Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by stetrain 619 days ago
You could build a larger re-usable rocket that could launch this payload and still have margin for recovery, such as the in-development SpaceX Starship.

However for this type of mission that would still leave the question of "What if we skipped re-usability and paid more to expend the launcher? Could we launch a larger payload and/or get there faster?"

The trajectory for this mission was already a slower transit time than the alternate plan of launching it on the SLS rocket. I think for some missions that are infrequent and targeting far-away destinations there will always be a desire to maximize performance at the cost of reusability on that singular launch.