neilnevill
Free Member
What do people think of space X trying to catch a returning starship on the pad with the ‘chop sticks’ or arms? It must be harder than landing on legs on a flat pad.
Harder, yep but it’s mass on the ground vs in the rocket so that makes a huge difference. Basically this is saying that landing and reusing is pretty much a solved problem, so they can stop trying to make it easy.
There’s some other benefits- you don’t have a rocket firing at the landing pad from minimum range reducing damage and heat stress, and backwash onto the vehicle, which is going to be really useful for floating platforms since usually the solution is “just use a shit-ton of concrete” And once you can land a rocket at a precise speed on the X, that’s not so very different from hovering it near to the grabber arm, especially since the arm could in later versions move, and be higher up. So things like gimballing the arm so that rather than needing calm seas or massive levels of stabilisation, you can have the platform move and the arm compensate.
