An asteroid has just hit the aerospace dinosaurs, in Europe, China, Russia, and here.
28 thoughts on “SpaceX”
Anybody know about their reusable ship attempts? I had thought they would try to relight the dropped stages at every flight from now on?
Last I read, they are waiting until the next NASA launch because they need full performance for their next two (now one) customers.
I seem to recall they were going to skip a few flights before the next reusable attempt. That makes a lot of sense on this launch, where they’re already taking a risk (relighting the second stage for boost to GTO). They also might have needed the performance margin. Again, going by memory but it was something like returning to a stop at sea level way down-track cost 15% performance, and returning to launch site 30% or so.
SpaceX mentioned before this launch that they weren’t going to be landing the first stage this time. Maybe next time.
They need excess performance margin to reuse the first stage. They figured they’ve already got as much data as they need from “hover over the ocean” tests so the next tests are likely to be full up reusability attempts. It probably won’t be until the next CRS flight before that happens.
“…it will take years before SpaceX can be considered to have a safety record comparable to longer-standing providers.”
Providers such as China, where “It Takes a Village” should be the Long March 3B’s nickname, or Russia where an observer in a bunker was killed in a 2003 Soyuz U launch accident?
SpaceX has a perfect safety record, as do all U.S. commercial and semi-commercial launch providers. They don’t kill or injure the uninvolved public. That is unlikely to ever change, but it can’t get any better.
I think the writer meant “reliability,” though even there he is years off the mark…
As I recall, last year SpaceX was trying for some large DOD launch contracts and didn’t get them because they hadn’t yet established a long track record of successful launches. That is rapidly changing, and I think they’ll be very successful in the next round of DOD bids. That will greatly add to the revenue flowing into SpaceX, allowing them to become even more dominant.
Nobody will be able to compete with SpaceX using heritage engines due to their expense, and unless the US starts domestic production of NK-33’s and RD-180’s, and builds them cheaply, or rethinks engine production with new cheaper designs, it’s largely game over for traditional launch providers. I’m confident they can get back in the game, but they’ll have to radically alter how they’ve been doing things.
Could someone explain what makes SpaceX so much cheaper? Is it because they built things in-house? Why wouldn’t space companies that already have working ships for a long while be cheaper?
Space contractors are notorious for how inefficient and overcharging they are – they have gotten used to building less and less yet get paid the same and more.
SpaceX only builds things in-house because even the basic components can be extremely expensive if contracted out to a traditional aerospace contractor.
Another reason is that for the last decades, the ingoing merger hysteria in aerospace have created less competition. The last two major engine manufacturers just merged – (Aerojet & rocketdyne) – and the only two major aerospace giants that remain are Boeing and LockMart. And those two would probably merge if they were allowed to, less of that pesky competition that could jeopardize profits. Ugh.
Some will be able to respond to SpaceX pricing and capabilities, but many will not – and they will disappear.
Short answer: they care about price. No-one else does.
Most estimates for value of a single human life dont exceed 10 million dollars. Chinese paid a thousand bucks to the farmer – and he probably considers himself doubly blessed now.
Cynical, but practical.
Last night on The Space Show, David Livingston pointed to a guest he’d had last Sunday. It seems that the Europeans are trying to set up an international set of “technical standards” for launch systems. Needless to say, these would wind up forcing people like Elon to adopt high-cost methods, thus keeping Ariane et al ‘competitive’. The indirect forcing function would be insurance companies for satellite operators who’d tell their clients that the launchers they used would have to meet them – or no insurance.
This is not a treaty, it would only require the President’s agreement to pull the US into this regime. The way the story was recounted last night, it sounded like such an agreement could be imminent and (as with all things space) unnoticed by any but very few.
Now, I would assume that SpaceX would be aware of these circumstances and put in some words in the right places if they are in fact as dangerous as they were portrayed. Or, it could be that the success yesterday, particularly if followed by another quick success with the Thaicom launch, would result in the satellite operators being intolerant of such cost-collusion nonsense.
Hey China! Think of all the money you could have saved by switching to SpaceX!
Reliability has been noted as a potential issue for commercial, unmanned launches as well as (obviously) for manned ones. However, consider: This launch reportedly cost $60 million – although one may reasonably expect that it was subsidised by SpaceX, being its first attempt at a launch to GTO. Be that as it may, the $200 million saving on the launch can buy a heck of a lot of insurance!
This does, of course, assume that the payload (although extremely valuable) is replaceable. Reliability becomes much more important for essentially irreplaceable payloads such as major space telescopes and the like.
Even for such payloads, much of the cost is engineering, and the second (and third, and fourth…) units are cheaper than the first.
If having a space telescope like the Hubble is important, maintaining a production capability for it would make sense. Heck, having more than one in space at a time could make sense. And launching new ones would have been cheaper than the pyrrhic repairability the shuttle provided.
