Will the Falcon 9 actually be reusable or just refurbish-able like the Space Shuttle?

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The shuttle had three reusable components: the orbiter, the space shuttle main engines (SSME), and the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB).

Upon landing the orbiter was essentially decertified for flight. The recertification process required 250,000 to 500,000 work hours. About 80,000 of these hours were required to refurbish the thermal protection system (TPS).

The SSME was supposed to be certified for 25 flights without overhaul. Actually, that engine was certified for 20 flights at 104% rated thrust and 8 flights at the 109% level after exhaustive ground testing that ran until April 1984. Through the first 100 shuttle missions, one engine achieved 22 flights, two engines reached 19 flights and 2 reached 17 flights. A total of 43 engines were flown on these missions and the average was 7 flights per engine. Each SSME cost about $50M in today's money.

The SRBs were parachuted to the water, towed to port at Cape Canaveral, completely disassembled there, loaded onto railroad flatcars, and shipped to the Thiokol plant in Utah. There the SRM was essentially remanufactured. There were 68 refurbishable parts, most of which were expected to have a 20-mission lifetime. NASA's plan was for to have each refurbishable part fly on every fourth mission. Only six of these refurbishable parts were associated with Thiokol's Solid Rocket Motor (SRM), but these were the massive SRM segments that accounted for 99% of the weight of the SRB. Most of the refurbishable items were part of the Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) and were processed by United Space Boosters, Inc. (USBI) which had the SRB assembly contract.

The SRB manufacturing cost was about $50M in today's money and the cost of refurbishment was about the same. Cost savings from SRB reuse was essentially zero. However, after the Challenger disaster (the 25th shuttle mission) NASA had no choice but to continue to fish the SRBs from the ocean, disassemble the SRM, and examine each of the O-rings to ensure that the redesigned joints continued to operate properly.

👍︎︎ 176 👤︎︎ u/flshr19 📅︎︎ Jul 04 2018 🗫︎ replies

Another good video Tim. I understand the comments regarding pitch but please don't change anything. Your videos are great for school and inspiring young people that science is important and relevant!

👍︎︎ 46 👤︎︎ u/antsmithmk 📅︎︎ Jul 04 2018 🗫︎ replies

I like your content, and I don't think youll change anything because you are clearly doing well. But I always feel as if you treat your audience like children. Like you are talking to children. If that makes sense.

Scott Manley feels like an adult talking to adults. Which makes the videos more enjoyable since they feel like I'm the intended audience.

But regardless, the content is high quality. Maybe it's just me with feeling like the presentation is patronizing..

No disrespect meant. Just an honest opinion.

👍︎︎ 410 👤︎︎ u/EnergyIs 📅︎︎ Jul 04 2018 🗫︎ replies

Makes me wonder what the BFS will take, The BFS will be the SpaceX Shuttle essentially. I mean they will have to achieve the goal, Since even if E2E does not pan out. Where the BFS is intended to go does not have a full shop so it will have to be able to relight and do a full interplanetary mission without major work.

Of course while the shuttle did not meet its goals and certainly showed how cost plus can cause problems I will say it is still probably one of the most fantastic achievements in history from a technical angle.

👍︎︎ 32 👤︎︎ u/filanwizard 📅︎︎ Jul 04 2018 🗫︎ replies

Great stuff.

I think it would be great if you did a short form vid focusing only the on the economics. Something like:

  • Shuttle cost 16 million for refurb
  • F9 costs approx 1 million for refurb (or whatever the best guess is)

Then briefly give an example of spreading the fix cost + incremental costs over the lifetime (say 10 flights).

👍︎︎ 39 👤︎︎ u/freddo411 📅︎︎ Jul 04 2018 🗫︎ replies

why didnt you take the Dragon into account in your explanation ? It has the same issues at reentry as the orbiter, and it will be able to transport humans. That would make the comparison more complete. Even if it's only Dragon 1 used for CRS...

👍︎︎ 17 👤︎︎ u/Erindel 📅︎︎ Jul 04 2018 🗫︎ replies

Great video. I do wonder why the RS-25 engines have to be torn down more than the Merlin 1D engines per flight. I would have thought that burning H2 would be cleaner and thus require less thorough inspection than Kerosene which can leave deposits in odd places. Or is it burn time? Or is this just a case of NASA hyper-paranoia? Or something else?

