Reusable Rockets

it's been a rough week. Wizards and Goblins. Man, Wizards and Goblins, got my slitherin sweater here though, So everything's doing okay. Yeah. So while we are mourning, we're grieving, we're also celebrating because one, we're celebrating great art that was left behind as artists themselves have passed away. But we're also celebrating because we're in an era of amazing technological and science development and we're witnessing it right now.

Like we are in a time that is phenomenal for multiple reasons, and just one of those is that recently we've seen a couple of really cool demonstrations of a technology that we've been waiting for for a while. Uh, the idea of reusable rockets, rockets that can launch up, go into space, returned to Earth and land safely so that they could be used again after being refurbished. And this is a big deal and we'll talk about why in this episode. Yea. So, so the two examples that

we've seen are are Blue Origin, which was the company company. Yeah, Blue Origins the company, and that was that's backed by Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Uh, and their rocket New Shepherd, which was the first one in late I think it was November, launched up, went to the edge of space. We'll talk about that in a little bit, and then returned to Earth and landed safely using thrusters to maneuver

at self and land upright. And then uh, SpaceX would be the other one, and they launched a Falcon nine which actually delivered a payload into lower Earth ormit because SpaceX does that. Yeah. Yeah, it was a payload that had some satellites in it. So now I should mention that the Falcon nine, it was the first stage that returned to The Falcon nine is a two stage rocket. We'll talk more about that a little bit later too. But in both cases, this is really impressive display of

technological and engineering expertise. Now, if you're sitting there thinking, wait a second, what's so great about that? I thought all the spacecraft we sent to space typically returned. Isn't that sort of the point? If they if they're especially for crude space missions, don't they come back? Here you need to understand the distinction between the spacecraft or the capsule,

for true, and the rocket. That's true. I'm being very loose with the terminology, but yes, the rocket, the vehicle that delivers the spacecraft up into space, is what we're really talking about here. And the situation with rockets today, I don't know, it seems kind of wasteful. It's like if you decided, hey, I'm gonna cook dinner, and in the process of doing so, you destroyed every piece of equipment in your kitchen that you used to make dinner with,

like the whole kitchen. Basically, like you just at the end of when by the time it's done, your stove is gone, your fridges, pots and pans in the trash, Your you know, knife, you're going in the trash. You're ruined. The example I gave is imagine that you are going to go on a family road trip and you buy a brand new car, and then you go out to Wally World, and then you just leave the car there and you uber it back home, and your car you never get to touch that car again. That car is gone.

So every time you take a road trip you have to buy a new car. That sounds expensive. You can get up there. I mean, you know, it depends on your taste of vehicle. I being a luxurious type. It's it starts to rack up after eight or nine trips. Sure, And as you can imagine, launching things into space is even as cheap as going to Wally World. No, it's actually a tad more expensive. Uh yeah, So we wanted to talk today about the concept of reusable rockets. Why

is that a big deal? And to really understand that. I thought it'd be kind of interesting because that's the way I think, to have a rundown on the basic physics of rocketry, so we can understand what is going on when we're sending a rocket up into space. This is particularly important because New Shepherd and Falcon nine are two very different approaches right. One thing you should keep in mind, of course, is where those two names come from.

New Shepherd named after Alan Shepherd, the first American to make it into space. Falcon nine named after Star Wars the Millennium Fall. So, uh, those two are are quite different. And it's also a really good look into the minds of Elon Musk and Jeff Basis. Yeah, I would, I would agree with that, but this this is uh, you know, we'll talk a little bit about how those two are very different as we move along. So rockets work because of fundamental law of our universe actually collection of laws

of our universe that we understand it. Yeah, if they weren't true, we wouldn't be sending stuff into space, right, And uh, those laws were first explained in a book called the Philosophia Naturalists Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton, Sir, pardon me, sir Isaac Newton. And in that work Newton framed his observations of physics and frame them in the form of basic laws of motion. And there are three

basic laws that we have to really look at. And the first is that objects at rest remain at rest and objects in motion remain in motion, moving in a straight line at a steady speed unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Meaning an outside force of some sort. Right, So a ball only stops rolling along the ground because