$60 million would be rack rate based on this pricing. I’m sure SES got some consideration for being the first to go, but it’s not reflected in the reported $60 million launch price.
And they’re really planning to do three more flights this month, according to their Launch Manifest? I guess I don’t have too much of a picture of what preparation for a flight looks like, but that seems like a lot.
I see that SES is still listed there as a “future mission”. I expect they’re busy people who don’t have some guy whose job it is to take care of the web page.
A footnote on the manifest page notes that “Year indicates vehicle arrival at launch site.”
I wouldn’t be surprised by some schedule slippage, but even factoring that in they’re looking at a rapid acceleration in flight rate. To date they’ve launched 7 Falcon 9s over 3 1/2 years, or about one every 6 months. They have 14 scheduled between now and the end of 2014, for a rate of about one a month.
Also scheduled this month: the first test flight of the 9-engine Falcon 9R vertical landing prototype, a successor to the single-engine Grasshopper test vehicle.
They probably won’t get all those flights in, but I do expect a significant increase in flight rate. They’ve been cranking out cores in Hawthorne like crazy, and now that they feel like the vehicle has been fully flight tested, they’ll be ready to step it up.
According to the consolidated launch list at NSF.com, there is only the Thaicom-6 launch, which shows Dec. 20 with a question mark. I’d be very surprised if that date doesn’t slip.
Sure, they’re going to get their flight rate up, but 2 1/2 weeks between launches at the same pad seems a bit ambitious at the moment.
The biggest reason SpaceX will shake up the industry isn’t because their rockets are cheaper it’s because the economics of operating reusable rockets are fundamentally different than expendables. With expendables it’s about the production pipeline. In order to have launch capacity you need to ramp up manufacturing months ahead of time.
With reusables you have a fleet, and the production cost is already sunk. Obviously this means that the marginal cost on flights will be low, but it also means that the capital investment constraints change dramatically. In order to have the possibility of launching it costs millions of dollars in hardware with expendables, but that possibility is latent with reusables provided there is an operational vehicle on hand.
Business wise that means SpaceX can be far more flexible with its launches and they can maintain a higher level of flight rate capability with a smaller capital investment. 3/4 of their cost is in the first stage, so if they are able to fly the first stage only 3 times that still means that for the same capital investment it would have taken to launch 10 times per year they would be able to build only 7 first stages and still be capable of 20 launches, at the same cost. Potentially they could even be able to respond to launch orders within only a matter of weeks.
I understand that reusable rockets will make an incredible difference – but they don’t have them yet and they still charged $60M for a flight that the others charge $250 million for.
Just like with SES, I’m pretty sure the first reused RTS boosters will get a significant discount (probably the cost of propellent and the launch team) for those first launches. NASA’s contract is for new boosters only, so I could see a host of cube sats get launched with a reused COTS booster (I think the COTS flights are the only ones that will have enough fuel margin to attempt a RTS).
Assuming that SpaceX can master re-using Falcon 9s, the question is whether the existence of a lower-cost, more flexible launcher will generate new demand for space launch. SpaceX could do okay just filling current demand, but the really exciting possibility is a virtuous cycle of lower costs leading to new markets and higher flight rates, and higher flight rates justifying investments to further lower per-launch costs.
One thing I haven’t really appreciated until just recently is that SpaceX has been flying reusable flight-hardware for the past 2 launches. The only differentiation between the “Falcon 9-R” first stage and the v1.1 core are the landing legs. In principle every single Falcon 9 v1.1 first stage rolling off of their assembly line could be re-used. That’s pretty astounding when you think about it, and yet another example of the clever way SpaceX tends to interleave testing and validation of R&D work in with operational missions to front load capabilities as early as possible (a perfect example being the testing of 2nd stage re-light on the first v1.1 launch).
Do we have any idea at all of how “reusable” is reusable? That is, if a first stage could land itself, what kind of shape would it be in? How about a second stage re-entering the atmosphere and landing itself?
It’s wonderful that Grasshopper can land from a thousand meters up, but aren’t these other cases, which went through the stress of a liftoff and then a re-entry, likely to be in a lot worse shape afterwards?
I guess one place to get data is from earlier Apollo and Shuttle landings. But the Shuttle had to be basically overhauled each time. Is there reason to think that the SpaceX ship will be different?
I’m wondering if even the SpaceX people have any way to guess the answers to these questions yet. So far all we know if that that first stage on the video was still in one piece before it hit the ocean.
The Apollo capsules could have been reflown.
That’s interesting. I have so little picture of what happens to a rocket on a launch. I have this picture of re-entry with everything glowing red, heat shield burning away. Do they have some way to focus the damage (in my imaginary picture) to one part of the ship and the rest is pretty much unscathed?
