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A possible alternative to SpaceX's landing technique.

Reusable rockets are one of the biggest potential boons to space exploration. If you could relaunch a rocket multiple times before discarding it, you could drastically cut down on the costs of spaceflight. So the China National Space Administration (CNSA) is developing a system to recover parts of rockets used in launches.

Others have done this in various ways. NASA's Space Shuttle, flown from 1976 to 2011, was partially reusable. The first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is reusable as well, with the company's first relaunch of a booster occurring today. However, the CNSA is taking a different approach than Elon Musk and the engineers at SpaceX.

SpaceX's rockets land vertically on ground pads or barge-like drone ships in the middle of the ocean. The Falcon 9 slows itself down as it falls back to Earth by firing its main engines before touching down. Ultimately, SpaceX predicts that by reusing rockets, it can cut the cost of launching a Falcon 9 to customers by about 30 percent.

However, the CNSA thinks there are cheaper and simpler ways to get the same results. Namely, parachutes and airbags.

In the CNSA's proposed system, parachutes would launch on the booster after it separates from the other stages of the rocket. A guidance system could be used to control movement, making sure the rocket component lands where it's supposed to. Then more parachutes would launch to slow it for landing and an airbag would deploy right before when it hits the ground.

"The mainstream trend of modern rocket development is to increase the thrust and reduce the number of rocket engine. That is also why China, as well as Airbus, Boeing and Lockheed Martin did not use the technology," said researcher Deng Xinyu . These rockets, he told China Daily, would "determine the extent" of the country's space program.

Airbags and parachutes provide problems of their own, of course. The expense SpaceX puts into its vertical landing system hypothetically gives it complete control over the booster's movement. "With a parachute you may hit a mountain top or end up in thick forest on a tropical island," professor Sun Yi, director of the aerospace science and mechanics department at the Harbin Institute of Technology, told the South China Morning Post. There's also the problem of designing an airbag to support the massive rocket booster.

It keeps Xinyu busy. Describing his work schedule to China Daily, he sounds positively Musk-like.

"I arrive in the office at 8 am every day and go home at about 8:30 pm. I also work at least one day over the weekend. Usually, I have only one supper with my family each week," he says. "But I don't regret choosing this job and I am still energetic. This is because my job keeps bringing me new challenges and inspiration."

If his team is able to get a rocket booster to land on an airbag, there could be a whole new way to reuse launch vehicles.

Source: South China Morning Post

David Grossman is a staff writer for PopularMechanics.com. He's previously written for The Verge, Rolling Stone, The New Republic and several other publications. He's based out of Brooklyn.

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