of friction. It doesn't stop rolling because things naturally slow down over time, Right, it would just continue for infinity if in fact that friction wasn't present, or or if it ran into something else in the change direction, obviously that would be difference, or maybe went through a gravitational field that caused some attraction. Yeah, but again, so when it encounters an unbalanced force, given no unbalanced forces, given only balanced forces. Yes. Also, we we wanted to note

a thing about the terms rest and motion. Yeah, they're relative terms, so it all depends upon your point of reference. Right, So some of it can be a little counterintuitive. If I'm, for example, sitting on a train and the train is moving, Am I at rest or my in motion? Well, we would describe me as being at rest because compared to my surroundings, I eat the train, the physical train that's around me, I'm not moving. I'm sitting down, I'm sitting

in a seat. Now, if I were to get up and walk in that train, then I would be in motion because according to my surroundings the train I am moving around compared to that the train itself is in motion because it's moving relative to the surroundings the countryside or tunnel or whatever the heck, the train happens to be going around, so it's all relative. Yeah, so that's important to remember. Unbalanced force is referencing the sum, total

or net force exerted on an object. So I used a sandwich on a table because I wrote this note shortly before lunch and I was dreaming of sandwiches. Hungry notes are sandwich notes, Yes, So a sandwich on a table is an example of an object under balanced force because gravity is pulling down on that sandwich, but the table is giving equal force upward, keeping the sandwich on the table. It's not pushing too hard because we're pushing harder than the sandwich would jump off the table. Right.

This is a really great analygy to be an amazing table would be an amazing table, but it's not happening. It's just it's exactly a balanced force. Now, if you can buy this table from you, this is a metaphorical table, So the answer is yes, I will sell it. Uh, But if you were the table, I am interested in your sandwich table, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. If you were to pick up the sandwich, you would

introduce unbalanced force because you would be actually counteracting gravity. Further, you would have to use enough force to counteract the poll of gravity to lift the sandwich higher than its current height on the table. So what we're really talking about here is is two different scenarios in which forces can be balanced. Yes. Yeah, So if an object does at rest, the forces on it are balanced, and that's that's without question, right, If an objects at rest, by definition,

the forces are balanced. If an object is moving, then it could still have balanced forces. If it's moving in a straight line and it's moving at a constant speed. If it's speed changes or its direction changes, that's a change and acceleration that is indicative of an unbalanced force being applied to this object. So that's covering just the first law of motion. The other two are pretty easy to remember. Second law of motion states that force is

equal to mass times acceleration. Keeping mind, acceleration is not just speed like I said, it's it's a change in speed or direction because it's a vector quantity. And then you have the third law, which is for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, And that's really the rocket law right there. Yeah, all three of these are are applicable. But yeah, but but the rocket would not go anywhere if it weren't for the fact of that third. That's the key to the propellant idea of

rocket tree. So when we look at rockets, a rocket at rest is going to require a certain amount of unbalanced force for it to lift off of a launchpad. You know, you've got this big, massive, heavy thing sitting on a un a really big sandwich. Yeah, an enormous sandwich sitting on a really big tape. Because the moon looks very hungry, yes, and shouldn't we treat it once in a while. So this unbalanced force has to be greater than the forces pulling it downwards. So it has

to be greater than gravity. And uh so with rockets we call that unbalanced for something specific, we call it thrust. So a rocket has to have enough thrust to lift off of the launch pad. If it doesn't, then it's not going to go anywhere. Even if you're shooting flames out the back of this rocket. If it's not enough thrust, it will just be a flamethrower firing at the launchpad. And gravity isn't the only thing that's that's in play here exactly. There are a couple of other things to

keep in mind. So there's a drag, which actually is you know, sort of air resistance. Really yeah, yeah, because as we have said many times before, the air around us is not open and clear. It's soup particle soup. Yeah. If it were otherwise, we'd be in a vacuum and that would suck for us. We wouldn't exactly like a hoover. It would suck for us. I wish you could see the little laugh that Laura. What was great was Laura

half laughter that almost came out. There was the moment where where she wasn't sure where I was going, and then there was the moment where she's like, on, man, I think I probably make around to you a lot.

