Can they relight sooner to improve their odds of landing successfully, or is the window for when they can relight relatively small?
Or does it not matter because a few more seconds won't increase the chances they'll be able to relight?
Or does it not matter because a few more seconds won't increase the chances they'll be able to relight?
If you want to start burning a few seconds early on landing by policy, you need to lift that fuel, and the fuel to lift that fuel, from the surface to space and then decelerate all of that. Just for those seconds. If you’re doing this from Mars, you also have to accelerate that mass around the Solar System and out of the Martian gravity well.
Not a bad thought. Just wanted to illustrate how energetically leveraged these systems are.
But these are all in the 'why don't they' category, SpaceX has some pretty clever cookies, experts in their field, the chances that anything we can think of has not been thought of by them are nil.
Not saying that a bunch of random folks on HN are seeing dollar bills in this analogy, but I've never quite been satisfied with the "if we're thinking of it then they probably already tried it" explanation :)
Same here :) . I'm still unhappy with their decision to use toxic propellants on Crew Dragon - I'm sure they could use something much more benign.
They've had better fuel options from the very beginning. I guess they didn't have space cycles to additionally solve this issue; hope they'll come back to it.
"We were too dumb" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1357256507847561217