The first SpaceX block 5 booster was flown on May 11 and it is scheduled to be used again for a launch on Tuesday August 7. This will be a slightly less than three-month turnaround. SpaceX plans to shorten the turnaround time for block 5 to less than 24 hours between launches. Elon Musk plans to try a fast turnaround in 2019.
Block 5s should be able to withstand up to 10 flights with minimal refurbishment between missions and up to 100 with moderate work. Older versions of Falcon 9 were only reused for two flights.
Previous Falcon 9 cost $60 million to launch but the Block 5 only cost $50 million.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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The old system was so bugged I could barely put a word in.. It was rediculous. And then if my comment was not liked by Russian hackers posse they could remove it in matter of seconds. Solid Opinion board was COMPROMISED!
When you write here is that to educate yourself or others?
Who needs the old comments anyways?
Small price to pay to have a bug and hack free system.
We’ll see. Solid Opinion was supposed to import the earlier comments, too. I don’t recall that working out particularly well.
Considering that the Solid Opinion comments had formatting and links, and Vuukel rather relentlessly doesn’t, (It deletes anything it even suspects might be a link!), I don’t see how they’re not going to end up a real mess, if they import at all into this current system.
LOL, seems the board system ate my link. It was a tweet from @realSPACEwatch showing some designs of a reusable second stage for F9.
Speaking about F9 second stage reusability, seems like it is in the drawing board already: https://twitter.com/realSPACEwatch/status/1026441577957404672
The original Space Shuttle goal for turn-around (landing to launch), was two weeks x 2 shifts = 160 work hours. SpaceX has so far managed a couple of months clock time refurbishing a booster, but the reflights have taken longer to happen. A given booster had to wait its turn to get a payload and and on the launch site schedule.
That’s what I hate. I want to read and post comments backed by actual data that can be evaluated, not just rants and opinions like a social media site.
Something I consider a bit of a nuisance is that I can’t get it to default to putting oldest comments first.
And if you put links, your comment is much more likely to be flagged as spam and auto-deleted.
Added
Brian just informed me that they are importing the comments from Solid Opinion to Vuukel and that the fille will be ready to import next week)
So please stay tuned
Point is that all comments writtenin the last 2-3 years are gone for good.
This is not fair. So much effort for ..uh.. almost nothing, not good at all
Pfft. Maybe bug free, but hardly better, given the total lack of formatting and html capabilities.
This potential s what makes the idea of a reusable F9 second stage still interesting. Launch, check/refurbish and launch again in a few days is basically the achievement of the original Space Shuttle dream.
The reductions in cost due to reuse and the increase in launch cadence could perfectly justify the expense of producing the reusable 2nd stage and the smaller payload.
In fact, it could still be interesting for the many applications not requiring a full BFR capacity.
A difficult to beat proposition, unless BFR launches become really, really cheap by economics of scale.
The Falcon Heavy central booster is a special built one.
But once they have the full stack up to the state they want, and assuming they have the side boosters and the central ones already prepared from previous missions, it could be quite fast (weeks, days?) to have something ready to fly again.
This potential capability is so novel that it doesn’t register in our hard/realistic science fiction yet.
No, it is good. This commenting system is way better and bug free..
So, imagine you were to rewrite Andy Weir’s novel “The Martian” with 24-hour turn-around Falcon boosters to LEO. There’d be a problem getting from LEO to Mars, BUT what can we do if we dramatically increase our capacity to get stuff to LEO? How quickly to lash-together 3 block 5 Falcons to put a Falcon Heavy in the game?
This is great news, but eh.. where are all the Solid Opinions comment we wrote in the last two years/?
All gone? This is terrible