It's you're not the only person I inspire that. But at any rate, so as long as a rocket is within Earth's atmosphere, it has to deal with the drag, right, It's gonna deal with this air resistance, which is part of something that like, when we think of air resistance, you're probably thinking, well, that's got to be minor compared to gravity. I'm not saying it's more powerful than gravity, but it's something that as a rocket scientist you have

to take into account. Otherwise you might not be developing a rocket engine that provides enough thrust to escape Earth's gravity. Actually, to escape ears gravity entirely, I mean not just going into orbit, but to actually leave Earth's gravity, you need to be going at a speed greater than eleven point one eight six kilometers per second or six point nine five miles per second. Wait, that's really fast, super fast for seventy kilometers per hour or thousand twenty three miles

per hour. I know that's true, but you don't think about that when you watch a rocket take off because it just doesn't look like it's going that fact, well, at the point where it's leaving the ground, it's not going that fast exactly constantly accelerating. And then, of course, once you get outside the air atmosphere, you're no longer dealing with the drag. And also the further out you go,

the less you have to worry about gravity. And the mass of the rocket itself is changing, right, because you've got the mass of all the fuel inside the rocket. As you burn that fuel, that mass starts to decrease, you need less force to accelerate it, right, because forces mass times acceleration um. As the mass goes down, it actually is easier to accelerate, right. And that's why multi stage rockets are so interesting, because you can jettison part of the rocket you had used to get up to

where you are at that point of that altitude. Right. That's what we talked about earlier, like throwing your pots and pants in the trash as you're done with them, right, and then the second stage you light up, and the second stage can then accelerate the smaller mass of the rocket plus spacecraft, uh, much easier than it would if the first stage were still attached, because then you would have more mass to deal with. So that's that's interesting too.

So the way that this thrust is generated is through propellant through burning fuel. Essentially, you're creating very hot, very rapidly expanding gas and you're directing it through a nozzle. Yeah, I mean, one thing we should specifies that it's kind of different than when we usually think about burning fuel. We we're thinking about like internal combustion engines or something like this. A rocket literally works by throwing mass out

the back. Yeah, it's and that mass is in the form of gas, and you would think, oh, gas doesn't have a whole lot of mass to it. Well, it's true, but it's coming out at an incredible rate. Yes, So

remember forces mass times acceleration. If that gas is coming out at an incredible acceleration, then the fact that it's small as far as mask goes doesn't matter so much, right though, I also think the total escaping mass that comes out the back of a rocket is pretty significant, even though it's gas over the over the length of a launch, definitely, But at any given instant, the amount of gas that's escaping that mass is tiny compared to

the rocket plus spacecraft, right, But the acceleration is so great that it's enough to counteract gravity. So, in other words, when you watch a launch and you see that kind of slow lift off, that's because you've got this huge mass undergoing a relatively small amount of acceleration compared to the tiny mass of the gas particles undergoing massive acceleration. Now,

I have another physics question. Has anybody ever done the math to figure out how much it changes the position shin of the orbit of the Earth every time you have a rocket to pitch against the Earth to leave. Orbit pushes back, Earth pushes back, So you know, you shove Earth, Earth shoves you. Then it goes to your family. Another reason to go treat the moon. The moon never did nothing to anybody, well werewolves, but other than them.

So obviously, when you are making your plans to launch your rocket, it's not just the mass of the rocket and spacecraft you have to take into account. You also have to take into account the mass of the fuel that you're including, right, So this gets a little more complicated because then you think, all right, well I need to add enough fuel to get to this particular altitude,

more fuel to pay for the fuel exactly right. So then you know, it's interesting, Joe, because before we went into the studio, in fact, a couple of hours ago, you had mentioned it's really cool that we live on Earth because Earth has properties that allow rocketry to even

work here. Yeah, we actually got a really good piece of listener mail about this one time on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the other podcast that I do with Robert Lamb and Christian Seger, and this listener wrote in to talk to us about about how we're in a nice position on Earth that you know, we can build rockets that can escape Earth's gravity. But if we lived on a planet that had a more difficult to escape gravity, well,

