You're right of course. Wishful thinking on my part. It's just that
SpaceX's recent achievements (and Blue Origin's to a lesser degree) have
relighted my fan-boy imagination ;-)
Gert
On 20/01/16 00:18, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Tue, 19 Jan 2016, Gert van Spijker wrote:
Few, if any, customers will have enough confidence in buying a second
hand
ride, no matter what the record of their first few recoveries will be.
I think you might be surprised. They didn't have any great trouble in
lining up customers for first flights of two new versions of Falcon 9.
The *first* customer for a refurbished first stage will probably
demand a deep discount, but that won't last once it becomes routine
practice.
... Then re-fuel it and send it, without a payload ... on a
trans-lunar trajectory and land the center stage on the moon...
Quite apart from whether this is feasible -- haven't done the numbers,
but at first glance it seems unlikely -- SpaceX is, and has been for
some time, wary of doing anything that could embarrass its biggest
customer.
Don't expect Elon to do something flashy in deep space that would
upstage NASA. If he decides that demonstrating something like that is
on his critical path, so he needs to do it, there will probably be
some sort of NASA cooperative agreement signed in advance, so the NASA
logo will be present and NASA can claim part of the credit. Doesn't
matter whether this really holds up well on closer inspection, so long
as NASA gets to share the podium at the press conference.
Henry