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/CodedElectrons 📅︎︎ Jul 04 2018 🗫︎ replies

Love your videos, Tim! I think you cover great discussions and debates while laying out the arguments of all sides in a way that any audience member could follow. It's always great to see this kind of connection between science and the public. I have a few nitpicks, though!

@5:30 I think you could have been more clear that prograde is the direction of travel and not the direction the shuttle faces after turning around. I had to listen to it a few times to realize it wasn't a mistake!

@6:15 you say the orbiter "starts to build up a ton of friction and therefore a ton of heat." I think this is actually a very interesting topic you could do a short video on, but that's actually a common misconception! Nearly all of the heat generated upon reentry of any manned vehicle (more specifically generally, of any blunt body) comes from the compression of air in front of the craft. The craft itself is protected by a boundary layer of air that helps keep most of that heat away from the body. So while technically what heat does enter the vehicle does so through friction (or rather convective heat transfer), it's actually compression that generates the heat along the shockwave while pressure slows the vehicle. Friction has nothing to do with it!

Edit: Are those little vehicle animations your making? They look great! Nevermind, I should have finished the whole video first! Lucas does indeed have awesome animations!

👍︎︎ 14 👤︎︎ u/StoneHolder28 📅︎︎ Jul 04 2018 🗫︎ replies

Great video, as always Tim! Keep it up.

