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Next Falcon 9 to Attempt Soft Splashdown

posted by Dopefish on Friday February 21 2014, @01:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the rocket-kits-are-awesome-these-days dept.

WildWombat writes:

"nasaspaceflight.com reports that the next Falcon 9 flight will attempt a soft splashdown off the coast of Florida to test its newly installed landing legs. If successful, this will be a major step along the path to a reusable rocket.

The flight, CRS-3, is an ISS resupply mission scheduled for March 16th. The pace of SpaceX technology development is truly impressive."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by NovelUserName on Friday February 21 2014, @03:03PM

    by NovelUserName (768) on Friday February 21 2014, @03:03PM (#4465)

    Since any craft landing on mars or the moon etc. would need to lift any occupants back out of the gravity well, I would assume that craft would use a different design than a final stage designed to fall into earth's gravity well and stay there.

    My guess would have been that you need a smaller mass in retro-rockets than you do in a 'copter system. Therefore it's cheaper to launch with the rocket system. This would be especially true since mass increases as cube of linear size, so the blades needed to carefully drop a Falcon9 would be proportionally huge when compared to the blades on little models like the GP linked to

    Cheers

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