SpaceX hopes to retrieve the first stage of one of its Falcon rockets using an ocean platform within the next year.
Its founder Elon Musk has said the launch services provider is building a landing platform that would float in the Atlantic and position…
SpaceX hopes to retrieve the first stage of one of its Falcon rockets using an ocean platform within the next year.
Its founder Elon Musk has said the launch services provider is building a landing platform that would float in the Atlantic and position itself using on-board motors to give its boosters a solid platform to land on.
SpaceX has been able to soft land its boosters on sea twice so far, however on both occasions the first stage – which is the height of a fourteen storey building – has tipped over and rendered itself unusable.
“What we need to do is either land on a floating platform or, ideally, boost back to the launch site and land at the launch site,” Musk said, speaking in an onstage interview at MIT.
“But before we boost back to the launch site and try and land there, we need to show that we can land with precision over and over again.”
SpaceX is constructing a 300ft by 170ft pontoon in Louisiana that will act as a landing site for the first stage, which has landing legs that span 60ft, Musk said.
The entrepreneur said the chance of successfully retrieving the booster from its upcoming launch was less than 50%. However, with at least a dozen launches scheduled over the next year Musk is hopeful of recovering the first stage on at least one of those occasions.
He dismissed the prospect of salvaging the second stage of a rocket from the Falcon range because on its kerosene-based system the specific impulse – the force with respect to the amount of propellant used per unit time – is not high enough.
Musk added that SpaceX launches a lot of geostationary missions, which is considerably further into space than where it is trying to catch the boosters from and too far to recover the second stage at this point.
SpaceX plans for its next generation of rockets to be fully reusable and utilise a sub-cooled methane-oxygen propulsion system, where the propellants are cooled to close to their freezing temperature to increase the density. The broader concept, known as Raptor, is intended to be a fully reusable Mars transportation system.
