…from people who currently make good money building expendable launch systems.
In other news, the Buggy Whip Manufacturers Association saw no future in these newfangled “horseless carriages.”
[Update a while later]
Bob Zimmerman has some thoughts on the lie that is Orion, while Eric Berger discusses the GAO concerns about its programmatics.
Such prognostications are at best self fulfilling, and at worst quotes to make them look foolish in 10 or 20 years.
It would say this: reusability is expensive — at least at the present time. But that is how price curves work; the first, second, third version of something is quite expense, rare, hard to make and operate. Gradually each version becomes more perfected, cheaper, and better.
That’s why SpaceX’s feat of landing a booster (from a paying customer’s flight) is so important … the development path to cheap reusable flight is all “down hill” from here.
That’s why SpaceX’s feat of landing a booster (from a paying customer’s flight) is so important
It’s a situation that couldn’t exist under the old form of contracting.
The old contractors might not see the value in shaving millions off their costs but they also don’t see the value in having customers other than the government and government crony industries like communications.
Zimmerman nails it. It’s one of his finest posts.
Ya, that was good. Americans aren’t supposed to be the ones using the potemkin strategy.
SpaceX will be accumulating used stages regardless. It’s just a question of where they price them. If traditional customers spurn them we’ll see untraditional ones.
I want to add that SpaceX’s reuse strategy has a nice side effect: they can differentiate their product offering, selling launches on new and used stages as different products, for different prices.
This is important because, as I understand it, US federal government acquisition rules prohibit the government from buying a product or service at a higher price than the supplied sells it to others. SpaceX can reduce the cost of launch on used boosters without affecting the price they can charge the feds on new ones.
Spot on.
I can see another market developing as well. Launch on aggregate.
This would be perhaps the lowest cost (rock bottom pricing) you could pay to get to orbit (low Earth). The idea being, if you are a cube sat size payload and are trying to get to orbit as cheaply as possible and time is no obstacle, then you pay for a launch “berth” on a used LV, either up front or as a down payment to hold it. When enough “berths” are sold you go after you’ve paid in full.
A “berth” is determined by size. If your payload is too big or too heavy for a single “berth” you can buy multiple “berths”. At some point there is a cross-over to where it is just cheaper to lease an LV for launch. By “launch for purpose” the price you pay for the LV lease would depend upon the flight profile you seek. It the profile prohibits LV recovery then the lease reverts to a buy. Obviously a GTO is going to be more expensive than LEO, and the buyer would be on-the-hook to pay for the 2nd stage, unless the provider is willing to take ownership once it has reached GTO as Ken points out. On orbit it remains more valuable if controllable and reusable in orbit. Perhaps this should be a priority over recovery? Maybe SpaceX should be making queries now about reserving parking orbits?
BTW this doesn’t have to require an independent LV. The same pricing model could be applied to payloads hitching a ride in the Dragon trunk.
Wow. They named the moderator well. There is so many dumb thoughts, I’m almost tempted to write a white paper explaining how they fail to understand success in other industries in regards to systems engineering. For example, the Toyota method of system improvement. If all SpaceX or Blue Origin did was recover the launcher for destructive analysis to pinpoint available reliability; they would be, as they are now, far advanced then NASA’s piecemeal test a little, analyze a lot, subsystem approach to spacecraft design.
I would have love to have grilled Doug Bradley on approaches to cost reduction of reusable SSME’s not taken. Especially in the post-flight maintenance and engine serviceability areas. Now that the Senate is frog-marching A/R off 180 degrees in the opposite direction. I’ll bet you dollars-to-donuts there are some very interesting internal technical memorandums languishing there…
Totally agree with Paul D. on the customer potential. Also expect to see interesting pricing and other forms of re-numeration going forward. You don’t have to buy an LV if you can lease it for purpose.
I remember reading some papers a couple of years back. They were talking about using channel-wall nozzle and automating the engine diagnostics on the SSME with more built-in sensors. Instead of having to manually tear down the SSME every dozen flights or so and check it piece by piece. I think it was in some paper about Shuttle upgrades which also mentioned the glass cockpit upgrades. Before the Columbia accident.