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/SupressWarnings 📅︎︎ Jul 04 2018 🗫︎ replies
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- Hi it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, the world's first reusable rocket. (record scratching) Wait! No it's not. Do you remember the Space Shuttle? It had those Solid Rocket Boosters, and the Orbiter, which were both reusable weren't they? Well today we're going to talk about why the Space Shuttle failed to actually be reusable and wound up being described with a more accurate word, refurbishable. People often cite the shortcomings of the Space Shuttle and are quick to point it to SpaceX's claims of the Falcon 9 booster being reusable. So today we're going to look at what it takes to get the Space Shuttle operational between flights, what it takes to get a Falcon 9 operational between flights, and why SpaceX's first stage booster take much less of a beating than the Space Shuttle did. We'll also do a quick reminder of what technologies SpaceX added to their Block 5 booster to hopefully achieve their goal of making a rapidly reusable rocket that can truly be reused 10 times before needing any kind of serious refurbishment. Let's get started! - [Technician] Three, two, one, zero, and lift off. - [Neil] That's one small step for man. (upbeat, rhythmic music) - Reusable is definitely the hottest buzz word in the new space industry. If you don't know why a vehicle being reusable is such a massive game changer, may I suggest checking out my video Why does Falcon Heavy matter to help get a good perspective on why reusability matters. But long story short, the margins to get stuff to space are so thin it takes a massive rocket to put anything substantial up there. So unfortunately there's just too little margins left over to add additional hardware to make a rocket reusable. This makes spaceflight extremely, extremely expensive. As in, so expensive we're hoping to someday see costs come down to just a $1000 per kilogram! Yeah, imagine those shipping costs down here on Earth. Hi there, I'm calling to get a quote for some new tires for my 2011 Hyundai Elantra. Yes of course it's the GT model. I did some really cool drifting and so that's why the tires are bad. How much would the new tires be? Oh $400? How much for shipping? $36000! And that would actually be a steal compared to the historically astronomical prices of getting space hardware into space. Even the cheapest dollar to kilogram ratio is around the $3000 per kilogram mark, thanks to the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. It's a good thing rocket delivery isn't the standard here on Earth. So here's where reusability comes in. It's honestly fundamental. Of course! Why throw away super expensive multi-million dollar engines and a massive fuselage and all that extra stuff when you could just reuse it, right? I mean duh! Well that was the original idea for the Space Shuttle. Believe it or not, NASA was seeking a reusable launch vehicle before we even put humans on the moon. The original studies began in 1968, some 10 months before Neil Armstrong famously took the first steps on the moon. As a matter of fact, one of the first people to fly the Space Shuttle, John Young was walking on the moon when he got news of the shuttle. - [Tony] This looks like a good time for some good news here. The House passed the space budget yesterday, 277 to 60, which includes the votes for the shuttle. (beeping) - [Charlie] That's wonderful, wonderful. Tony, again I'll say it. With that salute I'm proud to be an American. I'll tell you, what a program and what a place and what an experience. - [John] Yeah, and I'll say it too. (beeping) - [Tony] So am I. Country needs that shuttle mighty bad. - So with all the excitement leading up to the shuttle, fast forward 50 years to today and the Space Shuttle has kind of a bad taste in our mouths. It wound up being terribly expensive, pretty dangerous, and actually more expensive than just about any other way to get into space, although it could do things that no other launch vehicle could do. So with some of the greatest minds working on the shuttle, why did it fail its promise of bringing the cost down? Is SpaceX doomed to repeat history or has a lot changed in 50 years? So first, let's look at the recovery methods of each system. They're quite different. The Space Shuttle utilized both parachutes and a lifting body to recover hardware. Let's go in order of what was recovered, so starting with the Solid Rocket Boosters which were jettisoned around two minutes into flight. The boosters separate while traveling around 4800 kilometers an hour or 3000 miles an hour, at an altitude of around 45 kilometers or 30 miles. And due to their velocity, they continue to coast upward to their highest point of around 65 kilometers or 40 miles. Just a fun note, that does means the SRBs never actually make it above the Karman line or the commonly agreed upon boundary of space. So keep that in mind. The boosters fall back through the atmosphere and start popping a sequence of parachutes at exactly 4786 meters or 15704 feet. Eventually after a pilot chute, and a drogue chute, the three main parachutes deploy and splish splash the booster down relatively softly in the ocean. The Orbiter on the other hand is traveling much, much faster and its recovery, like all orbital things, is a lot hotter. About one hour before touchdown, the Orbiter turns around and faces away from its direction of travel or prograde. It fires up its orbital maneuvering system or OMS and slows