18 thoughts on “The SpaceX Telecon”

  1. — Ultimately, full reusability is essential. Will consider SpaceX a failure if it doesn’t eventually achieve fully reusable system.
    — Only way to get costs really down, e.g. 100 below current costs.

    Anyone know/can guess their path to reusability?

    Parachute recovery of the first stage into the ocean seems the first step, but a 100 fold cost reduction will likely need something that flies back and how would they plan on recovering the second stage including reentry?

    Are they thinking VTVL for the Falcons long term? Or a completely new clean sheet design?

  2. Why bring the upper stage back? Seems like construction material in the right place.

  3. In addition to an engine, the upper stage contains the avionics. If they can recover and reuse that, it could save a good deal of money.

  4. Again, why bring the upper stage back? If you want the avionics, you can pick it up whenever you want.

  5. And how exactly would you do that? Salvaging the parts would require either an advanced robotic capability or a manned vehicle. Neither is realistic for years at least.

    I saw something a year or so on how SpaceX hoped to recover the upper stage. The concept looked pretty straight-forward and practical but no one has ever tried it before. IIRC, the stage would come in upper end first with heat shielding taking the thermal load. Once slowed enough, parachutes would do the rest. If it worked, it’d be a lot simplier and less expensive than salvaging parts on orbit.

  7. If it worked, it’d be a lot simpler and less expensive than salvaging parts on orbit.

    Not necessarily.

    Salvaging the parts would require either an advanced robotic capability or a manned vehicle. Neither is realistic for years at least.

    Agreed. In a few years SpaceX will have a crewed dragon. They could salvage the avionics as a side trip of another mission which pays the primary cost. But the main thing is they have valuable construction material in space where it’s needed at zero cost. Retrieving the avionics could even happen at the time the construction material is put to use so even that retrieval is basically zero cost.

  8. Sorry Tom, I really do mean using most of the upper stage in space where you just spent so much to put it.

  9. Also consider, the engine of the upper stage is a vacuum engine… also in exactly the right place for reuse.

  11. I’m not sure the expense of the avionic hardware justifies heroic measures to recover second stages from orbit, per se. The development cost of avionic code is considerable, but none of that gets lost, just the physical copy of the hardware it runs on. Things made from silicon tend to obey Moore’s Law. Things carved out of metal mostly don’t. In terms of component expense, I’m thinking those 10 Merlin engines in each Falcon 9 are the cost drivers. Recovering the first stage gets you nine of ten back. Going for the tenth one gets you some incremental benefit, but it’s, at best, a nice-to-have. When Falcon 9 Heavy comes on-line, there’ll be 28 expensive engines on each bird and 27 of them will be relatively easy to get back. I hope SpaceX does try de-orbit recovery of 2nd stages at some point, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be a critical aspect of their reusability economics to do so.

    Also, as Ken notes, a Falcon 9 upper stage could be damned useful as an intact artifact. Put a fresh load of fuel in it and change the avionics code to suit the mission and you could move quite a bit of mass from LEO to just about anywhere else.

  12. I know that with such a new design, failures can happen, but I hope all goes well for this launch.

    If there’s a failure, we’re going to see it used to slam the concept of commercial manned launch. It doesn’t matter that its not rational; it will happen.

    Fingers crossed…

  13. Fully reusable launch vehicles would be nice, but we are still in the early days of launch vehicle design, mere “incremental” improvements are more than enough. There’s no reason why an expendable vehicle can’t be an order of magnitude cheaper than the current industry standards. And there’s certainly no reason to call any endeavor a “failure” if all it does is manage to revolutionize orbital launch by bringing the price down a mere single order of magnitude.

    As they say, perfect is the enemy of good. We shouldn’t let pie in the sky imaginings or even sound theoretical long-term predictions get in the way of doing good in the short-term.

  14. An order of magnitude reduction in launch cost is not really, by definition, an incremental improvement.

    A near two order of magnitude reduction in launch costs is probably required for comprehensive cheap access to space.

    The Falcon 9 at 10 ton to LEO and $40m would need to be launched an average or say 20 times and have a turnaround and operating cost of say $2m per flight to achieve an order of magnitude reduction in costs.

    Considering the reentry, salt water crash landing and need for high reliability/safety, I doubt refurbishment will be that inexpensive. Also, upper stages tend to be expensive, because that is where performance really matters. The first stage is not necessarily a near SSTO reusable vehicle that dominates costs.

  15. One other factor on re-using the second stage is that if the stage achieves orbit, then every kg added to it for recovery is a kg taken away from payload. First stages are much more forgiving in that area, and require less hardware to allow recovery.

    The idea of a small farm of F9 stages in orbit is kinda cool. Given a central hub launched in some sort of parking orbit, they could be the start of a nice depot or space station.

  17. About the avionics, aren’t they in the capsule? The capsule is recovered.

    Al, they could be both. Leaving them in space gives you those options.

  18. …you could move quite a bit of mass from LEO to just about anywhere else.

    The first private satellites to mars, jupiter, saturn and the belt?

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