Jeff Foust has a report at today’s issue of The Space Review.
6 thoughts on “Reusability And Other Launch-Industry Issues”
The company launched three Falcon 9 rockets last year, but has plans to perform ten launches this year, of which it’s so far done one.
Down from the 13 (+1 FH) still on their launch manifest for 2014.
Yeah SpaceX tends to have overly optimistic schedules. Still even with all the delays and slips they are growing a lot faster than anyone would expect. I mean who would have thought a decade ago they would be competing with ULA and Arianespace for contracts to launch satellites to GTO? I was one of the people who believed they had a business case back then but their success goes way beyond what even I had expected.
Their hardware development model is very interesting. Other than during the Space Race I cannot remember people applying the spiral development model to the sector so successfully. It certainly helps that they are more vertically integrated than their competitors. This way they can reduce cycle time and cost and make it effective.
I still think it’s odd that nobody in the media delves into the reusabiity question with any depth. SpaceX is uniquely positioned to both enable reuse and get the biggest win from it. First stage reuse is the easiest, due to the speeds and distances, but for most rockets it would be the least useful. The RL-10 engine costs almost as much as a full Falcon 9 launch alone and that engine gets thrown away with the upper stage on a Delta IV and Atlas V launch, so trying to reuse the first stage with those vehicles is economically nonsensical. Only with a vehicle like the F9 where the first stage is the majority of the vehicle cost is it sensible.
And only with a vehicle that has 9 engines and so on is it even feasible. With 1 out of 9 engines running you get tens of seconds of deceleration burn time, which gives lots of control and ability to adjust and compensate for thrust variations. With one big engine, like the ULA launchers, you get about 1 second. Which makes it effectively impossible. And that’s aside from the difficulty of reengineering an engine built by a 3rd party.
Proton has similar issues as does Ariane 5. SpaceX is the only company with a rocket that can be sensibly upgraded to reusability and make a significant cost impact by doing so. Which isn’t surprising, it’s by design. But the fact that every other rocket maker would have to go back to the drawing board and build a new rocket design from scratch in order to become competitive is rather a big deal. Even more so because nobody’s doing it. Ariane 6 is an expendable, for example. Either they are discounting SpaceX’s chances of success or they don’t have a clue how to proceed or some combination of both.
I think the economic arguments are hard enough for most to understand.. but you make great points.
It just seems odd to me that the so-called aerospace media can’t do basic math. Nobody’s going to be able to be cost competitive with a reusable Falcon 9 if they are throwing away an RL-10 every flight, period. Nobody’s going to be able to do a slight modification to Atlas, Delta, Ariane, Proton, Long March, or GSLV to gain reusability. Reusability means designing for it from the start, like SpaceX did. And even then it’s not exactly trivial. And reporters are asking ULA, Arianespace, and ILS whether or not their considering bolting on reusability to their rockets. As though that’s something one can just DO. It’s as bizarre as asking them if they have any plans to transmogrify themselves into dolphins and live forever in the sea free of worry.
Maybe it’s a good thing for SpaceX that they make what they’re doing look easy?
The comments of management in the established launch services firms remind me a great deal of what the wind-powered sailing ship industry was saying about steamships in the late 1820’s and early 1830’s. We all know how that argument turned out.
The established players don’t want to make investments in reusability because they see a static market. They think the smart move is to stand pat to the greatest possible extent.
SpaceX have cleverly engineered their product to constitute an incremental threat to established providers by undercutting them on price, even for expendable launches, and providing hooks for incremental reuseability that will, SpaceX hopes, expand the launch market by lowering prices much further. If SpaceX proves correct in their projections, then they stand to take the entirety of this new piece of the launch market for themselves while still chipping away at the market shares of established providers. The established providers have high fixed costs and high variable costs. At some point, each will fall below whatever launch frequency is required to maintain them as going concerns. One at a time, I expect to see them all go the way of windjammer freight carriers. I expect ILS to go first.
The company launched three Falcon 9 rockets last year, but has plans to perform ten launches this year, of which it’s so far done one.
Down from the 13 (+1 FH) still on their launch manifest for 2014.
Yeah SpaceX tends to have overly optimistic schedules. Still even with all the delays and slips they are growing a lot faster than anyone would expect. I mean who would have thought a decade ago they would be competing with ULA and Arianespace for contracts to launch satellites to GTO? I was one of the people who believed they had a business case back then but their success goes way beyond what even I had expected.
Their hardware development model is very interesting. Other than during the Space Race I cannot remember people applying the spiral development model to the sector so successfully. It certainly helps that they are more vertically integrated than their competitors. This way they can reduce cycle time and cost and make it effective.
I still think it’s odd that nobody in the media delves into the reusabiity question with any depth. SpaceX is uniquely positioned to both enable reuse and get the biggest win from it. First stage reuse is the easiest, due to the speeds and distances, but for most rockets it would be the least useful. The RL-10 engine costs almost as much as a full Falcon 9 launch alone and that engine gets thrown away with the upper stage on a Delta IV and Atlas V launch, so trying to reuse the first stage with those vehicles is economically nonsensical. Only with a vehicle like the F9 where the first stage is the majority of the vehicle cost is it sensible.
And only with a vehicle that has 9 engines and so on is it even feasible. With 1 out of 9 engines running you get tens of seconds of deceleration burn time, which gives lots of control and ability to adjust and compensate for thrust variations. With one big engine, like the ULA launchers, you get about 1 second. Which makes it effectively impossible. And that’s aside from the difficulty of reengineering an engine built by a 3rd party.
Proton has similar issues as does Ariane 5. SpaceX is the only company with a rocket that can be sensibly upgraded to reusability and make a significant cost impact by doing so. Which isn’t surprising, it’s by design. But the fact that every other rocket maker would have to go back to the drawing board and build a new rocket design from scratch in order to become competitive is rather a big deal. Even more so because nobody’s doing it. Ariane 6 is an expendable, for example. Either they are discounting SpaceX’s chances of success or they don’t have a clue how to proceed or some combination of both.
I think the economic arguments are hard enough for most to understand.. but you make great points.
It just seems odd to me that the so-called aerospace media can’t do basic math. Nobody’s going to be able to be cost competitive with a reusable Falcon 9 if they are throwing away an RL-10 every flight, period. Nobody’s going to be able to do a slight modification to Atlas, Delta, Ariane, Proton, Long March, or GSLV to gain reusability. Reusability means designing for it from the start, like SpaceX did. And even then it’s not exactly trivial. And reporters are asking ULA, Arianespace, and ILS whether or not their considering bolting on reusability to their rockets. As though that’s something one can just DO. It’s as bizarre as asking them if they have any plans to transmogrify themselves into dolphins and live forever in the sea free of worry.
Maybe it’s a good thing for SpaceX that they make what they’re doing look easy?
The comments of management in the established launch services firms remind me a great deal of what the wind-powered sailing ship industry was saying about steamships in the late 1820’s and early 1830’s. We all know how that argument turned out.
The established players don’t want to make investments in reusability because they see a static market. They think the smart move is to stand pat to the greatest possible extent.
SpaceX have cleverly engineered their product to constitute an incremental threat to established providers by undercutting them on price, even for expendable launches, and providing hooks for incremental reuseability that will, SpaceX hopes, expand the launch market by lowering prices much further. If SpaceX proves correct in their projections, then they stand to take the entirety of this new piece of the launch market for themselves while still chipping away at the market shares of established providers. The established providers have high fixed costs and high variable costs. At some point, each will fall below whatever launch frequency is required to maintain them as going concerns. One at a time, I expect to see them all go the way of windjammer freight carriers. I expect ILS to go first.