If you want to see proposals for whole engine re-designs you can read the engine proposals for the SLI (Space Launch Initiative) by Rocketdyne (RS-83) and Aerojet (COBRA).
Thanks for that info. I will pursue further when I have time this weekend. Some of links I’ve found in preliminary searches have already disappeared down the memory hole…
I’ll coin us a new acronym (as if we needed one).
LAAS (launch as a service)…
^^^^This^^^^ (this text added only because web page complained)
You can do less typeing but more work, depending on your muscle memory.
Its good and accurate but some will say its sexist. Maybe get a woman to endorse it as being better then how men do things.
One thing seems clear at least. If you’re in a position to hire aerospace engineers, don’t hire any who graduated from Purdue.
I do not get how the cost savings from reusability would be 30%. Goldberg seems to be talking about reusing only the first stage, like SpaceX is currently doing, and is guessing that the first stage costs 55%, or something close to it of total vehicle costs, probably based on their own internal data. I doubt the first stage in Falcon 9 costs 55% of the cost of the second stage. Except for the nozzle the engine is basically the same and there’s one instead of nine engines in the second stage. The propellant tanks and pipes in the second stage of Falcon 9 are a lot less complicated and made with the same tools used in the first stage. So WTF. This is not a rocket with an expensive RL-10 and Centaur in the second stage. Nor are we talking about reusing Shuttle solids which have little to reuse since a large portion of the cost is in the solid fuel rather than the casing.
Sure there will be costs in recovery, refurbishing, then there’s the actual operational launch cost which is more than just fuel (the standing army, renting the pad, etc). But I think you can do a lot better than 30% even reusing just the first stage in a Falcon 9. Let alone the Heavy which is supposed to have 27 engines in the first stage and a half.
SpaceX has plans to eventually reuse the second stage but that would probably require increasing the payload of the rocket since its a lot more weight expensive to reuse the second stage. However with the Falcon 9 Heavy I can see them having so much weight margin that they could easily do it. It might even make financial sense if there is a change it would recover an expensive satellite payload in case of first stage failure. Doing that would not be easy. But it is not impossible either.
Didn’t spacex say they could reduce prices by 30% or something? Maybe this is where it comes from.
Maybe Dick Eagleson will chime in with the answer or a link to one of his previous comments with the answer.
Being the low cost provider, their price can be, and likely is, higher than their cost. They just have to price it low enough to sell, which depends on the risk perception and the prices of launch on not previously used boosters.
Speak of the Devil.
I haven’t a clue where Goldberg got his 30% number from. Perhaps from Ye Olde Anal Archive where so many of the numbers tossed about in these discussions appear to originate?
I could sort of understand where Goldberg was coming from if he worked for ULA. Given that RD-180’s are costing in the mid-20’s apiece (millions of dollars) and that RL-10’s are rumored to go for north of $40 million each, it’s quite possible that an Atlas V 1st stage is significantly cheaper than the Centaur it pushes.
Having watched a few Atlas V launches, I notice also that the Centaur upper stage does a lot more of the actual boosting than does the Falcon 9 2nd stage. That seems to account for the near doubling of the liftoff-to-orbit time for Atlas V vs. F9.
With such weirdly inverted economics and disproportionate reliance on the uber-expensive Centaur, I could easily see how a 1st-stage-only recovery and reuse strategy might seem marginal to a ULA-er. For their vehicles, it is.
Not sure I see where an Orbital-ATK guy would get the same opinion from. Most of Orbital’s current lineup are Franken-rockets with lower stages salvaged from decommissioned ICBM’s. Their only liquid-fueled 1st stage, on Antares, is also a bit Franken-rocket-y with most of the structure of Ukrainian origin atop a pair of Russian engines.
The Ukrainian tankage and plumbing is probably pretty cheap by the standards of legacy U.S. aerospace. The former AJ-26 engines probably were too, even allowing for the fact they passed through the hands of those wizards of engine expense, AJR, on the way from their Siberian storage shed to the launch pad at Wallops. Even so, it would be interesting to know how the price of the new RD-181’s, acquired directly from Energomash, compares to what AJR was getting from Orbital for each of the face-lifted Cold War surplus NK-33’s.
