SpaceX successfully lands its sixth Falcon 9 rocket after launch

It doesn't make much business sense to pass along ALL the efficiency savings directly to your customers.

30% reduction in launch costs will be hugely welcomed and SpaceX will be able to do lots with the additional revenue.

Imagine the cost of the drone ship, the landing system and the logistics of recovery - I suspect that's the reason it's only a 30% reduction.

Remember in the current Falcon 9 design, they are only reusing the first stage -- reported to account for 70% of the cost of the rocket (which is of course different to the retail price of launch service), and attempting to recover and reuse the fairing, an aluminum honeycomb core + carbon fibre sheet enclosure the size of a city bus, which is thought to add a couple million dollars per rocket including capital costs (SpaceX is thought to have limited capacity to produce fairings at a high rate, which is why they're chasing reuse).

They still need to rebuild the entire second stage each launch, and continue to pay the salaries of 4,000+ employees.

If the end-to-end launch service is priced at $60 million, 70% is $42 million, with the other 30% ($18 million) that needs to be paid each launch. Assuming the cost of all re-use is 100% free (gas and go), a full passing on of the savings would mean the second launch (which has a free first stage) could be priced at $18m + ($42m/2) = $39 million.

That's a 35% discount off $60 million. SpaceX haven't proven that reflying a returned booster is safe and reliable. It will take many relaunches to gain statistical knowledge of safety of the fleet they're building.

If SpaceX can reliably relaunch the first stage 5-10 times with minimal refurbishment costs, the amortized costs drop dramatically. During the development of the Merlin 1, testing aimed for 10 full duration (3 minute) test fires. I can see SpaceX aiming for 5-10 flights per booster with the current iteration of Falcon 9 over the longer term.

I encourage anybody interested to play around with this spreadsheet [1]. If the current design can be proven to have say 5 launches per Falcon 9 booster, that's a 65% saving to SpaceX. Falcon 9 is already the cheapest vehicle in its class (though some providers are cost competitive if doing dual launches on say, an Ariane V). The Russia's Proton rockets were reasonably cost competitive, but their reliability has proven to be very low in recent times.

As Amdahl's Law notes, as the number of reliable relaunches per rocket with minimal refurbishment costs increases towards infinity, the total cost will asymptotically approach the currently non-reusable portion of the costs (so in the current design it's the second stage, launch operations, fuel, fairings etc)

In a few decades, SpaceX wants to get airplane like re-use (fully re-usable with thousands of flights per vehicle lifetime), where each passenger pays a marginal cost of roughly the jet fuel cost and inspections and refurbishments don't happen every single flight but at set intervals. That's a probably several design generations away though (human Mars landing will certainly happen first)

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/144Y_OVmFFYTh_zTiV-FH...

> 30% doesn't seem very impressive

If one launch provider can send you up for $40M instead of $60M for the others, would you ever go with the others?

Suddenly SpaceX owns the launch business.

Costs per launch include fuel (trivial at < $0.5m), rocket (say $30-40m of which first stage is 3/4) and recurring costs like employee time, refurbishment, test fires, barge rental, range costs etc (significant maybe 5-10m?). Musk is prone to talking about the far future as if it were tomorrow and within our grasp today. If you count medium term as 3-5 years (I'd call that short term), there is no way they're getting an order of magnitude saving.

They charge $60m, so it's unlikely ever to come down below 20m without 2nd stage reuse, and say around 5-10m even with full re-use in a few decades. Best case they could probably get it down to 10% of current costs (90% saving) if they manage full re-use and cut down on recurring costs a lot, but for now 30% is pretty impressive.

They mentioned on the live stream that the landing point doesn't really change the difficulty. It doesn't matter whether they land on water or on land, for the most part. What makes the landings difficult is how much propellant is left in the first stage. There's more of it left after a LEO launch, so they can do a longer landing burn and during that have more opportunity to correct, e.g. for winds. With the GTO launches there's only very little left, so the landing burn is shorter, which also stresses the vehicle more. This time they were happy to actually do a one-engine landing burn as opposed to three engines like they did with the drone ship landings so far (I think it has always been three engines at first and then one engine for the very last bit for drone ship landings until now).

They've also noted numerous times that waves don't really matter much to the landing.

True, interesting collection of Merlin engines they have. If nothing else their spare parts cache is huuuuge. :-)

Can't wait to see what they launch with the refurbed boosters.

they have done an engine reignite test on one of them.

Every year since 2013 was the year of the first Falcon Heavy flight. Maybe this time.

No, the launch was at 6:26 am BST.

Could it have been an Iridium flare? The timing sort of matches up.

http://www.heavens-above.com/IridiumFlares.aspx?lat=53.1204&...

The flashes would have been Perseids. We saw a few as well, including one that flared brightly and left a short persistent trail that took about 10 seconds to disperse. If one comes directly down, or at an angle but towards you, it will just look like a flash in the sky.

Depends on the launch. There is no remaining fuel in a second stage for any Delta v to lower its orbit into the atmosphere in most launches. A launch to GTO at 350 x 36,000 km will eventually decay. In some satellite launches there is a third stage (like a fregat, but not the same thing) which performs the final circularization of the orbit. In others the satellite itself does this. In a launch to an MEO orbit like 1500x1500 km the 2nd stage is going to stay up there pretty much forever as dead debris.

Some are deorbited immediately (such as on ISS resupply flights) others are left in orbit but so far they all have fairly low perigees so they re-enter after a few months at most.