[ExI] space-x sticks the landing

[Keith Henson]

Re the subject, it's a long way from the first time a rocket landed
this way.  DC X and SpaceX's Grasshopper plus the other guys who beat
them by a few weeks, though they only went to 100 k feet.

My interest is power satellites.  Skylon will cope with the traffic,
but I would dearly love to have multiple transport solutions for a
really large scale power satellite project.  Replacing fossil fuel in
a reasonable time (a decade) takes around 15 million tons per year to
LEO or around 12 million tons to GEO.  That's around 120 Skylon
flights an hour.  At a two minute headway, that would take a not
unreasonable 4 runways within 1-200 km of the equator.

Some descendant of a Falcon Heavy might lift 4 x the 15 ton for a
Skylon.  That gets it down to 30 flights an hour or one every two
minutes.

I can scale from aircraft operations, a million flights per year is
only ten days of commercial aircraft operations, but I don't know
about rockets, not sure anyone else has ever considered it.  Do any of
you have an idea of how many launch pads and how big the base would
have to be to support
a launch every two minutes?

If not, any thoughts on how fast a Falcon could be turned around
(restacked) and how far apart the launch pads would have to be to
prevent one exploding from setting off a chain reaction?  They have to
be right on the equator to avoid plane change reduction in payload.

I know Musk is utterly down on power satellites.

Keith