Landing legs are heavy and any mass you lift up lowers payload. You also prevent damage from the engines (which are much more powerful than the Falcon 9 Merlin engine) blasting the surface and reflecting heat/shockwaves back to the ship.
He [Elon Musk] was not enamored with the landing legs being planned for Starship’s booster. They added weight, thus cutting the size of the payloads the booster could lift.
“Why don’t we try to use the tower to catch it?” he asked. He was referring to the tower that holds the rocket on the launchpad. Musk had already come up with the idea of using that tower to stack the rocket; it had a set of arms that could pick up the first-stage booster, place it on the launch mount, then pick up the second-stage spacecraft, and place it atop the booster. Now he was suggesting that these arms could also be used to catch the booster when it returned to Earth. It was a wild idea, and there was a lot of consternation in the room. “If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can’t launch the next rocket for a long time,” Bill Riley says. “But we agreed to study different ways to do it.”
A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex. After more than an hour of argument, a consensus was forming to stick with the old idea of putting landing legs on the booster. But Stephen Harlow, the vehicle engineering director, kept arguing for the more audacious approach. “We have this tower, so why not try to use it?” After another hour of debate, Musk stepped in. “Harlow, you’re on board with this plan,” he said. “So why don’t you be in charge of it?”
Man, say whatever you want about Elon. The guy comes up with crazy ideas that break with some convention, and is willing to stick with them until they either fail or miraculously work out. Cybertruck is having some birthing pains but I will timidly predict that it has achieved a decent level of acceptance and we'll see imitators soon. AND he's good at picking the right people to implement these ideas.
Like there's still probably some irreducible risk from this approach, but to pluck it out of the space of possible solutions when it wasn't even on anybody else's radar? Damn.
"Willing to stick with it" does not sound as impressive when you're just funding the work, not personally putting your nose to the grinder 12 hours a day. And maybe Musk does put his nose to the grinder, but I don't see him doing that. I see him posting midwit takes on twitter.
He needs a PR team to tell him what to do to look more like the modern Tony Stark and less like, well, Trump.
There is a reason SpaceX has developed and deployed this capability, and none of the national space organizations and none of the private space organizations succeeded or even tried.
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Notes -
Could someone explain why they are doing this?
Landing legs are heavy and any mass you lift up lowers payload. You also prevent damage from the engines (which are much more powerful than the Falcon 9 Merlin engine) blasting the surface and reflecting heat/shockwaves back to the ship.
https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942
Man, say whatever you want about Elon. The guy comes up with crazy ideas that break with some convention, and is willing to stick with them until they either fail or miraculously work out. Cybertruck is having some birthing pains but I will timidly predict that it has achieved a decent level of acceptance and we'll see imitators soon. AND he's good at picking the right people to implement these ideas.
Like there's still probably some irreducible risk from this approach, but to pluck it out of the space of possible solutions when it wasn't even on anybody else's radar? Damn.
"Willing to stick with it" does not sound as impressive when you're just funding the work, not personally putting your nose to the grinder 12 hours a day. And maybe Musk does put his nose to the grinder, but I don't see him doing that. I see him posting midwit takes on twitter.
He needs a PR team to tell him what to do to look more like the modern Tony Stark and less like, well, Trump.
Organization and management is also labor.
There is a reason SpaceX has developed and deployed this capability, and none of the national space organizations and none of the private space organizations succeeded or even tried.
Boeing having to get rescued from their latest boondoggle, despite that company having more funding than GOD, should be an illustrative point.
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