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Second SpaceX Starship launch ends with explosion. What happens next?
(www.nationalgeographic.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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I mean... They invented reusable rockets.
Edit: they invented the first reusable liquid-fueled rockets and the first rockets that can autonomously land themselves. NASA used reusable solid rocket boosters on the space shuttle that would deploy parachutes and land in the ocean. Getting a solid rocket booster back into a reusable state seems like a lot of work to me.
They absolutely didn't invent reusable rockets.
They created reusable rockets. Lots and lots of concepts on the drawing board, but theirs was unique and the first one to get made.
The rocket boosters on the space shuttle were absolutely reused. Here's video of one being retrieved.
We can argue about semantics, but they were moreso rebuilt from the same parts than reused as is. NASA found that it would have been much cheaper to build new SRBs after each launch than rebuild them.
The SRBs used on the final shuttle mission were the same boosters used on the first mission. That set was used a total of 60 times. Only 2 sets of boosters were never recovered for re-use. The set from STS-4 had a parachute malfunction, and the set from the Challenger exploded.
Literally reused. What are you talking about.
SRB boosters are quite close to literally just a big steel tube, and they reused them by dropping them into the ocean under a parachute.
They still had to clean out and refurb every booster launched. And that was without the complex rocket engines that would get destroyed by being submerged in the ocean.
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Who outside of TinTin comics has done a reusable rockets other than SpaceX?