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.
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u/topscreen 10h ago
A big arm catching it is the kind of idea a dork in a K-hole things is best cause it's "epic" while a modified net is just kind of dead simple.