Reusable launch vehicle
A reusable launch vehicle has parts that can be recovered and reflown, while carrying payloads from the surface to outer space.
Reusable launch vehicles may contain additional avionics and propellant, making them heavier than their expendable counterparts.
Reused parts may need to enter the atmosphere and navigate through it, so they are often equipped with heat shields, grid fins, and other flight control surfaces.
Reusable parts may also need specialized recovery facilities such as runways or autonomous spaceport drone ships.
However, in the 1990s, due to the program's failure to meet expectations, reusable launch vehicle concepts were reduced to prototype testing.
Many launch vehicles are now expected to debut with reusability in the 2020s, such as Starship, New Glenn, Neutron, Soyuz-7, Ariane Next, Long March, Terran R, and the Dawn Mk-II Aurora.
So much so that in 2024, the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station initiated a 50 year forward looking plan for the Cape that involved major infrastructure upgrades (including to Port Canaveral) to support a higher anticipated launch cadence and landing sites for the new generation of vehicles.
The fifth test flight was on October 13, 2024, in which the vehicle completed a suborbital launch and landed both stages for the second time.
For suborbital flight the SpaceShipTwo uses for liftoff a carrier plane, its mothership the Scaled Composites White Knight Two.
Contemporary reusable orbital vehicles include the X-37, the Dream Chaser, the Dragon 2, the Indian RLV-TD and the upcoming European Space Rider (successor to the IXV).
As with launch vehicles, all pure spacecraft during the early decades of human capacity to achieve spaceflight were designed to be single-use items.
The Boeing Starliner capsules also reduce their fall speed with parachutes and deploy an airbag shortly before touchdown on the ground, in order to retrieve and reuse the vehicle.
With possible inflatable heat shields, as developed by the US (Low Earth Orbit Flight Test Inflatable Decelerator - LOFTID)[15] and China,[16] single-use rockets like the Space Launch System are considered to be retrofitted with such heat shields to salvage the expensive engines, possibly reducing the costs of launches significantly.
Reusable launch system stages such as the Falcon 9 and the New Shepard employ retrograde burns for re-entry, and landing.
Examples are: A variant is an in-air-capture tow back system, advocated by a company called EMBENTION with its FALCon project.
Retrograde landing typically requires about 10% of the total first stage propellant, reducing the payload that can be carried due to the rocket equation.
The launcher may not be able to be recertified as human-rated after refurbishment, although SpaceX has flown reused Falcon 9 boosters for human missions.
The problem of mass efficiency was overcome by using multiple expendable stages in a vertical launch multistage rocket.
[22][23] The General Dynamics Nexus was proposed in the 1960s as a fully reusable successor to the Saturn V rocket, having the capacity of transporting up to 450–910 t (990,000–2,000,000 lb) to orbit.
[26] NASA started the Space Shuttle design process in 1968, with the vision of creating a fully reusable spaceplane using a crewed fly-back booster.
This concept proved expensive and complex, therefore the design was scaled back to reusable solid rocket boosters and an expendable external tank.
[citation needed] NASA proposed reusable concepts to replace the Shuttle technology, to be demonstrated under the X-33 and X-34 programs, which were both cancelled in the early 2000s due to rising costs and technical issues.
Many private companies competed, with the winner, Scaled Composites, reaching the Kármán line twice in a two-week period with their reusable SpaceShipOne.
[38] In 2019 Rocket Lab announced plans to recover and reuse the first stage of their Electron launch vehicle, intending to use parachutes and mid-air retrieval.
[42] Blue Origin is developing its own New Glenn partially reusable orbital rocket, as it is intending to recover and reuse only the first stage.
[43] In December 2020, ESA signed contracts to start developing THEMIS, a prototype reusable first stage launcher.
In the 2000s, both SpaceX and Blue Origin have privately developed a set of technologies to support vertical landing of the booster stage of a launch vehicle.
After 2010, SpaceX undertook a development program to acquire the ability to bring back and vertically land a part of the Falcon 9 orbital launch vehicle: the first stage.
Blue is developing the first stage of the orbital New Glenn LV to be reusable, with first flight planned for no earlier than 2024.
On the fourth launch attempt however, both the booster and the ship achieved a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico and the Indian Ocean, respectively.
