Halfway to Anywhere 266
To lower the price per launch, all parts of SpaceX’s
rockets had to be reusable. “The insistence on reusability
drives the engineers insane,” a SpaceXer said. “We could
have had Falcon 1 in orbit two years earlier than we did if
Elon had just given up on first stage reusability.”^288 But Elon
knew the rockets had to be reusable if they at the same time
would be cheap. All earlier modes of transportation have
been reusable - except for rockets. “Imagine how expensive
flying would be if a 747 was a single-flight use,” Elon said.
“That’s a multi-million-dollar aeroplane you’d be throwing
away every time. Who could possibly justify such a thing?
We’d all be going in boats.”^4
SpaceX designed the first stage of the Falcon 9 to fall
back to Earth with parachutes. But in the future all the
rocket’s stages will land by themselves without parachutes.
To fulfill the promise, SpaceX developed the Grasshopper.
Like the craft that landed on the Moon, the Grasshopper
consists of thrusters and four foldable legs. The thrusters
will make each stage land on the ground again in a vertical
position. “Design completed for bringing rocket back to
launchpad using only thrusters. Yay. Wings r just dead
weight in space,” Elon said in a Twitter message.
The Grasshopper will increase the turnaround time.
Making rockets affordable requires not only reusable rock-
ets, the rockets have to launch again in a short amount of
time. A commercial aircraft can fly again in a matter of
minutes. The Space Shuttle failed because it was designed
to launch again in a matter of days, but in reality it
took several months before it could launch again. If the