Airbus Wants to Land Reusable Rocket Engines with Propellers

So far, SpaceX  has had no luck landing its reusable rocket on a barge. Airbus, meanwhile, has a different idea for how to reuse rocket parts: Build your rocket engine inside a tiny twin-prop drone that can land on a runway.

Instead of using extra rocket fuel in an attempt to hover down vertically, Airbus's reusable rocket engine has wings that let it fly like a conventional plane on re-entry, as well as twin propellers that pop out once the engine is in atmosphere, to help guide it to the runway. The advantages over the SpaceX method is that this doesn't require the reusable booster to hold on to any extra rocket fuel for landing, and landing a small drone on a runway is probably easier than hovering down a rocket.

This whole method is still in the very early planning stages though; Airbus hopes to test the real thing by 2025, and for now it only exists as a scale model. Even if it never comes to be, it's a clever solution to a problem that somebody has to solve.

Source: Ars Technica via Gizmodo