Sure, but we also never brought back bits to land. Closest I think we've really come to trying this out before was the McDonnell Douglas Delta Clipper, which got squished after NASA was essentially shamed into taking it and didn't support it properly. (There's a lot of backstory there, not really meaning to get into it; I think NASA does a lot of great stuff, but 20 years back being shown up by competition definitely ruffled feathers.)icekatze wrote:hi hi
We've done reusable space vehicles before, and the cost savings have never been great.Mithramuse wrote:Also, why the #%&^ weren't we doing this a whole lot earlier
A lot of what was done on the DC-X and -XA programs has informed SpaceX, Blue Origins, and others today, fortunately, but it's also something that really could have been done sooner if NASA's main contractors were actually interested in making spaceflight less expensive.
10%, certainly not, agreed. Ars Technica had a piece recently that is at least a decent attempt to tease some numbers out, though also implies that SpaceX set their own price a bit low... so where that price is relative to their cost is still an unknown, but I'd say 90% is almost certainly too high.icekatze wrote:It's a shame we don't have hard numbers on how much it is costing Space X to inspect and refit their reused boosters because as a privately owned company they're completely opaque, but I think it is a safe bet that they're not launching rockets for 10% of the cost like some of Musk's earlier predictions. It's probably closer to more conservative estimates of 70-90% the costs. But it's anyone's guess how much of their current pricing system is profit margin, subsidy, and reduced cost.
SpaceX has acknowledged that refurbishing a Dragon capsule (from cargo missions) that splashed down in the ocean is nearly the same price as making a new one, but that refurbishing the returned boosters is a significant savings over new. Don't have an article for that one handy, it's from further back in time than the Ars piece, but can try to find if needed.
Edit: Fix URL, clarify one point in DC-X commentary