Do you recycle?

Of course you do! In our modern, green, eco-friendly, low impact society EVERYONE recycles.

So why don’t we recycle our rockets?

After all, we put a lot of time into designing them. We put a lot of money into building them.  Then we use them once and let them fall to the bottom of the ocean. This would be the same as you buying a new car every morning, driving it to work then throwing it away once you got home again in the evening.
This is exactly the point Mr. Stewart Money is trying to make in his article over at Space Review titled “Taking the Initiative: SLI and the Next Generation”

It’s a great piece of writing and I encourage everyone to go read it. Mr. Money suggests the we may have hit the floor in terms of price when it comes to launch vehicles (about 56 million a launch), and that goes on to show how numerous NASA programs looking to design next generation reusable launch vehicles have gone astray. In conclusion he states “development of flexible, commercially produced reusable launch vehicles—remains both logical and achievable, and absolutely necessary.”

Is it though? Is recycling a rocket REALLY necessary? Let’s stick with our car analogy:

• Would you buy a used car that required inspection by trained professional every time you drove it?
• Would you buy a car that needed to have parts replaced every time you drove it?
• Would you buy a car that could only make one trip after fueling it, regardless of the destination?
• Would you buy a car that gets flooded with sea water every time you drove it?

…Probably not.

Not only would a car like that be ludicrously expensive to maintain, but it would need huge amounts of time to prepare it to be driven…. Let’s not even get into how much a car like that might cost upfront!

This is exactly the situation every launch vehicle must endure if it is to be reused/recycled.  As it stands without current design practices it makes no economical sense to reuse/recycle a launch vehicle. Does this mean we are locked into a pattern of disposable launch vehicles?

NO!

But, (there’s always a but) we are going to need to change how we design and operate a launch vehicle:

1. Launch vehicles will need to land and be recovered on the ground… or made entirely resistant to corrosion. Since the second option can’t realistically be done…
2. We will need to find someplace to drop spent rocket stages without a public safety risk.
3. No replacing of engines between flights
4. No/minimal inspection must occur between flights
5. Variable amounts of fuel storage for variety of missions must be a design feature.

Make no mistake, these 5 items are significant design challenges. They are not insurmountable, but they will all lead to degradation performance. This means a launch vehicle that has a smaller payload. It’s also the same reason why our cars only get 20-30 miles to the gallon instead of 100 and only go about 120 miles per hour.

In order to achieve reusability and reliability we must sacrifice performance. I hate to be a buzzkill on this one, but those are the facts.

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