down 1%. Yep, that's it, only about 1%! And that's enough to lower its orbit from about 480 kilometers or 300 miles down to just 45 kilometers or 28 miles at its lowest point. That's crazy. The Orbiter then turns back around so it can reenter at about a 40 degree angle. Now it's time for the atmosphere to do its work. The Orbiter is absolutely cruising at this point. It's still traveling around 27000 kilometers an hour or 17000 miles an hour, the Orbiter begins to hit air molecules and starts to build up a ton of friction and therefore a ton of heat. The Orbiter will reach temperatures of 1650 degrees Celsius or 3000 degrees Fahrenheit! Ouch! But luckily, the Orbiter is covered with four different types of thermal protection. It has reinforced carbon-carbon on the leading edges, then there were between 24177 and 31088 tiles, depending on the Orbiter, on the underside and front of the vehicle, then there is white Nomex blankets on the upper payload bay doors, the upper wing and fuselage, and a few white surface tiles for low temperature areas as well. For 12 minutes, the shuttle had so much hot ionized gases surrounding the vehicle, it caused a full radio blackout. Eventually, after several minutes of atmospheric drag and some computer guided S-turns, the shuttle bleeds off a lot of its velocity. Once it's about 40 kilometers or 25 miles downrange, the commander drops the nose to minus 20 degrees, that's almost seven times steeper than a commercial airliner, and it's still traveling 20 times faster. Finally the shuttle lands like a traditional jetliner, only a little quicker, touching down at 350 kilometers an hour or 220 miles an hour on a 4.5 kilometer or 2.8 mile long runway. That runway's actually so long that there's over a one and a half meter or over 5 feet in relative height difference between the ends of the runway due to the curve of the Earth! That's crazy. (whistles) It's quite the journey! Welcome home, Space Shuttle. So now, let's do a quick rundown on how a Falcon 9 is recovered. I've covered this topic a few times, more in depth, so if you have any questions remaining, check out my video How SpaceX lands the Falcon 9. At around two minutes and 40 seconds into flight, the Falcon 9 shuts down its main engines, called MECO or main engine cut off. It coasts for a moment and then the first stage lets go of the second stage for stage separation. At this point the Falcon 9 is traveling up to 8000 kilometers an hour or almost 5000 miles an hour at an altitude of 65 kilometers or 40 miles. Quick note, that's about twice as fast as the Space Shuttle's rocket boosters. The first stage quickly performs a flip maneuver with its nitrogen thrusters, to point its engines prograde. Then, depending on the mission, the booster may ignite three of its nine engines and do a boost back burn if it's going to land back at land. But there might not be enough margins left over to do the boost back burn. In that case it's omitted and the Falcon 9 continues on its ballistic trajectory away from the launch pad and heads towards the drone ship that's been precisely placed based on each mission profile. But in either case, the booster will coast up to its highest point, typically over the Karman line or 100 kilometers or 62 miles. In other words, the booster gets to hang out in space for a minute or so! Lucky, I wanna go. Around 55 kilometers or 34 miles in altitude, the Falcon 9 will light up three of its nine Merlin engines as it reenters the atmosphere. It does this to slow itself down and it actually creates a literal force field around itself so it can survive reentry. After around 20 seconds of reentry burn, the booster scrubs off 30 to 40% of its velocity, which is enough to withstand the remaining heat as the atmosphere gets thicker and thicker. The atmosphere will then take off another 60 to 70% of the remaining velocity until the booster is only traveling about 1000 kilometers an hour or 620 miles an hour. Then it lights up one or three of its Merlin engines to perform the final landing burn which it needs to time perfectly. Even with just one of the nine engines running at its minimum throttle, the booster still has too much thrust to hover. So if the vehicle stops before it hits the ground, it'll actually start going back up. Yeah, that's not good. This needs to be perfectly timed in a maneuver called the hover-slam or suicide burn. Then the landing legs deploy and the Falcon 9 softly touches down. Well, hopefully. (explosive booming) So before we move on, let's really quick remind you why the Falcon 9 doesn't use parachutes like the Space Shuttle SRBs did. Well there's a few reasons, and I'm just gonna breeze through these, since I've done many videos about this and I probably still need to do a more dedicated and updated video about it. So here's Everyday Astronaut's top seven reasons why SpaceX doesn't use parachutes to land the Falcon 9! One: SpaceX tried to use parachutes on the first two Falcon 9 missions to recover the booster. Unfortunately, the booster is going about twice as fast as the SRBs and the parachutes couldn't survive the extra forces. Two: The rocket already has engines capable of slowing down, why not use them? Does a helicopter need a parachute to land? No it has an engine and a propeller already! Three: You can't land a large rocket on Mars or the moon with a parachute, the atmosphere is too thin or nonexistent. So you'd better start practicing propulsive landings now and get good at 'em! Four: The rocket needs to slow down before it hits the atmosphere to survive reentry anyway. Remember