I mean, what would we do. Yeah, Because if you can't find fuel that has the energy density that you need and is able to release that gas at an acceleration that's going to counteract the effect of gravity on

your mass. In this case of rocket, you're stuck. Yeah, technological civilization that just can't get off the surface of the planet, which is entirely possible depending upon the gravity, right or not just the gravity, but also which elements are commonly available to turn into fuel, although for ygen not uncommon. I mean, once you figure out like fusion, then probably have a pretty good chance. Fusion is great. Fusion is great. Once you get into space to actually

create lift with thrust, it would be interesting. I'm sure there's a way to do it. I'm just I guess you could probably even do it with steam if you really wanted to, like if you wanted to write a boiler into space plan Yeah, But fusion I think of as more of a way of releasing a controlled amount of energy over a long period of time, as opposed to that burst that you need in order to escape

the bonds of Earth or whatever hypothetical plant. Yeah, maybe you could do one of those nuclear explosion reactions you do, the use nuclear bombs to propel yourself. You just yeah, it's like I've actually read about this, using like three or four nuclear explosions to propel an object into space. I mean, once you're real done with the planet, then why not. I've been stuck here for thousands of years. I'm sick of it for them, For them, nuclear real

asian might be a tasty treat. So at any rate, getting back to some of the other things that affect rockets taking off, there's also air pressure, so this is interesting too. You know, you have to counteract air pressure in order to have gas escape from the rocket in the first place. Right, If the air pressure were too strong, it would be like a cork, so no gas would ever escape your rocket. So your rocket has to produce more internal pressure than there is air pressure here on Earth.

Not such a big deal, right, If air pressure were that great where a rocket could not generate enough internal pressure to escape, we wouldn't be breathing right now. But it is a factor that you have to take into account when again you're a rocket scientist, it's not completely trivial where you can ignore it. Also, rockets have to obviously be strong enough to contain that internal pressure. If they didn't, they would not be rockets. They would be

bombs because it would explode. Uh, that would be what you would call something that is unable to contain the pressure that generates inside of it. Um And until recently they were one use affairs. It's kind of like with your kitchen example, my car example. The idea that you use this thing one time. Other couple of exceptions that the one that Lauren will pick up in a second. But in general, you'd use it to launch something up into space. It would fall back to Earth, usually in

an ocean. That's what where that's where we wanted to go. Also, the oceans cover more of the surface of the plant than than land mask does. And you might go out and retrieve it, but you probably weren't going to use it again, which meant that you had to build a whole new one the next time you wanted to put something on the space. Yeah, or you would have to put a whole lot of work into making that thing reusable. Yeah.

For For example, for the Space Shuttle, NASA designed components that could be retooled and reused the there two solid rocket boosters were the parts that got the shuttle off the ground and end up some like twenty eight miles or KOs And at that point they'd separate and and those solid rocket boosters would parachute into the Atlantic. The Navy would go out and pick them up, and then they could be taken back into the into the lab

and refurbished for future launches. But it was such an intense process because of the solid part of those solid rocket boosters that they used solid fuel instead of liquid, so huge parts of the rockets had to be completely replaced each time. But I mean that was the whole idea behind the space shell, right, was that they were trying to make as much of it reusable as possible.

Like that was the whole concept behind that particular era of NASA's space exploration was we want, we want, We're limited the low Earth orbit, but we can keep using this equipment repeatedly. And it had some stages that couldn't be reused. Right. The external tank, which was the shuttle's main fuel tank, would burn up upon re entry after launching the shuttle the rest of the way into low

Earth orbits. And and that's a good point to make because there actually if you want to use a reusable rocket to get you not just to the edge of space, spit up into orbit around the Earth and then back safely, there are a couple things you've got to take into consideration. One of them would be making it so that it survives re entry into the atmosphere from space. We've got it up in orbit. Uh, it's got to be able to get back into our gassy soup I talked so

wonderfully about with that drag. Thing becomes pretty intense without burning and breaking apart. And then it's also got to survive contact with the surface of the Earth. And so furthermore, I mean, I don't know about any of you guys, but every time I dunk my expensive electronics and an ocean, they don't work anymore after. So so that's that's another thing, Like if you have an ocean splashed down, then you're trying to get this thing ready to fly into space.

