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by grecy 700 days ago
> The other one is since the second stages are not recovered it is much harder to do an after-flight engineering analysis on them

This raises and interesting question - do you think SpaceX will attempt to recover a Falcon 9 second stage with Starship at some point?

It would be a great technology demonstrator for Starship, and finally gets them a F9 second stage to inspect. Win win.
2 comments
krisoft 700 days ago
Oh. Interesting! I haven't thought of that. It sounds super cool, although my gut reaction is that it would be a lot of work for not much bang.

My childish imagination pictures the proposal as the Agena target vehicle from the Gemini IX test flight. There the fairing did not separate correctly leaving the docking target looking like a hungry space alligator: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/5-s66-37966-...

One could imagine the aligator gobling up a drifting second stage. :D It would absolutely not look like that in reality, but if life were a cartoon that is how it would happen. :)

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grecy 700 days ago
> it would be a lot of work for not much bang.

I don't know. Surely it will be a sellable feature of Starship eventually to service and/or return aging sats from orbit. Grabbing an F9 second stage feels like the perfect way to demonstrate that capability. It's not like they're going to have a shortage of Starships returning from orbit in the future.

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philwelch 700 days ago
Low orbits clean themselves up relatively quickly though, and that’s where most of the newest satellites are going.

One of the Shuttle’s selling points was exactly this mission. Apparently it recovered a total of five satellites, three of which were research satellites launched specifically with the expectation of being recovered ahead of time. The other two were mis-launched into the wrong orbit because of a rocket failure. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/15094/what-satelli...

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mavhc 700 days ago
Cross between The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker?
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gus_massa 700 days ago
IIRC one of the initial animations had a landing second stage, but it was probably harder than expected (or it was just marketing material).
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grecy 700 days ago
> IIRC one of the initial animations had a landing second stage

Of Falcon 9?

Yes, they were aiming for that, and put significant engineering effort towards it before it was deemed too difficult, and instead to focus on Starship, which is a second stage design for re-use from the ground up.

(Same story for catching faring halves in a net on a ship.. they tried and tried, and ended up just making them a little tougher and letting them land in the ocean before fishing them out.

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sitkack 700 days ago
That would be amazing!
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