that whole reentry burn thing? Yeah, a parachute can't work very well before it's in the atmosphere, so rocket engines are the only way to go. Five: Parachutes and the supporting system that would allow the fuselage to get stretched and not just compressed would just add otherwise dead weight. Six: Parachutes, although steerable, are not nearly as precise as grid fins, cold gas thrusters and an engine gimbal. SpaceX is finding this out the hard way as they tried to catch their fairings under steerable parafoils. Seven: Splashing down is bad mkay. Salt water and precise liquid rocket engine don't mix very well. So that's actually a great place to transition. Okay, so now that we recovered the reusable parts of the Space Shuttle and the first stage of the Falcon 9, what did they do to prepare them for reflight? Let's start with the Space Shuttle. What did it take to get one back to the launch pad? After splashdown, the boosters were sealed up by scuba divers with a giant plug where they drained the water so it could be towed back to Kennedy Space Center. Each booster required a crew of 18 for ocean recovery. The Space Shuttle obviously had two boosters, so that's 36 people on booster recovery. Then the boosters are disassembled and sent out to Promontory, Utah to be cleaned, paint stripped, repainted, inspected and reloaded with solid propellant. Then they go back to Kennedy Space Center for assembly at the United Space Alliance Assembly and Refurbishment Facility. I like the name of that place. The four segments in each booster are then mated to a new igniter, forward segment, nose cap, aft skirt and frustum, whatever that is. So basically just the casing was actually truly reused. I definitely think refurbished is the right word here considering they stripped it down to the bare metal each time and taken to a place called the Refurbishment Facility. Okay, so the boosters aren't at all what I'd call reusable, but how about the Orbiter? What's it take to actually get that thing reflying? After touching down, a highly trained crew of 150 people and 25 specially designed vehicles head out to intercept the vehicle. They do safety checks for explosives and toxic gases, helped the crew exit the Orbiter and eventually they tow it to the Orbiter Processing Facility. Once inside the 2700 square meter or 29000 square foot hangar, the shuttle would be processed for approximately 125 days. More than 115 multi-level platforms would surround the vehicle so engineers could check six million parts. Six million parts! What? But first technicians would don hazmat suits to clean the vehicle of any remaining toxic and hypergolic elements. Then they would remove the Orbital Maneuvering System pods and the Forward Reaction Control Systems modules to be repaired and retested. Then crews would take off all three of the Space Shuttle's main engines, or RS-25's. These babies are still incredible engines, some of the most efficient engines ever made. But they required a healthy amount of inspection and refurbishment between each flight. Each engine had 50000 parts and about 7000 of which were life-limited and occasionally had to be replaced. In 2002, Kennedy Space Center took over assembly tasks of the engines instead of sending them out for refurbishment. But perhaps the biggest and most daunting task of the Space Shuttle was inspecting the thousands and thousands of fragile silica tiles on the bottom of the Orbiter. There were between 24177 and 31088 tiles, depending on the Orbiter. Every single one was unique and had to be carefully inspected and if damaged, replaced. And of course, all the avionics, the payload bay, the hydraulic control surfaces et cetera, et cetera, were carefully checked out between each flight as well. In total, the Space Shuttle required no less than 650000 hours of labor between each flight. Say the average person made $25 an hour, which I'm sure is kind of conservative for a highly trained technician, the cost of human labor to get a Space Shuttle ready for launch would be around 16 million dollars! And again, that's being fairly conservative. But it wasn't always this way. Actually, before the Challenger accident in 1986, the shuttle went through much less refurbishment and checks. So few in fact, it may have seen as little as almost 1% the amount of labor hours between flights. But after the Challenger accident, NASA changed the entire process of getting the Space Shuttle flight ready and wound up going over every single inch with a fine tooth comb. That's probably a good thing when you're dealing with human life. Oh and lastly, after 1989, to get the shuttle ready it was placed on top of the Orbiter Transfer System, a 76 wheel transporter, to take it from the OPF to the Vehicle Assembly building to be mated with the external tank and the Solid Rocket Boosters. Fun fact, SpaceX now owns the Orbiter Transfer System to transport their boosters! Okay, now time for the big question. What does it take to get a Falcon 9 booster back to the launch pad? Let me start off by saying a lot of this is speculation since SpaceX doesn't make public exactly what goes into preparation, but let's give a rundown on what they have done, and what things they will be doing. So first off, if it landed on the drone ship, a little robot actually comes out and grabs onto the booster and hangs on to it so this doesn't happen. It's then transported back by a support crew of around 10 and two ships. But if the booster lands on land, the booster is picked up by a crane and put onto their transporter. For the first few years