Mercury Redstone parachute recovery system funded

One of the feature of the Mercury Redstone project was the proposed parachute recovery system.

From wiki

The recovery system, at the top of the rocket, would have used two stages of parachutes. In the first stage, a single parachute, 17 feet (5.2 m) in diameter, would stabilize the rocket's fall and slow its descent. This parachute would then draw out a set of three main parachutes, each 67 feet (20 m) across. The rocket would come down in the Atlantic Ocean, to be recovered by ship.

To determine the feasibility of this system, several tests were performed on full-sized Redstones, including water impact and flotation tests, and an exercise at sea in which a floating Redstone was picked up by a Navy recovery ship. All these tests showed recovery of the rocket to be workable. Further development was halted, however, due to lack of funding, so the parachute system was not tested.


If this had been funded and worked, would this feature be carried through in future boosters?
 

SsgtC

Banned
It could be used on the Gemini program. But the Saturn family of rockets used on Apollo are too big IMWO to have an effective recovery system
 

marathag

Banned
It could be used on the Gemini program. But the Saturn family of rockets used on Apollo are too big IMWO to have an effective recovery system
Testing of models was looked into

But the most awesome way was pure _Thunderbirds are Go_ from the Hiller Compamy
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Now this World's largest Helicopter would have been huge, 400 foot rotor diameter, and each blade to have twin jets for a
supersized Fairey Rotordyne setup to grab that S-1C Stage and carry it home
 

hammo1j

Donor
I suppose there must be something that tips the scale of refurb vs make from scratch. Were the engines on early stuff wrecked after a normal burn?

The Shuttle seemed to indicate that reuse was entirely uneconomic and that disposable was the way to go.

However Musky's turned that on its head and hats off to him for those cool boosters returning to base.

I would love to hear from someone in the know exactly how the economics of reuse have swung back and forth and back and forth again...
 
I suppose there must be something that tips the scale of refurb vs make from scratch. Were the engines on early stuff wrecked after a normal burn?

The Shuttle seemed to indicate that reuse was entirely uneconomic and that disposable was the way to go.

However Musky's turned that on its head and hats off to him for those cool boosters returning to base.

I would love to hear from someone in the know exactly how the economics of reuse have swung back and forth and back and forth again...
To be fair the main reason why the shuttle cost so much money to reuse was the heat tiles, which won't be the case here
 
Were the engines on early stuff wrecked after a normal burn?
I would love to know what the cost balance of try to reuse say the booster engines on early Atlas would be? Say modifying the the stage-and-a-half concept to reuse the early dropped engines?
 
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