Anybody know about their reusable ship attempts? I had thought they would try to relight the dropped stages at every flight from now on?
Last I read, they are waiting until the next NASA launch because they need full performance for their next two (now one) customers.
I seem to recall they were going to skip a few flights before the next reusable attempt. That makes a lot of sense on this launch, where they’re already taking a risk (relighting the second stage for boost to GTO). They also might have needed the performance margin. Again, going by memory but it was something like returning to a stop at sea level way down-track cost 15% performance, and returning to launch site 30% or so.
SpaceX mentioned before this launch that they weren’t going to be landing the first stage this time. Maybe next time.
They need excess performance margin to reuse the first stage. They figured they’ve already got as much data as they need from “hover over the ocean” tests so the next tests are likely to be full up reusability attempts. It probably won’t be until the next CRS flight before that happens.
“…it will take years before SpaceX can be considered to have a safety record comparable to longer-standing providers.”
Providers such as China, where “It Takes a Village” should be the Long March 3B’s nickname, or Russia where an observer in a bunker was killed in a 2003 Soyuz U launch accident?
SpaceX has a perfect safety record, as do all U.S. commercial and semi-commercial launch providers. They don’t kill or injure the uninvolved public. That is unlikely to ever change, but it can’t get any better.
I think the writer meant “reliability,” though even there he is years off the mark…
As I recall, last year SpaceX was trying for some large DOD launch contracts and didn’t get them because they hadn’t yet established a long track record of successful launches. That is rapidly changing, and I think they’ll be very successful in the next round of DOD bids. That will greatly add to the revenue flowing into SpaceX, allowing them to become even more dominant.
Nobody will be able to compete with SpaceX using heritage engines due to their expense, and unless the US starts domestic production of NK-33’s and RD-180’s, and builds them cheaply, or rethinks engine production with new cheaper designs, it’s largely game over for traditional launch providers. I’m confident they can get back in the game, but they’ll have to radically alter how they’ve been doing things.
Could someone explain what makes SpaceX so much cheaper? Is it because they built things in-house? Why wouldn’t space companies that already have working ships for a long while be cheaper?
Space contractors are notorious for how inefficient and overcharging they are – they have gotten used to building less and less yet get paid the same and more.
SpaceX only builds things in-house because even the basic components can be extremely expensive if contracted out to a traditional aerospace contractor.
Another reason is that for the last decades, the ingoing merger hysteria in aerospace have created less competition. The last two major engine manufacturers just merged – (Aerojet & rocketdyne) – and the only two major aerospace giants that remain are Boeing and LockMart. And those two would probably merge if they were allowed to, less of that pesky competition that could jeopardize profits. Ugh.
Some will be able to respond to SpaceX pricing and capabilities, but many will not – and they will disappear.
Short answer: they care about price. No-one else does.
Most estimates for value of a single human life dont exceed 10 million dollars. Chinese paid a thousand bucks to the farmer – and he probably considers himself doubly blessed now.
Cynical, but practical.
Last night on The Space Show, David Livingston pointed to a guest he’d had last Sunday. It seems that the Europeans are trying to set up an international set of “technical standards” for launch systems. Needless to say, these would wind up forcing people like Elon to adopt high-cost methods, thus keeping Ariane et al ‘competitive’. The indirect forcing function would be insurance companies for satellite operators who’d tell their clients that the launchers they used would have to meet them – or no insurance.
This is not a treaty, it would only require the President’s agreement to pull the US into this regime. The way the story was recounted last night, it sounded like such an agreement could be imminent and (as with all things space) unnoticed by any but very few.
Now, I would assume that SpaceX would be aware of these circumstances and put in some words in the right places if they are in fact as dangerous as they were portrayed. Or, it could be that the success yesterday, particularly if followed by another quick success with the Thaicom launch, would result in the satellite operators being intolerant of such cost-collusion nonsense.
Hey China! Think of all the money you could have saved by switching to SpaceX!
Reliability has been noted as a potential issue for commercial, unmanned launches as well as (obviously) for manned ones. However, consider: This launch reportedly cost $60 million – although one may reasonably expect that it was subsidised by SpaceX, being its first attempt at a launch to GTO. Be that as it may, the $200 million saving on the launch can buy a heck of a lot of insurance!
This does, of course, assume that the payload (although extremely valuable) is replaceable. Reliability becomes much more important for essentially irreplaceable payloads such as major space telescopes and the like.
Even for such payloads, much of the cost is engineering, and the second (and third, and fourth…) units are cheaper than the first.
If having a space telescope like the Hubble is important, maintaining a production capability for it would make sense. Heck, having more than one in space at a time could make sense. And launching new ones would have been cheaper than the pyrrhic repairability the shuttle provided.
