Alan Boyle has his story up now. I have to repeat how struck I was by how adamant and vehement Elon was about the goal of reusability. It was almost Churchillian — we shall fight for it on the shop floor, we shall fight for it at the launch pad, we will never, ever give up. It should be noted, as always, though, that he also insists that reusability is not necessary to meet his current price goals. What it will do is give him more cost margin, either for lower prices, or higher profits, or both.
8 thoughts on “More SpaceX Presser Coverage”
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Higher gross margins would also allow him to lower prices even further, should competitive pressure ever approach his price point, or if he wants to grow total profits on a “high volume” rather than high margin basis. Or give special rates to regular customers, such as Bigelow might become.
Higher gross margins can also pay for more R & D.
I hope they also keep working on lowering operational costs – shooting for the time when only ten or twenty people are needed to monitor a launch.
Yours,
Tom
I believe they don’t even need ten people. I seem to remember about five on an F1 launch. I’d like to see their monitoring software. How many pages of info do they monitor? Do they need eyes on each page, or do they have alerts that help them focus on specific pages.
Knowing how many people we use to monitor the screens during our climbs in the NASA Power Beaming contests and the amount of work that has gone into our monitoring software, I am impressed that they only use five people for an F1 launch.
I too would love to get my hands on their software. Too many grandchildren and to far from any SpaceX offices, I am not likely to every work for them on it.
$6.8m per 800kg iridium satellite to 780km implied – $8.5k/kg. That is still not that cheap. It still needs to be lowered by around an order of magnitude to get into the significant market elasticity range.
I think I can see why Elon is adamant about reusability.
The Iridium satellites operate in a polar orbit. That orbit causes a serious performance penalty. From the SpaceX website, they state the Falcon 9 can launch 10,450 kg (23,050 lb) into a 28.5 degree inclination orbit from the Cape (they didn’t specify the altitude). From Kwajalein, they claim they can launch 8,560 kg (18,870 lb) into a 90 degree inclination orbit (no altitude specified there, either). If they’re using the same altitude for both orbits, launching into a polar orbit by about 18 percent. Add to the launch costs the cost for the multiple satellite deployment system they’re going to develop to support Iridium and keep in mind that Iridium operates in a pretty high (780 km) orbit with further reduces the payload capacity, driving up the price even more. The cost per satellite factors in the cost of the Falcon 9 booster along with the multiple payload deployment system to carry a number of satellites to a high, polar orbit. If they were going for a lower orbit, they might be able to carry as many as 10 Iridium Next satellites on a single launcher. The higher orbit likely limits that to 8 or 9 which drives up the cost per satellite. While it’s higher than we’d like, it’s still considerably cheaper than any other commercial booster out there. In time, the price may drop even more, especially if they can recover and reuse some of the more expensive components like the first stage engines.
Falcon 9 is the most economical route to orbit, but it’s not cheap enough. Reusability is the key, and I can see why Musk wants it so badly. Even with Falcon 9, we’re basically throwing away the plane after every flight, which would be a very detrimental model for affordable aviation. Getting to orbit economically is the only way we’ll ever open up space to a significant degree.
I had very high hopes for the Shuttle program. I still wonder, if they’d taken more care in its design (designing in easier serviceability) whether it could have worked as advertised. Sure, it’s reusable in large part, but reusability defeats its own purpose when costs are so high.
Just a reminder, we’re talking price here, not cost.
Not that I’m claiming that SpaceX has a 90%+ profit margin, or anything, but it is something to keep in mind. Undercutting the competition’s price by 10% is good enough when aiming for a business opportunity that would happen even at the higher price…