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They haven't gone anywhere but none of them can compete in price. Even the new vehicles, ULA Vulcan and Arianspace Arian 6 will be vastly overpriced, even if they reach the goal price they have set for themselfes.

For SpaceX reuse and the price saving are already a reality, ULA and Arianspace are only in the concept phase for these things. Their rockets are only planned for first flight in 2020 and maybe reuse a couple of years after that.

The only reason Arianspace can compete at all is that they don't amortize the development of the rocket.

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They may not be able to compete on price, but they sure can when it comes to reliability and launch cadence (current strike action in French Guiana notwithstanding). Ariane 5 is currently on a 77 successful missions streak. SpaceX has a long way to go to reach those numbers.

If you're trying to get a $250 million satellite into space, price savings of $20-30 million can easily be outweighed by a long history of successful, on-time launches.

I checked launch cadence, and I am now thinking Ariane is in much bigger trouble than I thought.

Ariane 2016: 7 launches (all successful)

SpaceX 2016: 9 launches (8 successes, 1 failure)

Ariane 2017: only 1 so far (don't know how many affected by the strike)

SpaceX 2017: 4 successes so far.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ariane_launches_(2010%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

For spaceX they just had one failure out of 8. If they have none in 2017 and they can keep up the cadence then it will be a solid blow to rest of the industry.

I feel it's a lot easier to make SpaceX's rockets safer than ULA's rockets cheaper and reusable.

Once spacex finds their sweet spot in design, they can shooting them up like crazy.

I am really looking forward to the moon mission. Last time it happened, I wasn't even born :(

>I feel it's a lot easier to make SpaceX's rockets safer than ULA's rockets cheaper and reusable.

The thing is that safety is cultural, not technical. It means that everyone realizes their limits, and has a conservative streak in them (if it ain't broken, don't fix it, or so least test it like crazy before putting a customers multi-million dollar payload on it). SpaceX, on the other hand, is all about moving fast and iterating fast.

To be fair, the conservative streak cuts against safety too. I believe a large number of US launch accidents were ultimately attributed to "component or measurement out of spec, but it's worked before so we'll expect it to work again."

Wouldn't the "conservative" choice in your example be to replace the part or correct the measurement to spec even though it has worked in the past.

Let's label them inertial conservatism and objective conservatism. Where the former is the sense of "we should do things the way we've previously done them" and the latter is "we should do things the most conservative way out of all of our options, even if we've never done it that way before."

NASA during Challenger would have been an example of the former [1]. In a way that I think many overly bureaucratic organizations are.

The other sense is somewhat oxymoronic given that conservatism is generally resistance to change. So when safety situations arise where the safest option requires acting novelly, who is there to lead the charge? I suppose in that case you'd want a radical safety department.

[1] From the NYT article on the findings of the Challenger commission, "As Commissioner Feynman observed, the decision-making was 'a kind of Russian roulette. . . . (The shuttle) flies (with O-ring erosion) and nothing happens. Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flights. We can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it last time. . . . You got away with it, but it shouldn't be done over and over again like that.'" http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/10/science/shuttle-findings-l...

I think so. Conservative could mean 1) preferring gradual change over abrupt change, or 2) resistant to any change (stubbornly conservative?)

How can you tell what SpaceX's culture is like?

Note that ULA does change things from time to time, but never does a test launch.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is on the 3rd or 4th revision of F9, but their accidents have not been related to changes to the rocket.

SpaceX is already doing pretty good on launch cadence and they are gone to be way better before 2020 because they are building launch sites like crazy. Neither Arianspace or ULA will be able to keep up (they are simply not expanding their launch sites at the same rate).

You have a point on reliability, but I would ask you to consider that both Arianspace and ULA is pushing hard to get a new launch vehicle. There is no way, they would be doing that if they thought reliability was their big money maker. Additionally with their new rockets, that reliability will be mostly gone. Vulcan and Arian 6 need to build up a record as well, and that will be hard because they will both be very limited in launch cadence just because they don't actually have enough commercial flights.

I made a similar comment before, but the launch cadence is key in that it enables new markets.

If it takes two years to get your heavy launch payload scheduled then of course a ~$10M price difference is dwarfed by making sure nothing goes wrong on your end.

If SpaceX can reschedule you in a much tighter timeline, for a competitive or cheaper price, then simply building two payloads and skipping some of the exhaustive QA starts to make sense in a way it simply didn't before.

And as the market shifts to that kind of thinking, there's more business for rocket companies that can provide a quicker cadence, which allows them to grow farther, which reduces costs, etc.