$60 million would be rack rate based on this pricing. I’m sure SES got some consideration for being the first to go, but it’s not reflected in the reported $60 million launch price.
And they’re really planning to do three more flights this month, according to their Launch Manifest? I guess I don’t have too much of a picture of what preparation for a flight looks like, but that seems like a lot.
I see that SES is still listed there as a “future mission”. I expect they’re busy people who don’t have some guy whose job it is to take care of the web page.
A footnote on the manifest page notes that “Year indicates vehicle arrival at launch site.”
I wouldn’t be surprised by some schedule slippage, but even factoring that in they’re looking at a rapid acceleration in flight rate. To date they’ve launched 7 Falcon 9s over 3 1/2 years, or about one every 6 months. They have 14 scheduled between now and the end of 2014, for a rate of about one a month.
Also scheduled this month: the first test flight of the 9-engine Falcon 9R vertical landing prototype, a successor to the single-engine Grasshopper test vehicle.
They probably won’t get all those flights in, but I do expect a significant increase in flight rate. They’ve been cranking out cores in Hawthorne like crazy, and now that they feel like the vehicle has been fully flight tested, they’ll be ready to step it up.
According to the consolidated launch list at NSF.com, there is only the Thaicom-6 launch, which shows Dec. 20 with a question mark. I’d be very surprised if that date doesn’t slip.
Sure, they’re going to get their flight rate up, but 2 1/2 weeks between launches at the same pad seems a bit ambitious at the moment.
The biggest reason SpaceX will shake up the industry isn’t because their rockets are cheaper it’s because the economics of operating reusable rockets are fundamentally different than expendables. With expendables it’s about the production pipeline. In order to have launch capacity you need to ramp up manufacturing months ahead of time.
With reusables you have a fleet, and the production cost is already sunk. Obviously this means that the marginal cost on flights will be low, but it also means that the capital investment constraints change dramatically. In order to have the possibility of launching it costs millions of dollars in hardware with expendables, but that possibility is latent with reusables provided there is an operational vehicle on hand.
Business wise that means SpaceX can be far more flexible with its launches and they can maintain a higher level of flight rate capability with a smaller capital investment. 3/4 of their cost is in the first stage, so if they are able to fly the first stage only 3 times that still means that for the same capital investment it would have taken to launch 10 times per year they would be able to build only 7 first stages and still be capable of 20 launches, at the same cost. Potentially they could even be able to respond to launch orders within only a matter of weeks.
I understand that reusable rockets will make an incredible difference – but they don’t have them yet and they still charged $60M for a flight that the others charge $250 million for.
Just like with SES, I’m pretty sure the first reused RTS boosters will get a significant discount (probably the cost of propellent and the launch team) for those first launches. NASA’s contract is for new boosters only, so I could see a host of cube sats get launched with a reused COTS booster (I think the COTS flights are the only ones that will have enough fuel margin to attempt a RTS).
Assuming that SpaceX can master re-using Falcon 9s, the question is whether the existence of a lower-cost, more flexible launcher will generate new demand for space launch. SpaceX could do okay just filling current demand, but the really exciting possibility is a virtuous cycle of lower costs leading to new markets and higher flight rates, and higher flight rates justifying investments to further lower per-launch costs.
One thing I haven’t really appreciated until just recently is that SpaceX has been flying reusable flight-hardware for the past 2 launches. The only differentiation between the “Falcon 9-R” first stage and the v1.1 core are the landing legs. In principle every single Falcon 9 v1.1 first stage rolling off of their assembly line could be re-used. That’s pretty astounding when you think about it, and yet another example of the clever way SpaceX tends to interleave testing and validation of R&D work in with operational missions to front load capabilities as early as possible (a perfect example being the testing of 2nd stage re-light on the first v1.1 launch).
Do we have any idea at all of how “reusable” is reusable? That is, if a first stage could land itself, what kind of shape would it be in? How about a second stage re-entering the atmosphere and landing itself?
It’s wonderful that Grasshopper can land from a thousand meters up, but aren’t these other cases, which went through the stress of a liftoff and then a re-entry, likely to be in a lot worse shape afterwards?
I guess one place to get data is from earlier Apollo and Shuttle landings. But the Shuttle had to be basically overhauled each time. Is there reason to think that the SpaceX ship will be different?
I’m wondering if even the SpaceX people have any way to guess the answers to these questions yet. So far all we know if that that first stage on the video was still in one piece before it hit the ocean.
The Apollo capsules could have been reflown.
That’s interesting. I have so little picture of what happens to a rocket on a launch. I have this picture of re-entry with everything glowing red, heat shield burning away. Do they have some way to focus the damage (in my imaginary picture) to one part of the ship and the rest is pretty much unscathed?