Category: Features

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Canceled SpaceX Projects: Falcon Rocket with a Reusable Upper Stage

Over the years, Elon Musk has played with the idea of making Falcon’s second stage reusable but it never materialized. Sadly, development of this new method has been eventually abandoned. In this article, we aim to shine some light on Musk’s past statements about Falcon’s second stage reusability and explain why it is such a difficult task.

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SpaceX Superstars: Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO

SpaceX is so much more than just Elon Musk, the company employs many other interesting people. Among the most recognizable are engineers who sometimes host the launch broadcasts. However, one of the truly key figures at SpaceX is Gwynne Shotwell, Chief Operating Officer and President of the company.

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Collaboration between Elon Musk’s companies has led to synergies but also caused some issues

Elon Musk’s companies often collaborate, share workers or even transfer technologies. I’ve put together a summary of actual examples of this cooperation. They mainly involve Tesla and SpaceX because they collaborate the most, but we’ll also look at OpenAI or the Boring Company. In some cases, the companies became intertwined so significantly that it led to real concerns.

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Canceled SpaceX Projects: Falcon Heavy Propellant Crossfeed

We’re launching a new series of articles about SpaceX and some of their projects that never saw the light of day. One of them was crossfeed funcionality for Falcon Heavy. It is a unique way of fuel transfer between the side boosters and the center core of a rocket. It increases payload capacity but was never actually developed in practice.

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How realistic is Elon Musk’s plan to launch the same Falcon 9 twice in one day?

Elon Musk has claimed in the past that the extremely quick 24-hour Falcon 9 reusey might happen in 2017 or 2018. This was yet another one of his overly optimistic statements, because two years later, SpaceX seems to be far from achieving such a feat. So I thought about what it would take to reuse a booster in one day, what it might look like and what is preventing it from happening.