And anyone who doesn't have a reusable product or expandability to match isn't able to take advantage of the new market reality.

Arianspace and ULA are building new rockets to reduce costs. So there's a datapoint for how those 2 companies balance reliability vs cost.

Note that Atlas V had zero failures when it was young. So there's proof that new development doesn't necessarily hurt reliability. You're correct that the track record of reliability will be absent for the first couple of dozen launches, which will be quite a while for at least Arianspace.

The Atlas V was built off the Atlas 3, so it wasn't totally starting from scratch. They kept the RD-180 engine, rebuilt the booster, and added strap-ons.

Also the Atlas program has about 40 years of experience on SpaceX. But I should point out they've also maintained their glittering track record while regularly upgrading their rockets, so they've shown it can be done.

Is the satellite that expensive? I would have thought that the cost to develop it (R&D) would be very high, but the cost to produce one actual satellite unit (given the R&D money are already spent) wouldn't be a quarter billion dollars.

Numbers aren't always easy to come by, but e.g. Amos 6, a more or less run-of-the-mill communications satellite that was destroyed when a Falcon 9 exploded during fueling operations, reportedly cost around $200 million.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/spacex-explosion-amo...

Surely the two questions are "price to insure against failure" and "business risk involved if launch delayed by needing to build a new one"?

Insurance for a launch is currently very expensive. My friends in the industry tell me that insuring a launch increases the cost by 50%.

The wording on that is misleading, you insure the satellite AND launch and then measured things in terms of launch cost. Industry has ~95% success rate so insurance is limited to around 10% of total costs or basically nobody would use it.

Further, insuring a 5% risk to a 200m satellite and a 100m launch vs a 200m satellite and a 50m launch at 10% failure rate would not be 2x because the payout is 50m less. Also, if the numbers get overly lopsided SpaceX would offer insurance for it's customers at close to the actual risk adjusted costs.

An Atlas V with the strap-on boosters is roughly equivalent to the Falcon 9 FT, it's about $150M (about $110M without the strap-ons). A brand new Falcon 9 non-reusable is around $65M?

You have a $200M satellite. Insurance on a Falcon 9 launch is $20M, your costs now are $85M. Even forgoing insurance on the Atlas V can't bridge the gap, and SpaceX's launch cadence is getting so rapid that you should be able to launch much sooner too.

Insurance rates aren't 10%, they're closer to 5%: http://spacenews.com/space-insurers-warn-that-current-low-ra... -- and note that 5% includes coverage of the 1st year of the satellite, and not just the launch.

Also, using a "flight tested" Falcon 9 apparently does not significantly raise the insurance rate: http://www.floridatoday.com/story/tech/science/space/spacex/... "In one measure of the mission’s perceived risk, Halliwell said that the insurance rates SES is paying “did not materially change” from a typical launch on a new rocket."

I wouldn't expect it to, and over time the insurance cost for used boosters may even be less if it turns out there are more failures related to manufacturing defects than damage from previous flights. Though it's going to be awhile before we know one way or the other.

Also, to be clear, in terms of reliability concerns vs your choice of launch provider the important thing is the marginal cost of insurance for company A vs company B.

As you say, if the insurance market were utterly deliquent it's inevitable that SpaceX would resolve the issue but I very much doubt it is. I wonder if it's done through lloyds...

Depends on the satellite. A cubesat is very cheap, a large commsat might be in the 100s of millions range, military surveillance satellites might be in the billions. But in general we should expect a world with cheaper launches to lead to an equilibrium where the average satellite gets less expensive.

To put this into perspective: the Planetary Society solar sail cubesats have a novel design, cost about $1 million apiece, and mass ~ 3kg. Falcon 9 costs about $12,000/kg for a GTO launch. The cubesat dispenser does have mass, but as you can see, the launch cost is still << satellite cost.

Amateur radio cubesats, which use 100% volunteer labor, appear to cost ~ $50,000 for a 3kg satellite. Launch cost is significant for them.

The thing I always forget is just how cold it is up there. You remember when your physics teacher dipped things in liquid nitrogen and smashed them? Well it's 70 degrees colder than that.

And then there's the radiation, the liftoff stresses, vacuum welding, and the complete inability to repair the thing after launch.

The problem is heat, not cold.

I could argue that SpaceX might be better targeted for manned flights, given that meat-loads can be replaced essentially for free, given the huge line of people willing to be sent to space even at significant risk.

Wouldn't a price reduction of that size open up a new market for smaller clients? Companies who couldn't afford it before would now be able to consider it.

