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Comment by kilroy123 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if they'll really save money right away doing this. I imagine they'll spend a lot on inspections and getting things 100% right.

Either way, it's an amazing achievement.

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There is a bigger question which was asked in the Economist this week (http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-25-08/spa...), which is can SpaceX create a big enough market where they can realize the savings of reusability? Right now satellites cost more than the price of the rocket, so if you shave off $10 million on a launch that's pretty much a drop in the bucket compared to the overall price.

This isn't to take anything away from SpaceX. It's absolutely amazing what they've done. I only hope that they can open up the market enough for things like asteroid mining and space tourism.

Mansa Musa can be considered the wealthiest man in history. On a pilgrimage to Mecca he gave gold to the poor everywhere along the way and traded great values of it too. He inadvertently destroyed many economies for a long time with the influx of capital.

Asteroid mining is going to do much the same thing, but the changes will be permanent.

It's not a matter of "if" but "when". Lots of sophisticated technology needs to be developed and the up-front cost is going to be in the billions... but once it's done and regular, lots of economies for materials are going to be shattered.

Satellite programs cost so much _because_ rockets cost so much. You can't justify putting a cheap satellite on an expensive rocket, but as the launch cost goes down, you get to being able to launch cheaper and cheaper satellites.

If SpaceX fails, someone else will succeed. The cat is out of the bag.

Building many identical satellites in an assembly-line like fashion cuts down on costs significantly. Large geostationary satellites are currently based on standard buses (like the Boeing 702 and its variants), but each satellite is generally a bespoke product. Larger quantities of the same thing like the second generation Iridium network and the o3b MEO satellites are very interesting from a per-unit cost perspective.

Right. It definitely looks like we could be in for a shakeup in the industry. The question still remains though; what is the total size of the market for all of those satellites? How many could we place in MEO/GEO/GSO before the market is completely saturated? I honestly have no idea. I would think the LEO satellite market will eventually be dominated by less powerful vehicles, although if SpaceX can survive long enough to open up other markets (like Mars tourism and mining), maybe those smaller rockets get cannibalized by payloads being co-launched on larger vehicles.

Geosync slots are scarce. There's a market in them.[1] Low-orbit slots are more available.

[1] http://www.nyulawglobal.org/globalex/Paper_satellites_free_u...

Reduced launch costs can compel emergence of entirely new kind of customers. Quite like the relatively affordable New England minicomputers of 1970s propelled whole new markets, branches of CS and eventual personal computing revolution.

If you can lower the cost for launching, you should also open up the market for cheaper satellites. Possibly not built the same rigorous way that a 100M satellite goes through.

This should also put pressure on the satellite manufacturers to lower costs.

The US gov't is working with contractors to make use of cubesats built from commercial off the shelf products to be able to produce cheap constellations of satellites for a fraction of the cost (hundreds of thousands per satellite instead of hundreds of millions) of what they've been paying. These satellites also will have significantly shorter lifespans (1-2 years) so they'll need more frequent launches to replenish the fleets, but the advantage is they can keep upgrading with the latest technology without being locked into a 10 or 20 year old machine. SpaceX dropping the cost of launches fits right into this.

"Either way it's an amazing achievement."

What the what.

We've gone from "holy ish, sci-fi reusable rockets and we's living la vita future!" to qualified approval..?

No. No. This is not about satellites. This is about the primary cost component for transporting a colony to Mars. And it's already destroying the competition pricewise, and this will widen that gap enormously.

Did the Spanish Govt say, well, that's nice and all, but spices are still pretty pricey? Maybe we don't go back? No. They didn't. They said, "Awesome, lock that ish down. We want a monopoly. And bring us more funny trinkets to show off to our landlocked friends to make us giggle and feel superior."

So yes, it's a huge, amazing fucking achievement.

Well said. This is one of those things that will get a specific mention in the history books for a long, long time.

Previous generations remember where they were for the Moon landing, just as I'll always remember where I was for the first successful Falcon 9 first stage return.