And that's why all all those rockets have that one sticker that goes from white to black. If it's had contact with an ocean um in case you didn't notice it as you were fishing it out of the Pacific or Atlantic. Yeah, so the reusable rocket idea is very attractive and that it can lower costs that you can keep you equipment instead of having to rebuild it every single time in the case of something like the Falcon nine. Obviously it only applies to the first stage of the rocket.

The second stage, which would push payloads further into space, that is not retrievable in that sense. So I think I've read that typically the first stage is like the most expensive part of the deal. It's definitely the largest and has the most fuel on it, so I would imagine it would have to be the most expensive. Honestly, one of the hard things to do is to put a price on a rocket, as it turns out, because

lots of companies work on them. And I'm not going to say that the government is squirrelly about releasing those numbers in in specific breakdowns, but they're really hamsterry about it. Or well, everybody nobody wants to tell you exactly how much money they actually spent to do something. Well, and to be again, it's it's complicated because if you look at we'll talk about the Saturn five rocket in a second. That was what we used to get the Apollo missions

into days. If you look at the Saturn five rocket, three different companies worked on the three different stages of that, rightet. That was a three stage rocket, so you had your initial stage that would get to launch, and then two more stages to actually push the Apollo spacecraft out to where it was supposed to go. And a different company designed each of those stages. When you talk about that, and then you look at it and and ask somebody

how much does the Saturn five rocket costs? It's understandable that the answer is that it's complicated, right, It's not just like you don't you go out to the lot and say, hey, how much for the Saturn five? Doesn't work that way. But at any rate, um it is still pretty cool that we've seen a couple of demos

of this reusable rocket approach. They they actually retain enough fuel so that they can use thrusters on the return to have a light, relatively light touchdown on a on a on a pad landing pad and on a launchpad. So both the Falcon nine and UH New Shepherd have demonstrated this ability, although they've done it in very different ways. It's almost like orders of magnitude difference in a way. But they neither of them were using a parachute, right.

They were actually using thrusters to counteract gravity's pull and slow down the descent so that they can have a smooth touchdown, just just so we can make it feel a little cooler. Can we call them retro rockets? Sure, they fired the retro rockets, firing retro rockets and slowed

the descent so that they could land. Now, one other thing I want to point out before I get into the differences between all this is also that at the time we're recording this, which is on January fourteenth, two thousand and sixteen, very soon we're gonna have another demonstration of SpaceX trying to land one of these rockets on one of the barges that are floating out in the ocean. Like y, I think it's I think it's the seventeenth. So by the time this episode goes live, it we

will know whether or not it worked. But but we don't now. Yeah, we don't know now because we can't see. So you guys have one up on us. But it hasn't worked yet for for the ocean landing. It has worked for a landing pad that was on the ground. The fingers crossed. Yeah, and okay, so just in case you guys are thinking, like, man, this doesn't sound that hard, let me lay out another few reasons that I don't think that we've covered on why this is really difficult

to do this whole reasonable rocket thing. Okay, first off, and you know, not to bring the party down too much, but you know, like it needs to be brought up. The failure of the original version of the Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters was what caused the destruction of the Challenger back and okay that the problems with that original

design have been really well documented. Concerns about them were raised with the NASSA during development, So of course that tragedy is taken into consideration by today's engineers when they're building reasonable rockets. Just you know, I'm just trying to say that whenever you're trying to save a piece of equipment for future use, you've got to be so careful that you're not doing so by potentially endangering the crew and the passengers. Um, it's it's a it's a really

huge thing to think about. Also, from an engineering perspective, when you reuse a rocket, you're basically stopping development of that rocket, so you're looking at getting stuck with a potentially imperfect model. And this was pointed out by a representative of the French Space Agency c n e S by the name of Christoph Banal, and he sat back in I just thought it was such a pithy little quote. If you reuse, you stopped producing, depending on the level

of reusability, so you end up with a permanent prototype. Um, so that's something to think about. And then he he also pointed out that the equipment and fuel that you need to add to a rocket to get it to land safely is a non trivial weight and size issue. He estimated that you'd be needing to use at least like more fuel at launch than you would with non reasonable rockets. So in other words, you'd have to make sure that however much more fuel you need doesn't completely