The Antares 2nd stage is one of Orbital-ATK’s in-house solid motors.
Bottom line? It sure seems as though Orbital-ATK’s 1st stage vs. 2nd stage cost economics ought to approximate these of SpaceX a lot more closely than those of ULA – in percentage terms, anyway, if not in absolute dollars.
So Goldberg remains a man of mystery.
In any event, SpaceX officials have already spit-balled a 30% price reduction number for a mission employing a reused F9 1st stage. Perhaps you are right that Goldberg just happened to pick that number because it’s already out there and he secretly hopes that SpaceX can never make a liar out of him by someday doing better.
Based on the price differential between F9 and FH, and Shotwell’s remark that it would cost circa $3 million to prepare a recovered F9 1st stage for reuse, I have deduced that Shotwell was referring to the cost of a new F9 2nd stage and payload fairing as being the main cost items in re-flying a used F9 1st stage.
Based on previous SpaceX remarks by Musk and Shotwell that an F9 1st stage is 75 – 80% of the F9’s total cost, that makes the whole rocket a $15 – $16 million item. For a $62 million launch price, SpaceX makes upwards of $40 million in gross profit. Or, put another way, circa 250% in gross margin.
Now, take a recovered F9 1st stage, add $3 million in new toppings and $40 million in profit and you get circa $43 million as a launch price. By no particular coincidence, this is the 30%-off number spit-balled by SpaceX after their first successful 1st stage recovery last December. Really neat how that all works out.
Of course that just keeps the total profit dollars per mission more or less constant. The gross margin – already through the roof at 250%, goes orbital itself at well over 1,000%.
The 30% off number, of course, can be seen merely as an opening gambit on SpaceX’s part. SES, which has long been on record as wanting to fly SpaceX’s first reused booster, almost immediately countered by offering to pay a 50% discount. After that, the negotiations moved indoors and out of sight and earshot.
Suffice it to say, SpaceX has plenty of maneuvering room within which to bargain. Even if they end up giving SES exactly what it first asked for – a $31 million mission price – more than $25 million of that should fall directly to SpaceX’s bottom line. Their gross margin would still be over three times what it has been for missions with new F9 1st stages. Not too damned shabby say I.
All this pricing flexibility, owed entirely to SpaceX’s maniacal attention to costs throughout its entire history, would let the company offer incrementally lower mission prices for each subsequent reuse and still do very well in terms of gross margins.
With a well-used F9 1st stage, SpaceX could go as low as a circa $10 million mission price and still make the same margin it does now on a mission using an all-new launcher. That’s Firefly Alpha mission price territory for roughly an order of magnitude more capability.
SpaceX could even make worthwhile money at the $5 – $7 million eventual mission price Shotwell first broached a couple years back. As production volumes rise, new F9 2nd stages should cost less and less in variable costs and SpaceX already has plans to recover and reuse payload fairings. Assuming a $1.5 million new 2nd stage and reused 1st stage and payload fairing, SpaceX could make what I take to be its current gross margins on a mission price of just $6 million. That’s within spitting distance of a Rocket Lab Electron.
I think both Firefly and Rocket Lab have ample time to get their own economics and possible future reusability initiatives down the inevitable learning curves though. SpaceX would be crazy to offer mission prices in the single-digit millions for at least a few years yet.
Even a 30% discount off current list price is going to stimulate quite a bit of new demand. SpaceX needs to finish building out their current pad projects and raise their launch tempo on each. The company may be in the enviable position of being launch facility limited in terms of its possible company-wide launch cadence for many years to come and can optimize launch pricing to maximize gross margin given their launch cadence limitations at any given point.
That means SpaceX’s current 2+ year backlog of missions – at the company’s current launch cadence of 12 – 17 launches per year – is likely to be just as long, in temporal terms, even when the company is launching 50 or 60 missions a year, as it well could be by 2020 or so.
Nice problems to have.