Probably like pancakes, the first is always a wash that you feed to your cousin.

That is the essential question, of course assuming this flight goes off without a hitch they will have new data about what it took to this this booster back to flight ready status, and then they can see what they did that they could do better, what tools they should make to improve efficiency and what tweaks to the design will lower the time to cycle it through.

There are interesting precedents in the tooling jigs that Thiokol built to refurbish SRBs and the Rockwell folks used to do tile repair for the Shuttle.

When the first booster was recovered, Elon said something along the line of that they're a bit like the dog that chases a car and now they've caught one they have to figure out what to do with it. That's what's great about Elon, he just tells it like it is. I'm sure they did have some plans for what to do, but as you say it's a whole new process they need to do a lot of work on improving.

I also wonder this!

CRS-8 was launched on the 8th of April this year, so given that the launch of SES-10 is slated for Q4 2016, that means there's like, 6/7/8 months for the turnaround.

But I'm hopeful that we'll see an assembly line of rockets landing, being inspected, and being launched, sometime in the future :)

The delay between landing and relaunch has less to do with refurb on this particular booster, than with the series of tests that they're doing on other returned boosters to convince both the customers and their insurance companies that they generally come back in re-flyable condition, which have been happening on and off for months. Among other things, a different booster has been put through at least three full-length test-fires at their proving ground in Texas.

It isn't clear how much refurb will be required generally, beyond replacing some of the surface thermal protection that came back visibly dinged up. (Well, at this point, SpaceX knows what it took to refurbish one, but I'm not aware of any public statements about it yet.) But they're certainly acting like the propulsion systems don't need much -- the very first returned booster (the one now on permanent display outside the SpaceX factory) was re-fired on the launch pad within weeks of return, without having ever left the Cape, just to prove that they could.

They would have launched sooner, but public opinion is swayed too much by failure. Engineers and money men don't really care, failure is interesting and valuable. Unfortunately, so is public opinion and support... and every perceived failure has a million armchair rocket scientists shitting on SpaceX because people loove to do that sort of thing... so they have to be unduly careful about it.

If that would be the case, SpaceX wouldn't tweet explosion videos on every failure or have live streams of their launches. They would take the approach of Blue Origin that only publishes carefully edited marketing footage where everything always seems to go perfectly.

This is really not about public opinion. SES insisted a lot with SpaceX to get the first re-used booster at a considerable discount. They were also the very first customer to fly on SpaceX. The delay in launching it comes from two reasons: a) because they had to do quite a lot of extra testing on the recovered booster to certify it again for flight and b) because SpaceX is actually overloaded with launches as they have the most cramped launch schedule of any other company.

Considering the very deep nature of the three-way relationship between a commercial satellite customer (SES), a launch vendor (SpaceX) and an insurer (many companies), I wonder if they negotiated an agreement to essentially embed a thoroughly vetted employee of the insurance company inside SpaceX, working alongside and observing the team that is doing the returned rocket testing and qualifications, teardowns, test firings, etc. I would not be surprised if this is the case.

The first rocket launch cost a total of $63 million or so, IIRC. This one, I've read, is being done for about $15-20 million less. Still tens of millions of dollars, but quite a bit of savings, especially for the first time SpaceX has done this (considering the risk involved).

Even if they saved money on this one particular booster the costs of the technology and all the landing attempts/ successful landings will probably mean it takes some time to come out ahead overall.

I think I've read that the cost of an empty Falcon 9 first stage is somewhere $10 million. They would have to spend a lot on inspections in order to not save a lot of money. IMHO, a lot of the skepticism I've previously read about SpaceX's reusability program is just inherited from the Space Shuttle program. I.e. ""if the US government can't do it, how can a small-ish private company do it"?

Ugh, the space shuttle was such an abomination it blows my mind it was allowed to continue siphoning resources for so long

When SpaceX and SES were negotiating in press releases, SpaceX said that eventually they'd offer a 30% discount for a re-used first stage. That's $20mm. The first stage has to cost significantly more than that.

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