of the Falcon 9 reuse, the booster were shipped back to Hawthorne for the refurbishment. But SpaceX is building a booster refurbishment facility at the cape. The first booster to ever land on December 21, 2015 for the OG2 mission, was extensively torn down and inspected. Since this was the first booster that SpaceX actually caught in one piece they had to check their work and see if it actually came out okay. On the first 13 reused boosters, or non-Block 5 boosters, we know SpaceX changed out the heat shields and blankets behind the exhaust nozzles. We know they had to fix and repair the grid fins on the extra hot missions. We know they had to do a lot of inspections on the vehicle but they also had to run an X-ray along the booster to ensure the fuselage is still good to go. Now I've heard speculations of between 1000 to 10000 human hours of labor for the turnaround of the Block 3 and Block 4 boosters. And say this is terribly conservative. Say it's actually 100000 hours of labor, that'd still be over six times less labor than the Space Shuttle Orbiter. The Falcon 9 has much less systems to check over than the Orbiter, so I think it's pretty safe to assume there's a lot less labor hours required to prepare it for reflight. We know SpaceX has a goal with their new Block 5 Falcon 9 to see it land and refly within 24 to 48 hours with nothing but inspections and checks between flights. The overall goal of their new block 5 booster is to be reflown 10 times without any actual refurbishment, only inspections. They built Block 5 having learned the lessons from the 24 recoveries leading up to Block 5. If you need a reminder of what's new with Block 5, I have a video all about what Block 5 is and what has changed. A quick list of things that are new with the Block 5 is a thermal protective coating on the whole booster, a liquid cooled heat shield by the engines, a bolted Octaweb, 8% increase in thrust on the first stage, upgraded retractable landing legs, titanium grid fins, an upgraded COPV 2.0 and a ton of tweaks that allow it to be even more reusable and most importantly, rated for human flight. So how can the Falcon 9 booster actually be reflown without refurbishment? Can it? What's so different about the Falcon 9 compared to the Space Shuttle? Well let's first compare it to the SRBs and see what it actually does differently. First off, the SRBs splashed down in salt water. That's not really a good thing. Solid Rocket Boosters are also basically giant empty canisters that are loaded up with a rubber like solid propellant between each flight. This is different than a liquid fueled rocket engine that has say tens of thousands of parts. If a liquid engine were to be submerged in salt water, I don't think that'd be a good thing. So right there is probably the biggest thing, having a booster land on dry land or a dry ship deck, is a huge leg up as far as reusability and refurbishment goes. As a matter of fact, the SRBs were so expensive to refurbish, in the long run, it was more expensive to bring them back, tear them down and all that, than it was just to build new ones. So why is the Falcon 9 booster more reusable than the Orbiter? Well first off, the Orbiter was not only a rocket, it was also a spaceship that carried up to seven people. So a lot of work and check outs went into the cockpit, the interior, the payload bay et cetera, et cetera, let alone the actual rocket engine portion of the Orbiter. The RS-25 engine, although amazing and eventually refurbished on-site, still required an awful lot of work to fly again. The Merlin 1D engine that SpaceX has developed has been fired over 5600 times, and is designed to be reflown and reused over and over with minimal inspections. How much, we don't really know yet, but more on that in a second. But perhaps the biggest difference between the Falcon 9 booster and the Space Shuttle Orbiter is the velocity in which each one reenters. Let's compare the velocities of the SRB, the Falcon 9 first stage and the Orbiter to help understand why each one uses their given reentry system. The SRB never exceeds 4800 kilometers an hour and it also stays lower in the atmosphere so it doesn't require any kind of slow down before it reenters, well because it never really exited in the first place. The Falcon 9 on the other hand goes from up to about 8000 kilometers an hour down to as low as about 5000 kilometers an hour in order to survive reentry using its retropropulsion. But it's safe to say it will probably never see much more than 8000 kilometers an hour. The Orbiter reenters at speeds of up to 27000 kilometers an hour but it slowly bleeds off a lot of its speed in the upper atmosphere. Wow. Those are some pretty big differences in velocity. Since the Falcon 9 booster reenters at only 8000 kilometers an hour it experiences up to almost 40 times less heat compared to the Orbiter. What? How can that be? Well, since the first stage of the Falcon 9 only gets up to at most about a third of orbital velocity, it receives much less than just 1/3rd of the amount of heat. The compressed gas on the leading edge of any vehicle will see heat increase by velocity squared but the thermal energy transferred to the rocket goes as velocity cubed! So that means if a vehicle is traveling four times faster, the bow wave in front can get 64 times hotter! 