SpaceX Recovers Another Rocket

Good catch, I've been confused by that as well.

How much fuel does it take to send a boat out somewhere to pick up a rocket?

The question is not the boat cost. A boat is still needed to tow the barge. The question is how much of a cost to clean out and refurbish the salt water soaked rocket parts. Refitting a rocket to use a parachute and flotation devices may be a more frugal approach than landing on a rolling and pitching deck.

Silly windstorm! That does not count, only the vertical counts.

We definitely need to reuse rockets. Right now it's like buying a new car every time you want to go to the grocery store.

Maybe what we need is a much larger aircraft to carry payload up to the altitude that second stage would normally kick in. There is your recyclable aircraft/load lifter.

I like that concept. I'd feel a lot more confident with a reused airplane than a reused rocket.

BTW, we haven't heard much about Burt Rutan for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_launch_to_orbit

Copied from your Wikipedia link: " According to Aviation Week and Space Technology, air launch to orbit is limited by aircraft size. Additionally, airplanes may generate large lateral forces which could damage payloads.^[2]

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk argued in a Q&A session that the increase in performance isn't worth the additional complexity and limitations (paragraphs added):

"…it seems like, well, you're high up there and so surely that's good and you're going at, say, 0.7 or 0.8 Mach and you've got some speed and altitude, you can use a higher expansion ratio on thenozzle, doesn't all that add up to a meaningful improvement in payload to orbit?

"The answer is no, it does not, unfortunately. It's quite a small improvement. It's maybe a 5% improvement in payload to orbit, something like that, and then you've got this humungous plane to deal with. Which is just like have a stage. From SpaceX's standpoint, would it make more sense to have a gigantic plane or to increase the size of the first stage by five percent? Uhh, I'll take option two.

"And then, once you get beyond a certain scale, you just can't make the plane big enough. When you drop the vehicle, the rocket, you have the slight problem that you're not going the right direction. If you look at what Orbital Sciences did with Pegasus, they have a delta wing to do the turn maneuver but then you've got this big wing that's added a bunch of mass and you've able to mostly, but not entirely, convert your horizontal velocity into vertical velocity, or mostly vertical velocity, and the net is really not great."^[3]"

Apparently Elon Musk is not sold on the Air Launch concept at all.

Elon obviously has his eggs in a different basket.

There is still research being done on hypersonic vehicles that bridge the gap between jet aircraft speed and rocket speed. The big payoff is reusability, and not just 1 or 2 times.

There once was a program called NASP which was discontinued, I'm not sure due to technological problems or funding considerations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_X-30

I'm thinking (and hoping) that someday, when the technical problems are solved, that this will be a cheaper way to space.

I wonder if air-augmented rockets will ever take off...pun intended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-augmented_rocket

Basically Ramjet technology added on a rocket to reduce the amount of fuel needed. I'm sure the problem is, in order to work, the reduction in rocket fuel weight would have to more than offset the additional weight of the ramjet engines and reduced aerodynamics.

Perhaps to be effective the launch would have to be at an angle as opposed to vertical to give it a chance to speed up more in the thicker oxygen rich atmosphere.

Just seems like a cool way to improve rockets, but I haven't heard of anyone doing it, so maybe it isn't feasible.

I think that is the common misconception with spaceflight and putting objects into orbit. Its not about going high (planes can do that rather efficiently), its about going fast. Here is an entertaining link that helps to explain

It is not how well you mow, it is how well you mow fast.

It is not how high you fly, it is how high you fly faster, further.

I still pull weeds with my hands and a pocket knife. I just wanted to be a lumberjack, but I grew up in West Texas. Not much to practice on in "NoTrees". There is actually a "town" with that name.