Retrieved, not reused.
Comment on Second SpaceX Starship launch ends with explosion. What happens next?
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 11 months agoThe rocket boosters on the space shuttle were absolutely reused. Here’s video of one being retrieved.
I_Has_A_Hat@startrek.website 11 months ago
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The SRBs used on the final shuttle mission were the same boosters used on the first mission. That set was used a total of 60 times. Only 2 sets of boosters were never recovered for re-use. The set from STS-4 had a parachute malfunction, and the set from the Challenger exploded.
drdabbles@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Literally reused. What are you talking about.
Strykker@programming.dev 11 months ago
SRB boosters are quite close to literally just a big steel tube, and they reused them by dropping them into the ocean under a parachute.
They still had to clean out and refurb every booster launched. And that was without the complex rocket engines that would get destroyed by being submerged in the ocean.
JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
We can argue about semantics, but they were moreso rebuilt from the same parts than reused as is. NASA found that it would have been much cheaper to build new SRBs after each launch than rebuild them.