An update from Eric Berger in the wake of the successful third flight of New Shepard. The long setback to reusability caused by the Shuttle is finally coming to an end.
[Update a few minutes later]
I wrote a piece a while ago with this theme, but I may have never published it:
Some people have also questioned whether it’s safe to reuse rockets, but Bezos thinks that perception will flip 180 degrees. “That is an argument that’s been made, but I have a different opinion,” he said. “I would much rather fly in a used 787 than on that 787’s first flight. Let somebody else take that first flight. Look, the fact that you just flew it yesterday means that it’s probably really good to fly right now. And that’s going to be true of rocket vehicles, too. In the future, because of reusability, nobody with a really expensive satellite is going to want to put it on an unused rocket. They’re going to decide that’s too risky. Now that will take a while, but that’s what’s going to happen.”
…”Our first orbital vehicle will not be our last, and it will be the smallest orbital vehicle we will ever build,” Bezos said. And to make it all affordable, says the man who has upended online retailing with Amazon.com, rockets must launch, land, and then fly again. When he’s asked about plans by government agencies and others to build large, expendable rockets, Bezos seems unable to understand that kind of business practice in the 21st century.
“What I know you cannot afford is throwing the hardware away,” he said. “Hardware is so expensive. Look around at the precision you see here. The turbopumps with beautifully machined propellers. It’s just a tragedy to throw all of that away. You can never make a step function change in cost if you’re throwing the hardware away.”
In a couple decades, people will marvel at the stubborn persistence some in throwing expensive hardware away.
Eric has been writing some decent stuff over at Ars. The comments though…a metric butt load of people who seem to be very threatened that someone besides The Lord God Elon is getting any positive press.
Yeah, it’s easy to slip into fanboyism if one doesn’t recognize that failure mode. Ah well, we’re all young and dumb at some point in our lives (then we become old and slightly less dumb.)
I’d like to see SpaceX focus more on cis-lunar space rather than Mars, and have more focus on LH2 upper stages. Say what you will about Tory Bruno and company, but their upper stage ideas are very interesting.
Yes, I think that George Sowers’ ideas are more realistically visionary than Elon’s.
I agree as well. I like a lot of the ULA focus areas.
I agree that it seems a lot more feasible at this juncture in time to do cis-lunar space exploration. Once you have a proper in-space economy outside Earth’s gravity well then going to Mars or the asteroid belt will come naturally by itself. But it’s Elon’s dime. So it’s his call.
As for the LH2 stage I’m less sure about that. One of the most successful rockets in history, Soyuz, is all LOX/Kerosene. Same thing goes for Zenit. Historically a large part of the R&D cost in a rocket was in the last stage because you needed special expertise in the rocket engine design and it was where all the avionics and all the weight shaving was done in the extreme. By using much of the same technology that was used in the lower stages SpaceX is saving a bundle in R&D costs. I am unsure of how they will continue this in the future with their next designs. Going all LOX/Kerosene was a good decision. It was also interesting to say the least that they managed to do it in only two stages.
AFAIK they are going to go for all LOX/Methane next. In the current rocket they are trying out chilled Kerosene which is something Soyuz already used in some flights. The only thing they aren’t going to bring back is the Sintin. 🙂
I’d like to see SpaceX focus more on cis-lunar space rather than Mars
A properly designed Mars architecture can easily handle cis-lunar space, but not vice versa…
Not sure I agree with the logic of wanting a used rocket. For cost of course, but reliability?
Start by assuming the more you reuse (and refurbish) it, the closer you are to the day it breaks. That could be the first flight or the tenth. In any case, you have to know when to retire a used rocket or it’s Russian roulette.
There is no significant difference between a used rocket and a used airplane. As Bezos says, I’d rather fly on one that’s demonstrated its ability to fly.
There is one difference… rockets take more stress per flight. They also have more destructive failure modes. You can often walk away from a plane crash, not so much with rockets.
If you crash an airplane, you’re not going to use it again. Stress is a function of margin. There is no reason that a rocket can’t be designed to be just as reusable as an airplane.
Back when the materials weren’t as advanced planes could not handle much stress either. As for destructive failure modes when you are flying in a pressurized cabin at high altitude and get an explosive decompression it’s not something you can walk out of either. It might be less destructive for those in the ground and the plane is probably less loaded with fuel, but other than that it can be pretty bad.
Eventually things should get better. Engines should improve in reliability margins with more design experience.
Remember the Me-262 in WW2 with the throw away jet engines which lasted like 25 hours? Back then Nazi Germany was under an embargo on strategic materials including tungsten. Even with those materials the best engine they could get only lasted like 100 hours running in the lab. Which is a far cry from what can be done today. Rocket engine technology in comparison is still in its infancy.
They are still reinventing late 1960s, early 1970s rocket engine tech and doing the next steps. Only when we see the Methane/LOX full flow staged combustion engines from both SpaceX and Blue Origin will we be looking at something which is next-gen in all aspects.
I agree with Bezos and Rand that given enough margin I would rather use a vehicle which was proven to work across the entire flight profile than one which did not.
I have never been a fan of Bezos’ plan to get into the segment. Or for the design approach. Or the apparent design plan. But it’s a good thing they finally managed to get a pump-fed engine working and that they got the avionics to work to this degree. Kudos for that. At last this seems like something which can scale up.
He’s got something which can work for suborbital alright, but that market was never as clear as orbital, it has been ignored for a reason. The re-usability might change things by changing the dynamics of the problem. I remain unconvinced that suborbital is ever going to be a big chunk of the space market. A couple of decades back it was supposed to be large LEO constellations and space stations and it didn’t go anywhere. That actually made more sense and it still didn’t go far.
Orbital flight is way different. I don’t quite understand if Bezos wants to scale up his suborbital vehicle or go orbital. The engine parameters seem to be for orbital but that just means he’s been using all these vehicles so far as mere demonstrator prototypes. This is really expensive. I mean Elon got a lot of willing customers even in the failed flights with the smaller Falcon-1. The odd chance for the customer was always that if it worked it would be a lot cheaper than a regular flight so a couple of them at least tried. Eventually they got it working.
It’s a good thing Bezos seems to have really deep pockets and seems invested in the idea. But I find this highly disturbing. It wouldn’t be the first time economic realities killed a project like this. It is likely that he prefers to work in stealth mode partly because he wants to carry humans rather than cargo. But still this is costing him a pretty penny I’m sure of it.
There is one overlooked but potentially huge suborbital market, which is deorbiting space debris by putting something in its path. Last year I ran some numbers on firing a pair of opposed rocket engines to create a long stream of exhaust gas along the orbit’s path, causing a fairly gentle drag that would drop the satellite into a lower orbit or directly into the upper atmosphere.
The question is the relative cost of a suborbital launch (one intercept per launch) verses an orbital launch with a space tug that might deorbit a half dozen or more pieces of debris.
Obviously Blue Origin is really about 95% of the way to a successful intercept below 100 km. It wouldn’t be hard to replace their capsule with a special stage to reach much higher.
The Air Force might kick in some side money to develop the clandestine ability to deorbit satellites that are still functioning.
Interesting. A suborbital rocket that could spew dense gasses or aero-gels into the path of an on-coming object to be de-orbited in a non-catastrophic fashion. How would you bill the service? By mass of object to be de-orbited? By elapsed time to de-orbit? Or a combo of both? I could see where either variable would determine the payload mass of the suborbital rocket and hence the cost.