[EthanHeilman]

Fuel is very inexpensive (~2% the cost of a rocket launch), rockets are very expensive. If you can trade off fuel for not having to build a new rocket you drop the cost to orbit by orders of magnitude.

Additionally you can build more expensive rockets that are more efficient since rocket creation becomes a capital rather than a reoccurring cost.

[petenixey]

But why not just use a parachute and airbags? They're going to be a vast amount lighter than the fuel you'd need for a rocket landing.

[InclinedPlane]

Parachutes are a pain in the ass to replace. But more than that taking a dunk in the ocean isn't so good for rockets, and spending the better part of a day with a search and recovery team and all the relevant equipment necessary out looking for the rocket and hauling it back home isn't cheap, it also adds a lot of delay to the whole workflow. Compare that to a propulsive landing on the launch pad next to the assembly facilities. You don't have to have a whole special team of folks on hand. The first stage is back in your hands in a matter of hours, where it can be transported back to the assembly building using a simple crane or other specialized equipment. And it can be inserted into the processing workflow much faster than if it had been out in the ocean, and with less overhead of having to clean it, refurbish it, inspect it, etc.

[anonymfus]

But why everybody compares landing solely on parachutes in ocean with landing solely on engines on land? For example, Soyuz use multiple parachutes for slowing down and engines for guiding and final soft landing on land.

[InclinedPlane]

The Soyuz does not "soft land" anywhere. It basically crash lands at a speed which doesn't cause any injury. For a first stage rocket the advantages of coming down on land via just parachutes are pretty much non-existent to negative.

First off, if the goal is to save fuel from having to do a propulsive return to the launch site then that's not going to happen (except for the 2nd stage and capsule). The US has a lot of sparsely inhabited land but it doesn't have the same huge swathes of uncared for steppe that Russia/Kazakhstan have where they can just dump spent rocket stages everywhere with nary a care. There are range safety issues there that can't easily be avoided. Second, a giant rocket stage coming down on just parachutes is going to be damaged more on land than at sea. If you're trying to avoid the weight of landing gear you're just going to end up with the rocket engines crunching into the ground, which isn't going to be good at any speed. OK, so you can't save RTLS fuel, and you can't avoid having landing gear, at that point the only difference is a tiny little dribble of fuel to bring the stage in for a controlled powered landing. So you might as well just do that and be done with it.

[JshWright]

The Soyouz lands 'somewhere' in a fairly large target area. The recovery overhead is still non-trivial.

Something as big and 'light' as the F9 first stage will be slowed down tremendously by the atmosphere. No need to add all the extra complexity and weight of parachutes.

[EthanHeilman]

You can't direct where the rocket ends up, highly likely that the rocket will get damaged or much less likely that the rocket will damage something else (This is why NASA dumps it's rockets over the ocean). Then you have find a way to get the rocket home, which involves time and money. Why not just burn fuel (rocket fuel is only a few times more expensive that burning water) and bring the rocket home?

If you need more payload build a bigger rocket.

You could also add wings to the rocket and fly it home which has it's own set of trade-offs and benefits(see space shuttle).

[TeMPOraL]

> highly likely that the rocket will get damaged

And because you don't know whether it is damaged or not (sometimes the damage may not be obvious), it's likely that the rocket will have to get a long post-flight inspection to check if it is suitable for another flight. It's something you can almost completely avoid if you land the rocket gently.

I read somewhere, that the costs of recovering SRBs of Space Shuttle from the ocean and then inspecting and fixing them were many times greater than building another pair of boosters.

[InclinedPlane]

The SRB thing isn't true. The costs ended up being pretty much the same for new vs. refurbed. The thing is, with solid boosters the "rocket engine" tends to just be giant aluminum cylinders, almost all the complexity of the job is in casting the fuel and putting the segments together, which is completely orthogonal to the reusability aspects.

Also, part of the allure of SRBs is that they are cheap to manufacture, comparatively (this is a false savings, due to increased operational complexity, but it's still very tempting), so even if a significant amount of money could be saved per SRB through reuse it wouldn't have affected the cost a launch much.

[bfe]

The SRBs don't just impose higher operational complexity, but also far higher acoustic load that requires much higher structural strength and therefore weight on everything else.

[InclinedPlane]

They also complicate the range safety situation and make on-pad aborts after they've been lit impossible. Once they've been lit you're going wherever they're going, whether you like it or not.

[danielweber]

Maybe you are thinking of the costs of "re-using" the Space Shuttle. $250 Million to refurb it each time. But we do it for cost savings!

[InclinedPlane]

Fun fact, the cost of building a Shuttle orbiter from scratch was about $1.7 billion.

The cost of launching a Shuttle including the amortized development costs ended up being $1.5 billion per launch.

[rst]

Parachutes were the first thing they tried, on the first stages of the first Falcon 9 launches. It didn't work; the stages broke up on re-entry before they slowed down enough to deploy the parachutes. The response was to try active control to keep them intact --- and I guess they figure they might as well keep it all the way down.

[deletes]

Parachute and/or airbags are not necessarily lighter than fuel on a rocket as big as falcon. Parachutes don't scale linearly with the weight of the cargo. Plus they introduce an additional complexity and a point of failure.

[simonh]

On large heavy objects they also impose significant stress on it's structure.

[artursapek]

I don't think a parachute would give them the amount of control they want over where it lands. Maybe the idea is to eventually have many of these things docking in the same area, like an airport. If you have a fleet of multi-million dollar rockets, you want to be in as much control of them as possible.

[cryptoz]

You cannot land a large payload on Mars with a parachute due to the very thin atmosphere.

[EthanHeilman]

When I first read this I thought you were missing the point, then I remembered Musk's ambition to live on mars and the planned landing sequence for the Red Dragon. Good point!

[danielweber]

Parachutes are really hard. Ask Carmack at Armadillo, but make sure he's in a good mood first. It's not because he's an idiot or anything.

Plus, parachutes create a new failure mode: parachute deploying when it shouldn't.

[schiffern]

…or not deploying when it should.

[VLM]

Think like systems administrator. They've gotta have a rocket engine and a nav system or its not much of a 1st stage. However adding parachutes, airbags, etc, is new systems. Which means much lower reliability and higher expense.

[HodCarrier]

Elon wants rapid (think aircraft), turn around times. That's what's driving the decisions.