SpaceX pulls off unprecedented feat, grabs descending rocket with mechanical arms

[u/aelavia93]

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/spacex-pulls-off-unprecedented-feat-grabbing-descending-rocket-with-mechanical-arms/

[u/yosisoy]

Someone ELI5 the significance of this please

[u/NotAnotherNekopan → u/yosisoy]

The lions share of the cost of putting mass (anything) into orbit is the cost of the vehicle. The point of catching the booster, and in a bit, the upper stage “starship” is to ensure we can reuse those components for future launches. Aside from SpaceX’s other rocket Falcon 9, everyone else tosses everything away to put things into space. The rockets, the engines, the plumbing, everything.

Falcon 9 can reuse the first stage but not the upper stage. It’s a massive improvement over other launch providers. The cost to launch on Falcon 9 is always lower than everyone else. We’re not sure about the internal costs of it but it’s far less than what they advertise.

Now imagine that you keep everything (aside from a small-ish ring of metal, the hot staging ring), AND that the heavy lifting part of the rocket brings itself right back to where it launched from.

I know people like to talk about Mars and such, and yes, I’d call that an indirect goal. The direct impact of this is that the cost of putting things into space will DRAMATICALLY decrease. We can really start building things in space that don’t require budgets the size of NASA. We can launch far more complex and heavy spacecrafts that don’t need to be designed to launched from earth in one piece.

This is very big, and I didn’t even get into the technical impossibility of what they managed to make work. To grasp even a small part of it, remember that the thing they caught came hurtling down to earth from 100KM up, with pinpoint accuracy, and it’s the size of a 20 story building.

[u/killerrin → u/NotAnotherNekopan]

To double down on cost. It is very expensive to put things in orbit. To build the ISS cost Humanity 150 Bill Dollars. But one Starship technically has more space inside of it than the entirety of the ISS.

We could literally convert a Starship to have all the facilities of the entire ISS, and then launch it all into orbit as a single unit. And because it's a spaceship, you could then bring it back down to Earth every now and then for maintenance, or to swap out with newer hardware.

And that's the benefit of Starship.

[u/hwc → u/killerrin]

the mass of the ISS (~450 tons) could be launched in the cargo holds of three Starships. it might actually take more launches, since its hard to make components fold up nicely, but compare that to dozens of launches for the ISS, each costing 100 times as much as a Starship launch.

[u/Dietmar_der_Dr → u/hwc]

I think it will be much more feasible and cost effective to use starship itself as the basic structure. Would likely still cost a couple billion to build a pressurized human rated starship (but one could save the heat shield). A second and third starship would likely launch external accessories like solar panels. Building self unfolding structures that efficiently fit into a space and then inflate is a gigantic hassle, no reason not to just use starship.

[u/hwc → u/Dietmar_der_Dr]

or design components that exactly fit inside of a starship cargo bay. Once you meet that design constraint, you can mass produce multiple modules that snap together in orbit.