9 thoughts on “The Fourth Flight Of Last Week’s Booster”

  1. I agree with the assessment at the sight; but I see two positives: 1) NASA is allowing a reflown booster on a Crew Dragon, even if a test. That’s good news. 2) It will be a great secondary test for SpaceX to see just how survivable that scenario is for the booster. SpaceX is likely to care, while NASA would just dispose of the booster and all such data that could be obtained. I hope SpaceX will get as much instrumentation as possible.

  2. They are probably still making changes to the Block V, so it still makes sense to dispose of their most used cores as testing dictates.

  3. Another little-noted reason why Elon would like to fly the in-flight abort test in April is that SpaceX gets paid two months earlier for notching that particular development milestone than if it flies in June. Flight of DM-1 – and payment for same – has already been stalled for over six months for no good reason. That is doubtless among the intentions of the anti-SpaceX and anti-CC cabals within NASA who’ve been busily jamming up D2 over the past couple years.

    I think Elon will enter into no more such milestone-based deals with NASA unless he gets a lot more say about just when milestones can be attempted. Fool me once and all that.

    1. Very interesting. I’ve been noticing the corrupting of the COTS style contracting process by the traditional contractors and your point is another example of how they can abuse the process to kill competition. Not every company has a billionaire backing them.

      We might see these milestone based contracts turn out to be just as abused as cost plus contracting not just in hurting competition but in extending timelines and boosting rewards for milestones. It is very easy to add artificial complexity to these programs to prevent new entrants because not everyone can sustain operations while compensation is deferred.

  4. The abort will be conducted at a high enough dynamic pressure that the stage separation system will be overwhelmed, and the certainly-shredded 2nd stage will kill the booster. Only if the 2nd stage had some large separation motors could the booster be recovered.

  5. Well, they’ll find out eventually. They used to say 100, but the last thing I saw from Elon was 30 to 40. That’s disappointing, but it is still 30 to 40 more than anything else that has ever existed except the Space Shuttle.

      1. The uncertainty, plus the the likelihood for success, makes this very exciting. Other companies are starting to copy SpaceX but emulation still might not help them.

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