>>11322820Speaking of memes. I just don't understand this reusable launch tower meme.
The amount of money you can save from reusing towers isn’t enough to justify how much harder it makes it to complete the difficult launches that usually make money in the rocket launch world. I’m sure one day reusability will be more effective, but the truth is that when you have all the challenges that come with structural science in general, it’s almost always much more effective to throw away the tower after it’s done its job than to figure out how to make recovery part of the mission. I know of no major technology on the near term horizon that would change that.
Even if reusable towers are possible now, but when reliability is THE number one priority (in this case the rocket takes up 2/3rds of the cost and the actual tower only 1/3rd) it makes absolutely no sense. Like, look at this tower (pic related). This represents some of the most advanced technologies in the civil engineering world. Do you honestly think that such a complicated machine can be made tough and reliable enough to be reusable? I doubt it. Best example in my opinion is condoms, sure you could reuse them but making sure that they do not suffer a drop in reliability will cost a lot of money and time.
Just because some company made reusing towers popular, then that doesn't mean that we will have the sci-fi future of millions of towers per year. We'll be lucky to see more than a couple dozen per year. Dial down your expectations, don't buy into the 'reusability for launch towers' meme.
