icekatze wrote:hi hi
I mean, it's very impressive that they landed the first stage, don't get me wrong. There are very few people who have done a successful vertical landing of a rocket. But plenty of rockets have delivered satellites into LEO, so that's really not a first.
I am, of course, very curious to see if they can put it back into orbit and save money with the recovery, or if maintenance costs will expand beyond initial projections like in recoverable projects of yesteryear. Definitely something to watch.
It's the first that the same vehicle has done both.
It's 90% of the overall launch vehicle, and unlike the Shuttle or the various other spaceplane boondoggles, it doesn't go to orbit. There's no exotic heat shielding tiles, it makes a much gentler reentry at just a few km/s. The added mass required for recovery makes a relatively small difference in the payload, and the added complexity amounts to landing legs, some small cold-gas thrusters, and some grid fins. If they want to pursue full reuse, recovering the second stage on its own is a much easier and less costly problem to solve. (Though they don't currently plan this with the Falcon 9, as the resulting payload capacity would be too limited.)
That's a very substantial amount of the overall launch cost that they don't have to pay on a subsequent launch, and they achieved it without anything that can be expected to cost a great deal...in fact, they're able to significantly undercut their competition while operating the Falcon 9 as an expendable launcher. Just recovering the engines means they can sustain a much higher launch rate for the same manufacturing rate...and the first stage has to be basically intact and operational in order to successfully land, so odds are they'll be able to reuse much more than that.
