/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11457717
I just don't understand this expendable rockets meme.

The amount of money you can save from expending rockets isn’t enough to justify how much harder it makes to frequently carry the cargo that usually make money in the launching world. I’m sure one day expendability will be more effective, but the truth is that when you have all the challenges that come with rocket science in general, it’s almost always much more effective to keep the rocket after it’s done its job than to figure out how to make expendability part of the mission. I know of no major technology on the near term horizon that would change that.

Even if expendable rockets are viable now, but when reliability is THE number one priority (in this case the payload takes up 2/3rds of the cost and the actual rocket only 1/3rd) it makes absolutely no sense. Like, look at this rocket (pic related). This represents some of the most advanced technologies in the space flight world. Do you honestly think that such a complicated machine can be made cheaply and consistently enough to be expendable? I doubt it. Best example in my opinion are cars, sure you could expend them but making sure that they do not suffer a drop in reliability will cost a lot of money and time.

Just because some government agency made expending rockets popular, then that doesn't mean that we will have the sci-fi future of millions of tons of metal dumped into the ocean per year. We'll be lucky to see more than a couple dozen per year. Dial down your expectations, don't buy into the expendability for rockets' meme.