over than than rebuilding a rocket from scratch. I would argue, I see totally where he's coming from, and I agree that those concerns are warranted. But if you're talking about trying to get to an era where the space industry makes financial sense. Clearly, at some point we have to look at the ability of using reusable rockets, because otherwise it's just gonna be this ridiculously expensive proposition that never

goes beyond a very very narrow use case. It seems like common sense that the reasonable would be the eventual way to go. Right. But but yeah, so let's look at the two different ways that these two companies are trying to get past these problems. Right So, Blue Origin, uh, with the New Shepherd rocket it's it's approach was arguably not even arguably it was simpler than the Falcon nine approach or less ambitious. If you're Ellen, Muski might mention

something along those lines. Uh must actually tweeted about SATs. Yeah, I don't even know if I spat might be a little too friendly, Yeah, that would I think ribbing is is a good way of putting it. But uh So, the test vehicle of New Shepherd it was had a target altitude of three hundred seven thousand feet, which is about ninety three point six kilometers. Now, the goal for commercial flights, which is the whole concept behind Blue Origin, is uh an altitude that would be just over one kilometers.

And the reason for that is that internationally, we define the boundary of space at one kilometers. When I say we, I mean pretty much everyone besides the United States now on a scale of one to ten. How arbitrary is that? Like a fourteen? Yeah, I mean it's uh, there's a specific term for it. But at any rate, the international

community says one kilometers. United States will say that anyone who has flown at an altitude higher than eighty kilometers as an astronaut, but does not actually have a specific definition for what the edge of space is. So, uh, there's this twenty kilometer gap between what the international community agrees as an astronaut and what the United States does.

And uh so what's twenty kilometers between friends? Right? But at any rate, Um, that one hundred kilometers, while impressive, is not the same as delivering something to low Earth orbit. Low Earth orbit begins at about a hundred sixty kilometers. So this vehicle goes just beyond half the distance it would need to get to a little bit more than half the distance it would need to get to low Earth orbit. Um, it's actually meant to be kind of

a passenger vehicle. Like, if you have a decent amount of cash to burn, you could get a seat aboard a space capsule on top of one of these rockets. Do you do you get a discount if you're a member of Amazon Prime. That's an excellent question. I've been. I've been Amazon Prime members since they first launched it, so just week so I think I think I should get This should include free space travel, or at least

at least a significant discount space travel. They'll just be like we just dropped the shipping fee Black Friday special. So the way it works is that you know, you would get aboard this capsule. H. The rocket would launch. Um, there would be a separation phase. What I'm sorry, still my space travel never arrived? Can you send me another one? Uh? So it would launch, the space capsule would separate from the rocket at the proper altitude. Space capsule would continue

to go up a little bit just from momentum from inertia. Uh, the rocket would start to descend and would it's almost like it's going straight up and straight down there. It's not quite like that there is an arc to it, Like it's almost like a really narrow parabola that you would see but the rockets orientation pretty much remains vertical

with respect to the ground, so it doesn't tilt. Meanwhile, you aboard the capsule would be able to experience free fall, which would feel like weightlessness for several minutes, and then you would get a little alerting buzz that says, hey, you need to put on your seatbelt now and experience around five g s of accelerative forces as you descend towards the Earth and land safely through a combination of

thrusters and parachutes. The New Shepherd rocket uses just those retro rockets for landing and it doesn't use a parachute. So that's Blue Origins New Shepherd, which I don't want to downplay. It is a very impressive achievement. They demonstrated it before SpaceX was able to have a successful landing of their Falcon nine. And if in fact they want to create a vacation experience where people with the right amount of money you can actually go up into space,

this is a really cool way of doing it. But if you were elon Musk, what might you tweet at that? Would it be something like congratulations? But people need to understand the difference between space and orbit. That's pretty much why he said. Right, So the Falcon nine, unlike New Shepherd,

can deliver payloads into lower th orbit. It is a two stage rockets, so the first stage gets them, the second stage and the the whatever the payload is up to the right altitude for separation, and then the second stage takes it from there. But the first stage already goes significantly higher, like into the lower th orbit range than the New Shepherd rocket can. And this is way

