…is complete. This will be a big week for SpaceX if they get the launch off successfully on Thursday.
[Update a few minutes later]
Meanwhile, while SpaceX is driving down launch costs, a new report is out on the insane program costs of SLS/Orion.
[Update on Wednesday afternoon]
Bob Zimmerman responds to media criticism of his report.
SLS isn't just programmatically insane, it's fractally so. It's completely nuts at whatever scale you look at it. https://t.co/PVYpsG3Tj7
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) March 29, 2017
[Bumped]
Would this mark the first time ever a first stage of an orbital mission is re-flown? Can’t say I remember it happening before.
It would also be interesting to know how much was refurbished and how much of the cost is saved or not. But I suppose that is likely to be at least partially confidential for now.
First liquid-fuel stage.
Technically the Shuttle SRBs were re-flown, but only after complete refurbishment, so I’m not sure that counts.
So I guess it depends on the amount of refurbishment SpaceX has done. If all they’ve done is clean it, then it’ll be a 1st and huge step to aviation type turn-around.
I’m dying to know the details of their refurb process. Alas, I don’t think we’ll know for a while
. . . I’m workin at the – Car Wash, Car Wash, yeah . . .
Sure, it counts, as a data point. The cost was high, yeah, for refurbishment, nearly complete re-manufacturing. I guess the metal tubes had to be somewhat usable, even dunked in salt water.
I guess progress isn’t really even, but goes in fits and starts. The experience of recovering SRBs at sea taught us something, even if it’s how not to do it. Now SpaceX uses barges, perhaps Blue Origin too.
It would be good to know what refurbishment cost but since its the first one, it probably isn’t going to be representative of future refurbishment costs.
I think it will be a historical footnote, a datum starting a graph showing the historical decline of the cost of re-launch as incremental improvements to the Falcon show results.
That’s a good way to look at it. It would be interesting to see if/how refurbishment costs drop on the legacy cores and then compare to the block 5.
This will be huge accomplishment. SpaceX’s approach of adding minimal incremental changes to an existing first stage design to enable a reusable profile may make for a good economic model to reduce launch costs.
However, from a technical point of view, I’d say that the Space Shuttle showed that flying rocket engines and real aerospace structures multiple times is/was feasible.
SpaceX needs to build on its accomplishments by making this type or reusability common and relatively inexpensive. Evidence indicates this is very likely to be demonstrated in the next 12 to 24 months.
I don’t think the reuse of the SRB’s showed much – they were basically just empty metal tubes – but the SME’s certainly did. (Naturally, NASA’s successor system is predicated on throwing those SME’s away after one more use.)
Successful reuse of a first stage will be a big step; but only if it’s a step on the road to (reliable) reuse of the stage within a few weeks, or even a few days. But that does appear to be SpaceX’s plan.
Then we get to see how much new demand this new supply brings into existence.
I believe this is the first time it has been done to send a second payload to orbit. In the late 1960s there was a Titan IIIb (single core) flight from Vandenburg in which the first stage came down in the water, was refurbished, and launched again as a test, but did *not* go to orbit.
That’s quite interesting, never heard of that before. Thanks for the reference. I found a link to a paper:
Dunn, J., “Titan IIIB Recovery Experiment,” SAE Technical Paper 670399, 1967, doi:10.4271/670399.
Regarding the other comments here, the issue with the Shuttle solids is that AFAIK the cost benefit of recovery in that case makes a lot less sense, since its basically a casing with no turbopumps or whatever and the “refueling” portion i.e. casting is quite complicated and time consuming.
I’ve heard of more instances of recovery but not actual reuse.
This stuff is really hard and really neat. Only way to know what happens is to try it. SpaceX is going to learn a lot that no one could have known till now.
Exciting times.
The overhead on SLS/Orion is enraging. The best and brightest have broken NASA on a very fundamental level.
Yes it is. We have Robert Zimmerman of the Behind the Black blog to thank for the study Berger reports on at Ars Technica. You can visit ZimmerBob’s blog very conveniently from a link on Rand’s blogroll.
I enjoy his original reporting on things like sunspots and rover progress in addition to his coverage of other topics.
Me too.
(Padding added to satisfy the anti-brevity troll who lives inside Rand’s blog software)
The study doesn’t look at this. but at first blush, it looks like the overhead may not be all that far off what it was for Apollo.
