SpaceX seeks to accelerate Falcon 9 production and launch rates this year | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX seeks to accelerate Falcon 9 production and launch rates this year

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97 pointsrfreytag50 comments

Somewhat tangential, but does Space-X have the will or ability to develop heavy lift rocket engines which at the moment only the Russians seem to be capable of producing?

I think Boeing etc. have to procure their heavy lift rocket engines from Russia because they have no alternative supplier, at the moment.

They are currently developing a larger engine, Raptor, which is intended for their Mars project and possibly for an upper stage for the Falcon family. But it's not a plug-and-play replacement for the Russian RD-180. (Nor is Blue Origin's BE-4, which is what ULA currently plans to use to effectively replace the RD-180 -- but only by building a substantially new Rocket, the Vulcan, around the BE-4, to replace their current Atlas V.)

BTW, as others have noted, "heavy lift" is more often used to characterize whole rockets than individual engines -- and the current American leader in that category (until SpaceX finally launches Falcon Heavy) is the Delta IV heavy, powered by three RS-68s, each of which nearly matches the thrust of an RD-180. (And yet isn't a drop-in replacement for numerous reasons, starting with use of different fuels.)

> which is intended for their Mars project

Space X is a for profit company right? What's the profit incentive of going to Mars? A marketing ploy? Does SpaceX not have any investors besides Elon Musk to answer to about spending?

Elon has done back of the envelope calculations and believes that Mars colonization can be profitable at a cost of around a half-million per ticket, with a free return for anyone who decides they want out.

At that price point, moving to Mars is something you can fund by selling your house. If enough people want to do it, he could make a lot of money that way. In addition to going down in history.

If he is wrong, well, it is his money. And every step along the way to building that capacity can be justified by ventures that are making money now.

If you invest $5K USD each year in an equities-heavy index fund, with compound interest and average market returns, you'll have your Mars ticket in ~25 years. Additional funds invested each year speed that up.

It's a privately held for-profit company. Who knows what the owners want...

Actually, since Musk owns half of it we can get a pretty good idea.

SpaceX is structured as a for-profit company, but the entire reason it exists is the Mars project, and Elon's vision of making humans a multiplanetary species.

Did some digging on Wikipedia.

Saturn V used 5x1 Rocketdyne F-1 at 1,746k pounds of thrust each. Made in the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1

Soyuz uses the 5x4 RD-107 engine at 229k pounds of thrust each. Made in Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-107

Falcon Heavy uses 9x3 of the Merlin 1D engines at 185k pounds of thrust each. Made in the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family)#...

Boeing Space Launch System uses two solid rocket boosters and 4x1 RS-25D/E engines (the same ones the Space Shuttle used) at 512k pounds of thrust each. Made in the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine

1746k each? That's obscene.

For reference, the Space Shuttle SRBs were 2800k each at launch and bumped up over 3000k. This chart is a little nuts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Srbthrust2.svg

It's true the SRBs were powerful, but I wonder how much of that was compensated by structural elements needed to live with their vibrations. I remember the original Ares I concept would vibrate the astronauts to death before the solid 1st stage burned out.

They are currently developing the methalox Raptor [1] engine that is planned to have 2300kN sealevel thrust. That would be more than six times powerful than the Merlin 1D+s in current Falcon 9. That would be solidly in the heavy lift rocket engine category, specifically as they intend to group them like they group engines in Falcon 9.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_engine)

Do they need to? Should Falcon Heavy work as advertised they can get 50+ tons to LEO. Considering the Heavy is using a lot of F9 tooling and production lines (~same boosters and such) it probably saves plenty money not producing drastically different types of launch vehicles.

It seems as if for now Musk is betting on F9 + FH to milk the satellite industry for cash to fund his mars mission which requires a completely different vehicle setup including a new engine (Raptor) among other things.

http://www.spacex.com/falcon-heavy

Well, the Falcon Heavy doesn't use heavy lift engines. It just uses 27 medium-sized engines, 9 per core.

Right, but as Falcon Heavy demonstrates, you don't need "heavy lift engines" to build a heavy lifter. Going bigger than Falcon Heavy with the Merlin engines is probably getting a bit excessive, but the Falcon Heavy will already be one of the largest capacity rockets out there.

There has certainly been information out there about SpaceX's Raptor rocket engine...but I am unaware of how far they are along the development process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_engine)

NASA's SLS, which is having its first test flight in 2018, will launch with a Block I config with 2 SRB of 3,600,000 lbf each, 4 RS-25D/E shuttle engines at 512,300 lbf each for stage one and RL10B-2 for stage two at 24,800 lbf OR a stage two Block 1B config of 4 RL10's at 99,000 lbf. So about 9m lbf in its heaviest configuration. The Saturn V produced 7m lbf for comparison.

Boeing also has the Delta IV which uses the home grown RS-68 series engines. The Heavy configuration of this rocket has 2m lbf.

Only the Atlas series uses the Russian RD-180. ULA just ordered 20 more RD-180s at the cost of a great deal of political capital. Its assumed this is the last batch until the replacement BE-4 engine is ready.

They are making an engine they call Raptor for their planned giant rocket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_%28rocket_engine%29

It is not a swappable substitute for the Russian ones, because it uses a different kind of fuel and probably for lots of more complicated reasons.

The Falcon 9 Heavy, which should launch later this year, will be the heaviest lift rocket since the Saturn 5.

I wonder how long SpaceX will maintain ops in their Hawthorne facility before opening a new one. With the larger rockets, I would think shipping via highway would become a problem. Also I wonder how feasible it is to continue to produce rockets so far from launch sites

They plan to be producing Falcon family rockets for a long time yet, and those are sized to permit highway shipping. They plan to produce larger rockets for the Mars project, but their current plan for those, per hints they've occasionally dribbled out at industry confabs, is to build a new factory near the launch site.