One problem SpaceX does not appear to have is rendering their recovered F9 1st stages ready for re-flight. That splendid bit of video SpaceX just released of a full-duration test fire of the F9 1st stage recovered at sea after the JCSAT-14 mission – the one Elon described in a tweet as having taken “max damage” – sure didn’t look very “damaged” to me. Oh sure, the outside of the thing still looks like a tramp steamer from some 1940’s Warner Bros. drama, but the innards seem to be in excellent shape. If SpaceX elects never to re-fly that particular stage it would not appear to be by reason of inability.
To paraphrase The Raisuli at the end of ‘The Wind and the Lion,’ the hard-core SpaceX skeptic/detractor/hater community has had a bad year. The next one is likely to be worse.
^read the whole thing^
Doesn’t anyone have some future vision? Once we are actually doing commerce beyond orbit we are going to need ships out there. You don’t recover the second stage. You reuse it. It’s already where you want it to be. The second stage shouldn’t be thought of as a stage at all. It should be thought of and designed as a general purpose refuelable ship. We’re going to need more of them than we can even launch. Payload to orbit should be a minor part of their overall life. You don’t need to refurbish it at all.
Sure. But you also need to return some payloads back to Earth. I agree that it doesn’t make sense to return most payloads if they can be recovered and used for something else in space.
I don’t do much math but yes, this seems great. Too hard to land on Earth? Who cares, use it in space. Not a new idea but isn’t this low hanging fruit?
Demand might not be there but considering the potential timelines involved, you can’t have too many.
Demand often follows supply which is why the plan to send cargo ships to mars with or without cargo is brilliant. Do the same thing in orbit. Suppose a half dozen ships were just sitting in orbit doing nothing (and assuming they could be kept in a state of readiness at low cost.) Somebody will see that as an opportunity. Especially since they are already paid for. Wheelers and dealers will figure out hundreds of uses for them even before they’re needed as outpost resupply shuttles. Outposts will eventually only need a SSTO for their lower gravities to make use of them.
That seems to be Tory Bruno’s strategy for ULA. ACES would be that refuelable spaceship – or at least its propulsion module. The recent offer to buy water at particular prices delivered to particular locations suggests that getting into the fuel depot business is also on the ULA to-do list.
If you have a means to deliver the propellant, a Falcon 9 upper stage could deliver quite a kick for boosting a payload to Mars or beyond. But how are you going to deliver the propellant? Production on Mars? Launch on other Falcon rockets?
I haven’t ever seen a study that showed an RLV to be less costly than an ELV, including ones that I did years ago. But there has always been a set of fundamental errors built into these studies, my own included. The three most important ones are:
1) Flight rates can’t exceed the available market.
2) The available market has to be one that the financial community believes.
3) The design must be “optimized” the same way we always do: lightest possible weight, highest performance engines, etc., etc.
1) and 2) guarantee that you will be designing for launch of geosynchronous satellites. Your vehicle will then be staggeringly expensive to develop.
3), though, is a hidden assumption (though the size required for geosats does make it seem important) that no one questions because it is hidden – in the “best” practices of the industry, in the way we’ve always done things, etc. It virtually guarantees a high-maintenance vehicle, one that couldn’t fly a bigger traffic flow than the geosynchronous market even if such a thing existed; it would be in the hangar too large a percentage of the time (see the Shuttle).
There are two only requirements that will make RLVs truly cost effective: 1) They must be capable of reflight in an hour, and 2) They must require no more frequent or extensive maintenance than an airliner.
The product of a design guided by these requirements wouldn’t even enter the trade space of the “mature” industry. It takes a Musk or Bezos to expand the trade space.
Well when they designed the Shuttle they planned to have a high flight rate. Which did not materialize. Same thing for the launchers designed back when LEO comsats were supposed to be the next big thing. So in practice it appears it is better not to count on having a high flight rate.
It does seem to be a good idea to make the launcher smaller rather than bigger at least to begin with (e.g. Shuttle, Ariane 5, were economical failures). That is one way to ensure you’ll have a higher flight rate. Elon himself said that if he was redoing everything again he would have made Merlin 1A have twice the thrust. I don’t know. He had a lot of failures in the start. The fact that Falcon 1 with Merlin 1A was so simple it allowed him to fail for a lot less expense. So I perhaps an engine between that and twice the thrust (i.e. between 340 kN and 700 kN) would be good. That would allow doing something with the launch capacity of Falcon 9 with an engine and vehicle configuration more like Falcon 5.
