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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: 0s | 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. panick21_ ◴[15 Oct 24 19:17 UTC] No.41852102[source]▶
You just go to distributed launch. You launch a rocket multiple times, fuel up and use that to escape. If you use your upper stage as the primary, its unlikely to ever come back.

But in future you would potentially have special boost stage for that. See something like Impulse Space is building.

But for these really powerful throws, its probably just cheaper to just drop an upper stage. Upper stages are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of a flagship mission. A Falcon 9 upper stage is only a couple million $.