harder to do, right. This is not just like you shouldn't have this attitude that well, once you're in space, you're in space, right, It's not like that at all. Earth's gravity is still a major factor to contend with, and you have to have a much higher velocity to escape, right, And you also have to your the orientation of your rocket changes because you're you're actually trying to when you're going into orbit, you're essentially constantly in free fall around

the Earth. Right, You're traveling forward at a speed that is great enough so that as you fall towards the Earth, the Earth curves away at a similar rates, so you're never going to actually hit the ground, at least assuming you don't slow down enough. So that your orbit deteriorates and you fall. Also, if you're if you're SpaceX, then

you're probably trying to do stuff while you're up there. Yeah, you're probably actually delivering payloads like like, and those are two space barges, sandwiches on the Moon to probably not the Moon, probably stuff aboard the International Space Station, as well as satellites. You're delivering all that shrimp cocktail they love so much. Yes, yes, we've talked about the shrimp

cocktail at length in previous Forward Thinking episodes. Uh So, when that first stage separates from the second stage and whatever the payload is UM, it then starts to descend. They use the thrusters so that they can orient the rocket properly so it's not just twirling and falling, you know, willy nilly as it descends into the Earth's atmosphere. And then they have to make sure that they use the right amount of force so that it can actually land

safely on a landing pad. So it is already more difficult than the Blue origin approach, which was already really hard to do UM. And then add to that the fact that they want to do this regularly using autonomous barges. Floating on the ocean, which obviously that's gonna be a moving platform. That makes it even harder. Drone boat sounds cooler. That's not a rowboat. That's something totally different. Okay, Well,

I have a question about this whole enterprise. Yeah, so the question is exactly how much money would a reusable rocket save in the long run. Now, I know Elon Musk himself has given a prediction, though you know, we might want to take it with a grain of salt because he himself has a stake in that somewhat yet. Yeah, but his prediction, he's he's famously said that rockets that are as reusable as modern airplanes will reduce the cost of access to space by a factor of about a

hundred time. Yeah. Do you think that number is close to right if it were as reusable as an airplane? Probably, But that's if you take into consideration the fact that airplanes can be serviced and ready to go back up in the air within within half an hour. I don't think we're ever going to get to a point where rockets are going to be that reusable. Of course, that may not have been what he was trying to get across. He might have just been saying like, well that he's

used that comparison several times. I think is is saying like, you know, look at what airplanes can do. Uh, you know, imagine if you throw your airplane in the garbage every time it landed right, And it's an interesting comparison. Again, I think with any rocket launch, you're going to have

a significant just for the sake of safety. You obviously have to have a significant amount of time to test and refurbish and everything to make sure that the rocket is ready to go for another another launch, which adds to the cost. Right, It's not just the amount of fuel you have to dump into the thing, it's the amount of work you have to do to make sure that is going to be safe and not danger to the payload or to anyone else in the launch area.

So you're saying, you think all this, all this testing is very important. We're not just like glad awesome, we're addicted to testing. I would say that in the case of rocket science, testing is of some importance. And so whether or not that testing would be enough to reduce this one hundred times cheaper prediction to you know, fifty times, I don't know, But still fifty times would be significant.

I mean, even if this is a ridiculously high estimate, like I would take thirty times, y'all, I would take fifteen times, it would be Any improvement would be really impressive, especially a magnitude of more than like two. So, but trying to actually answer your question of how much money, how much physical dollars it would save, as we said before, it's really hard to put a price in rocket. Why do they have to be physical dollars? Oh, I don't know.

