SpaceX And/Or Rocketry In General

I showed my father the first landing of the Space X a couple of weeks ago.

The only thing he said was, why are all those people in the Command center not in shirts and ties, lol..

I told him, it's a different age we live in.

Late March will be interesting, two East coast and one West coast in three days !! :-)

Cheers, Mike.

I think one of the reasons given for the need for ASDS is that the central third of a Falcon 9 Heavy will naturally end the "useful" part of flight rather farther downrange and faster than the two side packs. So boosting it back would require yet more fuel, and thus a larger loss of oomph than for the side packs.

I'd envision a tiered system, with a "barely heavy" launch landing all three at home, and a "barely anything returned" landing the two side clusters on ASDS far down-range, letting the center fend for itself. Of course the top end would be the "nothing returned" option allowing full lift performance devoted to the payload.

The interesting question that all raises in my mind is whether a landed Falcon 9 core is tough enough to withstand another one landing on the same land pad (just barely conceivable to me) or the same sea platform (not at the current size I think).

So full protection of possibilities for Heavy recoveries seems to call for six ASDS units. There seems no good reason to get on with building them until they are more sure that this works, that they want to do it on Heavy (which is a smallish part of the launches) and that they know just what their desired ASDS design is.

I had not thought this through before now, but I now think a real sign of serious intent to do returns on F9 Heavy launches will be the preparation of additional ASDS units. Landing next to one just landed, with no time for safing or tie-down, sounds really, really sporty to me. Probably it would cheaper to deploy two sized for single-unit recovery than one upsized enough to make two-unit plausible.