Of course, we can all see one important distinction: Apollo was attempting to do a number of things that had never been done before, and came with very high risks – and it all had to be done on a tight deadline. FAR contracts made sense; big contractors were not going to be eager to eat development cost overruns from unanticipated lessons and mistakes attempting to do lots of things that had never been done before. (There’s no way Grumman could have developed the LM on a fixed cost contract, or at least not within anything like that time frame.)
But SLS and Orion are not attempting to do anything new, save at the margins – indeed, the whole point (on paper, ha) is that it was supposed to save money and effort by reusing Shuttle heritage architecture and systems. And it is clearly failing to do that,
As the study says, it is time for NASA to do what the Air Force already does: farm out its payloads on fixed contracts to private American launch companies.
There’s no comparison possible. They designed the F-1 and J-2 engines, the LM engine, the lander and the capsule, the list goes on.
Had the J-2X development not been cancelled perhaps something could have been salvaged out of this. Although it was unlikely. I think they would have been better off funding the RL-60.
How many decent projects were left by the wayside in the 1990s?
A way to look at this is that overhead represents a highly trained staff and highly specialized facilities. This is beneficial but the ratio of overhead to actually completing things doesn’t look good. I haven’t read the report yet, even though its been opened in a tab since it was released, so I don’t know if it determines if the overhead is directly traced to work on SLS/Orion or just general operations.
It is a great example of how NASA isn’t a business and doesn’t self fund its work. I don’t think anyone wants NASA to operate this way even if they do want NASA to participate in the commercial realm to some degree.
Taxpayers do get a return on investment but it is often intangible. Greater reliance and partnership with the private sector means there is a monetary return on investment for government and business, that development is mostly self funded, and we still benefit from the intangibles.
So maybe I was too hard on NASA but considering that overhead is so high, it does make the commercial alternatives look very attractive.
Agree completely. Driving the costs lower is one way to encourage SLS to die.
Leading the way to genuine improvements in our ability to go where we want to go, vs. “I just want to build a giant rocket” to nowhere.
By the way, Rand, I used your term, Apolloism, over at Space Review (A gateway to Mars, or the Moon?). I did fess up at the end. Mea culpa.
“Agree completely. Driving the costs lower is one way to encourage SLS to die.”
THIS.
First stage has done its job; now for the 2nd stage to do likewise, and the 1st to be recovered.
And they did it. First stage recovered again, second stage did its job. IIRC this is the first time a first stage that sent a payload to GTO has been recovered.
I love watching their webcasts, just to see the sheer joy those kids express when seeing a charred first stage on a barge.
IIRC this is the first time a first stage that sent a payload to GTO has been recovered.
No, it’s not the first time. SpaceX themselves did it with JCSAT-14, Thaicom 8, and JCSAT-16. So it’s the 4th time. This satellite is heavier than any of those though.
On thar topic, I’m unsure if there will be much use for the Heavy, other than for the NRO, given the increased capacity of Falcon 9 Full Thrust and the fact that satellites have been switching from chemical propulsion to ion propulsion.
The heavy has more lifting power, so for smaller payload perhaps it has enough extra mass budget to make the upper stage recoverable. This will only make sense when the lower stage reuse becomes sufficiently routine that the cost of expending the upper stage begins to dominate.
BTW, Russians are saying silly things about SpaceX today.
http://tass.com/science/938723
He has a point though. Quoting that article:
“The use of a re-fly stage is not new as the first solid-propellant stages of space shuttles were relaunched. To my professional mind, the re-launch of such a hi-tech spacecraft as the Space Shuttle is a more complex task from the viewpoint of technologies than the re-launch of the rocket’s first stage. And this task was successfully solved almost 40 years ago,” the expert said.”
Recovering and reusing a second stage like the Shuttle is a lot more complicated. But the thing is, Shuttle wasn’t economic given its design and then available materials. Plus recovering the solids didn’t save a lot from the cost of the rocket. The fact is recovering a liquid first stage is quite likely a lot more economically sound than either of those cases.
Then there’s the fact that SpaceX has proven it can return a launcher to the launch site, even though it didn’t happen on this flight, which means a much higher likelihood of achieving rapid turn-around times and better economics. In addition SpaceX is willing to continue iterating the rocket design with regards to reusability while the Shuttle design was mostly frozen with only a couple minor design modification in comparison.
If you look at the latter comments on that Russian article, at least some people there are quite aware of the threat SpaceX poses to their business model. But they still seem to think they can compete with their old designs, which I sincerely doubt.
The fact is SpaceX is causing the launcher market to change with both new entrants and the incumbents changing their plans.