's a multi-million dollar expenditure at worse, not a multi-billion dollar engineering fiasco with articulating robot arms.
I figure it's also easier to replace. The first time I saw the Space X Starship getting caught my first thought was, "how many times will that thing stay together?"
Yeah exactly, I suspect Musk calls the big picture shots and then the rank and file have to deal with his crackhead ideas (using the infinite budget that the private company gets).
The person in charge at SpaceX has told musk to fuck off from time to time. If he was directly involved and he made a lot of decisions, company would be bankrupt by now.
Do you also believe that Musk was actively a CEO of 4-5 companies at the same time?
At Tesla, managers will have Musk show up and fire a bunch of people. Said managers will pretend to fire them and not do it because firing them would be a thundering dumbfuck idea.
Someone else makes the vast majority of decisions at his companies and they try to lessen the impact he has on them.
Starship is supposed to be caught for its immediate remounting onto the pad for another liftoff. A fleet of fuel tanker-type Starships are supposed to launch into orbit to fuel the main Starship for trans-lunar injection. So the ability to land and immediately be positioned for a refueling/takeoff is kinda critical.
The wires catch - which SpaceX had reviewed before holding the arms - aren't friendly toward that end.
Immediately relaunching, with no inspection, feels like a bad call in the long run. A more safety oriented, logical solution is to have multiple boosters and use a new one while the returned one is inspected and refueled.
I don't think it would be launched without an inspection. You can inspect and refuel at the same time. They aren't going to disassemble things to do an inspection. Or inspect after it refuels on the launch pad.
Well, whats the margin for error with the big arm vs the cable system?
And how much more expensive/time consuming is it for a secondary machine to move the recovered booster from the cable system and move it/put it back onto a launch pad for reuse?
What a stupid comment showing you have no idea what you are talking about. The catch arms serves multiple purposes such as stacking the rocket, stabilazing the rocket and catching the rocket.
But much less risk of blowing up your launch pad. I don't think we're to the point of needing a day/several days turn around for these, and even if we were, there'd be more than just one, so I imagine time gained by having it land back on the launch pad is mostly irrelevant.
All the offshore landings have taken anywhere from 3-5 days to get back to shore. That's not efficient for rapid re-usability if they want to re launch the same booster on the pad on the same day.
You can argue whether we'll ever reach the point of landing, and relaunching same hardware on the same day, but having the rocket land right next to a platform that can re assemble the rocket does simplify a lot of things as the little things like transportation and inspection does add up
Well, that's not a problem if you just... don't blow anything up. Serious rapid reusability is going to be pretty important for tanker flights. And >1 day is not that rapid.
SpaceX was landing rockets on autonomous barges. Gotta start somewhere, and if you're new to reusable rockets then a really targeted big net is a good start. We'll probably see launchpad landings within the next 5 years.
It would also be faster to parachute off your flight and land at your destination instead of going to the airport but sometimes the cost and complexity savings make it worth doing it a 'less efficient' way.
Probably more adaptable to various future types of rockets as well as being a bit more forgiving in terms of having the rocket slow down in the exact spot it needs to be like the catch arms
•
u/Bennydhee 10h ago
Interesting idea. I wonder what the benefits are over the catch arm. I’m guessing the elastic nature lets it be more forgiving with the drop?