SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first time

Re:SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first... by AmitShipEasy on Saturday April 09, 2016 @12:49PM (#11462016)

Tell me again which engines get corroded by sea water but not by combustion and re-entry

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Re:SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first... by CydeWeys on Saturday April 09, 2016 @01:11PM (#11462132)

You really don't see how being dunked in water is different than going through the atmosphere? You could pretty easily put a heatshield on a car and have it survive high atmospheric speeds, but dunk it in water and you'll fry out the electronics and destroy the engine. You're arguing against decades of actual experience in rocket technology. Just read up on what happened with the space shuttle SRBs.

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Re:SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first... by stcredzero on Saturday April 09, 2016 @04:39PM (#11463201)

And those were really just sections of stout metal tube. They didn't have things like high precision turbopumps in them.

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Re:SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first... by CydeWeys on Saturday April 09, 2016 @05:29PM (#11463438)

Good point. Solid fuel rockets are quite different in construction than liquid fuel rockets. They are less worth reusing because what is left isn't as valuable as a liquid fuel rocket, but they are also easier to reuse post-dunking because they aren't as complex. It's still a wash for them.

Still, it says something that no actor has ever even bothered attempting to reuse a liquid fueled rocket that is landed in water. The only successful track record of reuse of liquid fuel rockets is the space shuttle, and those landed on a runway. And that isn't preserving the fuel tanks for reuse, mind you, just the engines.

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Re:SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first... by stcredzero on Saturday April 09, 2016 @05:35PM (#11463460)

Solid fuel rockets are quite different in construction than liquid fuel rockets.

Hell, when they fell into the water, the impact bent the sections into ovals. They actually had a giant vise that they used to bend those things back into round. (Feynmann noted this in one of his autobiographical books.)

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Re:SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first... by rkangel on Saturday April 09, 2016 @02:14PM (#11462515)

When designing your rocket engine, you very carefully control where the combustion is, where the heat is, which bits will get burned away.

Dunk the whole thing in seawater and suddenly you have corrosion everywhere.

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Re:SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first... by mikeash on Saturday April 09, 2016 @01:46PM (#11462335)

The ones on the rocket.

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