The Fate of Four Landed Falcon9’s – Space Pod 6/1/16
June 1, 2016

This week, SpaceMike asks, now that SpaceX has four landed Falcon 9 first stages, what are they going to do with them?
TMRO Space Pods are crowd funded shows. If you like this episode consider contributing to help us to continue to improve. Head over to http://www.patreon.com/spacepod for information, goals and reward levels. Don’t forget to check out our weekly live show campaign as well over at http://www.patreon.com/tmro
I still think reusability will be much more expensive than single use.
Although it is a great accomplishment I think that the total cost will
turn out to be not worth it.
As they start routinely reusing 9 out of 10 engines, they’re going to have to start retasking a lot of their workers since not so many engines will need to be made. This retasking will start accelerating their progress towards other objectives.
I expect SpaceX to gather enough data from these recovered rockets to redesign the next generation of first stage rockets for more complete re-usability. Examining a series of spent rocket stages will enable them to pinpoint where and why damage is occurring, and therefore enable them to re-engineer the assemblies to withstand such forces without damage. That will be necessary for true re-usability.