Talking about space exploration is going to be some kind of cat show only enterprise and we can change. Bitcoin is the new thing, guys. This is how you use

up your old pennies, Joe. So, you know, trying to answer the question like how much money would be saved, it's super tricky because obviously, unless you have the actual price tag of a rocket and you can see how much it costs from building it from scratch all the way to the point of launching it, and then compare that to a refurbished rocket that has already been fired once and is now going to go again, you can't

easily answer that question obviously. But if we want to look historically and again, this is kind of comparing apples to oranges. We can look at the center in five rocket, like I mentioned before, that's what NASA used to get the Apollo missions up into space, and those costs at the time around four million dollars per launch. That's in the late sixties, early seventies. If you adjust for inflation,

that's more than three billion dollars per launch. Now that's not just for the cost of the rocket and the fuel, that's all the costs associated with launching. But still three billion dollars. So I thought, well, let me check and see what SpaceX how much that would cost? Uh? And I looked on SpaceX's website, which actually has the amount of money it costs to launch a Falcon nine rocket according to two thousand sixteen numbers, and according to that

it's sixty one point two million dollars. So three billion to sixty one point two million. Already we've seen a dramatic drop in the in the in the cost. Right, That's that's pretty good. That's not bad. Now. Arguably, we could also add the fact that we've got decades of research and development between the sixties and today. We have things like computers. Yes, we're not using slide rules to

make the calculations. So yeah, just the decreasing cost of computing power is gonna be a huge part of enormous stuff. Oh and I love the fact that that SpaceX calls it their standard payment plan for the sixty million dollars per launch. So if they're able to actually make a reliable, reusable rocket, that cost the sixty one point two million might actually go down significantly, at which point you might have other companies that would be interested in launching scientific

research equipment or commercial equipment out into space. It might fall within the realm of possibility now, because for some companies they might say, well, we have this great idea, but there's no no point in even developing it because we have no way of actually executing this. But this could open a lot of doors as well as usher in a new era of space exploration, manned missions or peopled missions. I guess I should say, I mean, you know, we we we like it when people are able to

do science. Yeah, it's it's pretty pretty psyched about it. It's also nice to see something that could reverse the trend of space missions getting so expensive that governments are loath to fund them, right especially if there's not some other outside force that is acting upon our interests. For example, I say that because the Space Race was largely funded because it was part of the Cold War between the

United States and the then Soviet Union. Arm wrestling, military related kind of kind of thing, and we benefited from all of that scientific exploration and discovery, But ultimately what was funding it was something akin to fear and aggression, which I would rather we not have to have. But but sometimes when you're talking to the person who signs the checks, you've got to have that other really compelling reason.

But are you saying now that the the analogy to the Cold War could be like billionaire ego feuds could be that, or it could also just be it also could just be that, well, now the price has fallen to a point where it's easier for the people who fund things to see that there could be a return

on that investment. You know. The thing that we talked about and forward thinking all the time is that pure research is of value all by itself because you never know what else you're going to learn or or benefit from down the line as a part of that pure research. But that's a hard sell for the people who actually signed the checks, if they're not a scientist, if they

don't have that appreciation. Uh. And by lowering the cost, it may make it easier to convince the powers that be to actually fund the various missions that could lead to phenomenal discoveries down the road, things that we can't even anticipate right now. Um. So I'm excited by this era. I really hope that it continues to develop over time. I really hope that the SpaceX demonstration was successful, which we will know by the time this episode goes live.

And uh, I hope that we see even more competition in the space because that drives innovation. If you can't get competition through you know, various nations warring with one another, companies trying to one up each other, I'll take that, sure. And I guess that kind of comes akin to your billionaires all getting into a fight with one another and just through space exploration. All right, that's fine. I don't mind if we benefit from it, sure better than I

bought a bigger boat. I don't think that's nearly as beneficial to humanity. So just wait till we introduce James Cameron into this feud. Yeah, well, I mean, we'll have to get them out of the ocean first, right. Once we get them out of the ocean, then maybe we can point them towards space. But at any rate, this was fun to talk about. We're so excited to be back.

And guys, if you have any suggestions for future topics for forward thinking, or you got any comments or questions, you should send those into us our email addresses FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus. Twitter and Google Plus we are FW thinking. You can search FW thinking on Facebook. We'll pop right up. You can leave us a message there. Thank you guys so

much for your support. Thank you for all the questions about Hey, when are you guys coming back, because it means a lot to us. We're so pleased that we could be back now and strap in because it's gonna be a crazy year. I have a feeling. I mean, there's some weird stuff coming down the pipe as far as science and technology goes, and we're gonna try and cover all of that. That's my it's my ambition. So we'll see, all right, and until then, we'll talk to

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