Are most rockets manufactued near launch site? Think not. BTW Long Beach port is just 1 hr away from Hawthorne.

How does Long Beach help get a rocket to southern Texas? If a rocket is too big for highway bridges then it might not even get to Long Beach anyway

So how are other rockets made and and transported to launch site?

It's about time. Two years ago, Space-X was talking about how they were going to produce a hundred engines a year. They have a big order backlog for Falcon 9 launches, and they are way behind. Supposedly the bottleneck was pad time and range time at Canaveral, not production. Opening the Brownsville facility, under the total control of Space-X, was supposed to fix that. But that's two years behind schedule now.

Not clear why they're having so much trouble with the soil at Brownsville. Sure, it's silt and alluvium, and bedrock is a long ways down, but Houston has similar geology upon which skyscrapers have been built.[1] The Falcon 9 doesn't need a massive launch complex. They currently use a solid roadbed with railroad tracks from the hangar, and a modest launch tower and flame deflector.

[1] http://www.beg.utexas.edu/staffinfo/paine-pubs/RI259_paine.p...

> It's about time.

Come on folks. Musk's companies are innovating at a fantastic pace. One year at either company is like three to five years at any other firm. And we come arm chair it in HN that "It's about time." The future is being delivered pretty damn quickly (~50K Tesla's/year manufactured, Falcon 9 returning to the pad successfully)

Our expectations might be slightly out of line with reality.

EDIT: If you'd like to speed things up:

https://www.teslamotors.com/careers

http://www.spacex.com/careers/list

Disclaimer: No affiliation with any Musk companies, except retail investor in TSLA.

This isn't about innovation, it's about production. It's been almost six years since the first Falcon 9 launch, and volume production hasn't started yet.

The Minuteman-I missile was first test-fired on 1 February 1961. All 800 Minuteman-I missiles were delivered by June 1965.

It's been a little over a month since the first launch of the last major revision to the Falcon 9. It's kind of been in beta for six years.

Reuse will actually make a big difference then. I can't wait for the relaunch of the one that landed before.

As other commenters have mentioned, Elon has stated that they plan to keep the first one ever returned on the ground. Reflights won't happen until they land another rocket [1].

They have done a static test fire of the F9 core, where they run through about the first several seconds of a launch while holding down the rocket with large clamps. In that static test fire, everything was mostly nominal though they did mention fluctuations in one of the nine engines. Elon has stated that the fluctuations may have been due to a small amount of debris that entered the engine during the landing procedure.

I share your sentiment, though! I absolutely cannot wait until they fly their first mission with a re-used core!

[1] They have a launch of SES-9 on Feb 24. It's been stated that they may attempt to recover this rocket, though it sounds like if recovery is attempted it will be a fairly low-likelihood of success attempt.

Thanks for the explanation, I guess I missed the statement from Elon.

"I think we’ll probably keep this one on the ground," he said, "just [because] it’s kind of unique, it’s the first one we’ve brought back."

http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/21/10642028/spacex-falcon-9-...

Alas they said they're not going to relaunch that one. They're only studying it to identify issues and improve reusability on future launches.

Can't help thinking the first re-flown one might be a self-funded test flight. Then again, maybe there are customers lined up to be the payload on there.

I think they plan to use them to launch the new satellites they are coming out with until they are proven reliable.

They do have a launch abort mission coming up. That seems like the prime candidate to me.

Kind of paradoxical that just after their first successful landing they ramp up rocket production. Isn't the point of re-usability not to have to build so many rockets?

I think if you step back and think about this you'll see there isn't really a paradox here.

SpaceX makes revenue on launches, if we assume that they make a profit on launches, then more launches means more money. None of that requires that their rockets are re-usable.

When they they are "Category 3" certified[1], other customers treat that like a reason to trust them with more valuable payloads and so more business will come their way as well.

So SpaceX works on growing and investing without re-usability. And when when you add resuable boosters to the supply, its like kicking on the after burner of profitability. You can now launch something for half the cost and make more margin, or at the same cost and make huuuge margins. If you get to that point, then you have a really strong competitive advantage against older competitors.

[1] http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/05/15/spacex-gets-certified-t...

So far they've only landed the first stage, not the whole rocket. And they've successfully brought it back to land, but not to the barge, which is what they need for larger payloads (since returning to the launch site requires fuel).

And maybe they think by the time they're reusing rockets on a regular basis, they'll have enough volume to need the bigger factory as well. I don't think they've said how many times they expect to reuse each rocket.

> but not to the barge, which is what they need for larger payloads (since returning to the launch site requires fuel)

To be clear, landing on the barge requires fuel too, just not as much.

That was the first mission return landing, ever. It'll be awhile before they can reuse a first stage for a mission, there's a lot to study and learn from returned stages and static firings (as the article said, they are already making changes based on what they learned).

More rockets to re-use, I'm guessing.

I don't think their current rockets are reusable. Only once they figure it out they can build more expensive engines that could be reused. I might be wrong though.

Current rockets are supposed to be reusable, they've designed them that way from the beginning. They've already test-fired the one they brought back, and it looks like they can reuse with minimal refurbishing.

http://www.universetoday.com/126837/spacex-test-fires-recove...

They are, and I expect if nothing else they want to continue to attempt more landings for study purposes. We won't see actual rapid re-use of rockets for few more years though.

Elon's best guess is 70% success rate on landings for 2016 - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/689299216607232000

In addition to all the rest, they still need to build a new second stage for every launch.

Spaceflightnow launch schule shows SpaceX and UAL tied at 14 launches each the rest of this year. Only Russian Soyuz+Proton has more.

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