Craft Development

Developing the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft were by far the most difficult tasks of the project. The reason being that the first stage of the Falcon 9 needed to be reusable via the method of the booster making a propulsive landing back at the launch site. This means that there needs to be reserve fuel for the booster to fly back and land on the engines. So after an extensive amount of research, this is the first design I came up with

The first design of the Falcon 9 booster was for the most part a good start. The first change made was the sectioning of the fuel tanks. Initial simulations revealed there was too much fuel for the ascent, and not enough for the return, so the balance of the fuel was changed

From here it was time to add the solar panels and the SuperDraco engines, which help the Dragon maneuver in orbit and slow down on final descent. The product is seen below

With the design mostly fleshed out structure wise, it was time to add the launch mounts and make a few statistical changes.

The final version is seen below, the second stage separation motors have been removed and the launch mount changed slightly

Then it was time to fly, the final version and the real thing are compared below