I remember there was a phase of Falcon design where it looked like they had perfected barge landing, and then they had a rash of failures. Later on they admitted to intentionally crashing older boosters so they could find the limits of the hardware. They were iterating at such a pace that the data was worth more than a recovered booster. I wonder if that was the case today?
To give an example of this, the Starship they've been flying on the last few flights is already obsolete. There's a newer V2 but they wanted to burn through the rest of the V1s they had already built and get more data before flying V2.
It's been announced, and is surely being designed, but they are only building hardware for V2 right now. Most likely V2 will continue as long as they need to get dialed in what they want V3 to be, then they will switch. V2 seems to be based on the learnings from V1, and I think V3 is the real design they want to fly-- but V3 depends on Raptor 3 and probably other advancements, and Raptor 3 is still at the testing stage in MacGregor.
For instance the V2 design seems to use Raptor 2.5 which is a Raptor 2 variant with Raptor 3 style interface with the ship. So they are testing the ship design to support Raptor 3 before they have Raptor 3.
The engines are really heart of these things and drive the development cadence.
That makes so much sense. Once you find the correct parameters for an optimal flight, use the rest of the rockets to map the state space of configurations to see how much they can deviate
Interesting, so if they do not intend to recover the rocket from the water here, then this was an effective waste-disposal method for their obsolete V1 design?
I was surprised to learn that, besides the environmental impact of the leftover fuel - though methane is the least toxic of them, and decomposing electronics, the metal rocket body itself can be a boost for marine life and corals by serving as shelter. Guess the outcome depends a lot on the design and materials used.
It's possible to plan for multiple eventualities. They may have pushed it to its limits (or beyond) and decided the best destination based on how it handled it
One of the commentators said (roughly) "they can make another rocket real quick, but if they blow their one pad up then they are hosed for a long time."
I like SpaceX as much as the next nerd but that's not "intentionally crashing the booster" it's "doing the only other type of landing you can when you abort the first plan of landing it successfully". I'm sure they got useful data out of it (it's better than "booster blows up in mid air") but this is squarely in "2nd attempt to land with chopsticks wasn't as ready as they hoped" bucket, not "132nd attempt to land the booster was intentionally destroying it to see how much farther they could be pushing it" as was originally implied with the wording and prior example.
Oh, sure, I didn't want to make any comment on what they were actually doing or trying to accomplish. Only that the hypothetical we were talking about would have been consistent.
There's a lot of middle ground here. I suspect what's most accurate is "let's push the booster out of envelope a bit, if we get really nice numbers we'll go for the chopsticks landing, otherwise it's into the drink".
In other words, they were optimistic enough to think that another upright landing was within the realm of possibility, while also deliberately doing things which made that outcome less likely, to get the data they need.
If that's true, I wouldn't characterize it as a second attempt at a chopstick land, that would just be a stretch goal. Who knows if it is, but it's consistent with how SpaceX operates.
No, but I'm neither omniscient nor able to see into the future. It's not clear to me that the sentence you're referring to had been posted 18 hours ago, and in any case, I hadn't seen it.
You have to pay to get the rocket back anywhere near to a barge at all. If you don't want it back you just let it fall into the ocean without spending fuel on slowing it down (and more fuel bringing that fuel along so that it is there to slow it down). You don't pay for a barge. You don't pay for the engineering work associated with bringing it back.
Dropping rockets into the ocean was what everyone* did before SpaceX came along.
If you're already paying the cost to bring it back though, it's very hard to imagine that you would have to pay to scrap it. The thing is primarily a large metal tank, and some engines made up of a bunch of metal - people pay money for the privilege of scrapping metal, not the other way around.
* Technically some other countries dropped them on deserted land, or not so deserted land in the case of China.
Depending on what's in the rocket, just leaving it to decay in the environment would likely lead to contamination. Especially if you have any Hypergolic fuels lying around (explode on contact, and extremely harmful to humans / the environment). So you either pay to scrap it, or pay to clean up the site in X years.
They could probably get museums to pay them for their scrap. They would have some work to remove any confidential components before handing it over though.
I have no idea, but my guess is that the cost of fuel would be an order of magnitude greater than any possible disposal costs.
Also, people pay good money for high-quality metals. The scrap value is probably greater than the logistics cost of getting it to a scrapyard.
You wouldn’t even need to scrap it. Cut it up and turn it into some mega silos for agriculture or materials suppliers. Or just set it aside and donated to the Smithsonian in a few decades…
And, I should add, but if anyone discovered that the fuel was being wasted for no benefit, it would be a PR nightmare, especially as there’s no end of people eager to find fault with the company’s founder and largest shareholder.
Yes Musk said before one of the first flights, that they are making changes and building new hardware at a much faster rate than they could ever hope to fly it right now. pretty much something to the effect that by the time they get to fly hardware a lot of it is obsolete.