'Cause that's four times faster, times four, so squared, times another four, cubed, so 64! Now this is an oversimplification but that's why the Space Shuttle needed those carbon-carbon leading edges and those silica tiles all over the bottom of it to survive reentry. Not only that, but the Falcon 9 also does an a pretty significant retropropulsion burn before it reenters, to ensure the vehicle can survive. The Space Shuttle didn't do any of this because it relied on its large surface area to slowly bleed the speed off for several minutes. As a matter of fact, the Space Shuttle spent almost 10 times the amount of time radiating heat off through reentry, which is the key to how its non-ablative heat shield worked. So long story short. The first stage is going slow enough to not get crazy hot, so it doesn't require nearly as much thermal protection. Therefore it's probably safe to say it doesn't require as much refurbishment, hopefully. (upbeat, melodic music) So some final thoughts on all this. First off, the reason why I think the Falcon 9 will actually achieve reusability when the Space Shuttle couldn't is mostly due to the engineering philosophy of SpaceX. They are constantly tweaking their rocket, to the point where according to SpaceX's VP of production, Andy Lambert, SpaceX has "Never built any two vehicles identically, "such is the pace of innovation at SpaceX." Now this is quite different from the Space Shuttle that had only only five operational vehicles that changed very little in their 30 years of operation. As a matter of fact, phase one of the Space Shuttle was only the first four flights of Columbia. After that, further development would be minimal. But with the Falcon 9, if an idea doesn't work out, they can literally make that change on one of the next manufactured boosters. And if it's a really big change, they'll do that on the next block iteration. The Space Shuttle's design didn't exactly freeze, but it certainly didn't evolve nearly as much in 30 years as the Falcon 9 has in eight years. Some might consider this much change reckless, but considering the end goal is to actually have a reusable vehicle, I'm really glad they're pushing this aggressively. I just can't wait another 30 years. And lastly to those that think SpaceX won't be able to make it worth the cost of reflying, or who question whether or not it'll be worth it for them, luckily for us, it really doesn't matter. SpaceX is a private company. They will only do what makes the most financial sense. So if after a few years they look back and realize it's more expensive to try to refly these things than it is to make a new one, I'm sure they'll stop doing so, because they don't wanna lose money. They don't owe it to anyone to reuse their rockets. It's only in their best interest to figure out how to do so so they can maximize profits. And that's just different than the Space Shuttle which had the weight of the entire nation's expectations to be reusable. Whether or not the system put in place actually made sense, it was too late. There was no room for major changes per say since Congress would probably frown upon, "Well this didn't work out, let's scrap the entire idea." So personally, I think with this new age of innovation and materials, rapid evolution of hardware and software, and leadership that simply requires they keep trying until they figure it out, I think we're finally entering a new era of reusable and airliner like rockets. Hopefully! So what are your thoughts? Is actual reusability finally upon us or do you think we're still going to be stuck in refurbishment land? What other questions do you have? Let me know your thoughts, questions, and video requests in the comments below! Thanks to Lukas from kNews for his amazing animations. I've always been a fan of his work and was so happy to work with him on some of these visuals. Be sure and check out his awesome channel where he does updates on spaceflight news and other great spaceflight topics as well. Check it out, kNews! And of course I owe a huge thanks to my Patreon supporters for helping me make this and all other Everyday Astronaut content possible. You guys are seriously amazing! And you help me stay sane during all these long bouts of research. They hang out in my exclusive discord and our exclusive subreddit, to help me script and research. If you wanna help contribute, please visit patreon dot com slash everydayastronaut. Thank you, seriously thank you. As always, all the music in my videos is original. Feel free to check it out for free at soundcloud dot com slash everydayastronaut. Tell a friend. Hey guess what? This ridiculous shirt is finally available in my web store, along with a lot of other fun things like hats, mugs, prints of rocket launches or original other work and lots of other fun stuff at everydayastronaut dot com slash shop. Have fun. Thanks everybody, that does it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, bringing space down to Earth for everyday people.
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Channel: Everyday Astronaut
Views: 1,134,684
Rating: 4.8459511 out of 5
Keywords: SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5, SpaceX reusable, will spacex be reusable or refurbishable, refurbish-able, Falcon 9 vs space shuttle, why doesn't spacex land with parachutes, why doesn't spacex land in the water, spacex landing in the ocean, spacex falcon 9 landing, how does spacex reuse, can spacex reuse, will spacex reuse block 5, how many times can block 5 fly, refurishing the space shuttle, flying the space shuttle, landing a space shuttle, reusing space shuttle, nasa, elon musk
Id: HF69nqY3TZs
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 27min 42sec (1662 seconds)
Published: Wed Jul 04 2018
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