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NASA's Europa Clipper Launch

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217 points belter | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 15:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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sidcool ◴[14 Oct 24 16:14 UTC] No.41838932[source]▶
Are the side boosters going to be recovered?
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benjismith ◴[14 Oct 24 16:16 UTC] No.41838957[source]▶
Nope. They needed the maximum amount of thrust from those boosters in order to propel the spacecraft toward Jupiter, so they couldn't save enough fuel for the boosters to land themselves. This was the 6th flight of these boosters, so we thank them for their service!
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linotype ◴[14 Oct 24 16:36 UTC] No.41839149[source]▶
Is this one of those things that’s limited by physics or at some point will these kinds of missions be doable with a mostly reusable setup?
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1. stetrain ◴[14 Oct 24 18:33 UTC] No.41840442[source]▶
You could build a larger re-usable rocket that could launch this payload and still have margin for recovery, such as the in-development SpaceX Starship.

However for this type of mission that would still leave the question of "What if we skipped re-usability and paid more to expend the launcher? Could we launch a larger payload and/or get there faster?"

The trajectory for this mission was already a slower transit time than the alternate plan of launching it on the SLS rocket. I think for some missions that are infrequent and targeting far-away destinations there will always be a desire to maximize performance at the cost of reusability on that singular launch.