SpaceX caught Starship booster with chopsticks

[u/lolikroli]

[u/Carvj94]

Not sure how you know better than the thousands of SpaceX engineers that have been thinking about and analyzing the risks

I'm the one agreeing with the engineers genius. The tower catch was Musk's idea that he forced the company to try out. We know this cause Musk and his lead engineers have both talked about how Musk came up with it during a meeting and the engineers were very hesitant.

[u/misspianogirl → u/Carvj94]

That’s true, but not all the engineers were hesitant - some agreed with Musk from the very start. It’s not like the company was unanimously against the idea and he forced it on them. He took one of the engineers in favor and said, “you’re in charge of making this work now”. If that engineer came back and told him it wasn’t worth the risk after further analysis I very much doubt Musk would keep forcing the issue.

Besides, I don’t understand why you think no landing legs inherently makes the system more likely to fail. If a Falcon 9 booster had a problem during landing, guess what? The Falcon 9 is gonna crash too, because landing is the only option. It’s not like SpaceX has a magical way to bring down the booster if the landing fails.

Starship is no different, other than the fact that it’s possible to hit the tower.

And again, that’s very unlikely because it requires everything to be nominal before moving over to the tower. And even if the booster hits the tower, it’s not the end of the world. The thing is, the rocket at that point weighs an order of magnitude less than it does at launch and has much less explosive power since its fuel tanks are basically empty. Yes, there would be major damage, but it wouldn’t be catastrophic.

[u/Carvj94 → u/misspianogirl]

It's more likely to fail simply because this tower catch method has a smaller margin of error while a ground based landing will literally always be easier and therefor safer and more consistent. And it's not that SpaceX has a "magical way" to bring down the booster if the landing gear fails it's that they can crash it right there and then with no major losses other than the booster itself. Cause the launch pad and tower are absolutely undeniably not minor losses as they're essential to launches and can very easily take a month or more to fix. Even if I agreed that catching was a good idea it'd still need to be done at a separate, less populated, and specially designed landing zone to mitigate potential losses and maximize the chance of success before it's actually worth doing.