Reflight in an hour, at least for GEO, seems overkill to me. If you could get a flight a day it would be awesome. Heck AFAIK no launch operator does a launch a week as it is even with multiple launch sites.
As for suborbital it remains to be seen if there’s a large market for it. There are plenty of people trying to cover that segment including Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites and Blue Origin. Both have plans to do orbital launchers which can launch into GEO. I think this is not a coincidence.
I’m unaware of any plans for VG to launch to GEO.
Your opening sentence is a bit confusing. “When they designed the Shuttle they planned to have a high flight rate.” Let me clarify. They hoped to have a high flight rate, and sold the economics of Shuttle to Congress on the basis of flight rates that never materialized.
Having sold the program on one set of assumptions, they proceeded to design to a set of requirements that was random, contradictory, and irrational, and did not contain the requirement to fly frequently. For example, the entirely politically-driven decision to use solid propellant boosters itself limited the flight rate to seven a year. Match casting of two huge solid rockets with nothing but a couple of 600 gallon mixers was never practical. Oh, and the SRB liners and nozzles were expendable, and their mass, together with that of the external tank, was greater than almost any ELV’s expended mass at the time it Shuttle entered service (Titan IV was the exception). So don’t call Shuttle an RLV, or use it as an example of why RLVs aren’t cheap.
Also, I didn’t say one would require 1 hour turnaround for launching of geosynchronous satellites. In fact, I don’t think satellites should be launched at all. I think that parts for satellites should be launched into orbit by small launch vehicles, and the satellites built where they are going to operate: in space. Gone is the huge engineering effort to make a satellite fit under a fairing, unfold successfully in orbit, and endure the 8 minutes of brutal environments imposed on it by the launch vehicle – engineering effort which has nothing whatsoever to do with the satellite’s ultimate mission.
Spacecraft built in orbit would look dramatically different, be more capable for less weight, and avoid the 2% to 10% risk of not making it into orbit to begin with. With standard parts warehoused on orbit, new types of spacecraft could be brought from concept to operation in months, rather that decades.
The geosynchronous market could then be serviced by any launch vehicle of any size. The smaller the vehicle, the more frequently it would have to fly. It is under these circumstances that a non-optimized, rugged, small RLV would become not only practical, but necessary.
$16 billion and 17 years to produce a crew vehicle that’s not a lot more capable than Dragon v2 – and less capable in some ways. And who knows what Dragon will be like by 2023, when Orion is finally supposed to fly with crew?
That said, Orion is nonetheless flawless at achieving its program objectives to date: transferring $16 billion to LockMart and its subcontractors in key congressional districts.
If Orion carries a crew into space on 1 August of 2021, it will have taken 3,721 days to go from the program’s announcement by NASA to that first manned flight. It took 2,979 days from President Kennedy’s address to Congress requesting the Apollo Program to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin standing on the surface of the moon.
We are so much smarter today!
Well FWIW the NASA budget was 9X as big as a fraction of the GDP back then. There had also been multiple launcher development programs in the late 1950s early 1960s so there were a lot of skilled people available to work on Apollo.
It’s not about the level of funding. It’s about the fact that it’s a make-work program.
I think the more important aspect of Apollo was that it had an absolutely clear objective, and a deadline. It’s much easier to take one’s time on a project that has no objective and no deadline. In fact, it’s almost impossible not to, because under those conditions, they literally don’t know what they’re doing, or why. All they really know is that they have to make it as safe as possible, because no one would want to kill astronauts for no reason whatsoever. By itself, that adds to the schedule. Simberg’s Law, don’t you know…
Actually Orion has an objective and deadline which it is meeting. A small bit of the NASA aerospace community was employed before they were laid off. They continue to get paid and be called experts in the field.
And that’s assuming it actually flies in 2021, rather than 2023, as GAO fears will be the case. If so, tack another 700 or so days onto that timeline.