Yes. It should open up the market to stuff that most of us can't yet imagine, but I'm sure someone somewhere is.

Probably just on the savings on insurance.

20-30 million extra for insurance would take an ~85% success rate and SpaceX is well past that. Industry average being 95% and SpaceX is around 93%.

Note: at ~95% you would expect very long stings of successes not just 19 then one failure repeat. But, it's reasonable for those long strings to represent an increasing probability of success over time.

There are no fundamental reasons to believe that SpaceX can and will not reach a similar level of reliability.

There are no fundamental reasons to believe that Ariane space and others can and will not reach a similar level of cost cutting by the time Space X gets anywhere near them in reliability level.

Yes there is. We know the target that they are planning for it. Those targets are for 2020 and beyond and its already more then you pay for a F9 now.

Yes, maybe sometime after 2025ish they might have their so far completely theoretical re-usability plan in action. Even then, they are still throwing away far more stuff then SpaceX. They throw away a very expensive upper stage, solid fuel boosters and most of the core itself.

Additionally and that is not talked about enough, Arianspace can only compete on price at this level with Arian 6 because the development cost is majority funded by ESA (and co). They don't have to put that in their launch price. So Arianspace is essentially completely unable to compete with SpaceX in terms of cost.

As long as the Arian 6 flies, it well simply never be competitive in cost with the Falcon 9. Even in price it will not be competitive. The architecture of Arian 6 as currently planed is just not designed for it.

The national champions are going to have a difficult time matching SpaceX on cost if for no other reason than the respective governments will force inefficiencies on these organizations by dictating where the rockets are built and by whom. That's what made the shuttle so damn expensive.

SpaceX won't be immune from this sort of meddling, but it's in a much better position to resist than, say, Arianespace or Roscosmos.

Optimism regarding future performance is not the same as a proven record.

Is this a jab at SpaceX or Ariane?

One of these has a proven record in conventional launches and the other has a track record of innovating. Only one of these is required today.

> For SpaceX reuse and the price saving are already a reality

Let's not get carried away... SpaceX has done one reuse until now, and there is no way to know exactly how much savings it will net them in the long run.

I appreciate the endeavour they started, but the HN fan service for Musk and his projects is cultish sometimes...

Obviously any discussion of the future of space will entail speculation since it's a volatile business by nature. But Shotwell recently stated that the savings of refurbishing a first stage over fabricating a new one was significantly over half, and the first stage itself comprises ~2/3 of the total hardware costs of an F9. It seems like that is a good starting place to estimate future savings, and other companies don't seem to have a competitive answer.

Aside from that, in my experience the anti-Musk is less rational than the pro-Musk group... We have a guy here that's started amazing companies that otherwise probably wouldn't exist. In the past year we saw the first orbital-class rocket landing on the Earth, a landing on an autonomous drone ship on the ocean, first launch and landing of a reused rocket first stage, and we heard about a private company's plans to send tourists around the moon, and eventually, settlers to Mars. Without SpaceX, none of that would be on the table right now. We'd still be waiting on NASA. I think the cult following is totally warranted.

Optimism around spaceX should be driven by it's current pricing and performance, which is pretty amazing. Even if they never improve their reliability and struggle to lower costs through re-usablity, they are still far cheaper for anyone who doesn't need the absolute best in reliability (certainly any payloads under $500B in value).

Yeah well - there are others who can compete on price as well.

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/24/6838079/india-mars-mangalyaan

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/15/india-launch...

Those are cool things but they don't have the rockets with the size and launch cadence to compete in the same market as SpaceX, ULA and Arianspace is right now. Maybe in the further away future they can do it.

They'd certainly be served better with fewer (at least not ~90%) old "management"-looking people on their webcasts, which could've looked like they were made in the last five years (and less misleading people with talk of "hundreds of satellites" that in reality, IIRC, weigh just about the conventional PSLV cargo capacity[0]).

The reason I'm not very gung-ho right now is because there is, just maybe, a future in which ISRO isn't just "one of the space agencies that have made it into orbit", but as important to the future of space as NASA was a decade or two earlier, and getting there involves not just doing good work, but being ambitious at the scale of SpaceX and such. ISRO is being funded well right now, but if they can't "make it" in the next decade, with NASA in a slightly precarious position and private companies with no history of going into space doing all manner of remarkable things, they are going to miss this shot, and that can be dangerous in a political climate where the "can such a poor country really afford to go into space" types might drown out more reasonable people and shutter things for good. I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers.

Good promotional material attracts talent: I seem to remember someone from SpaceX saying "our webcasts are actually recruitment propaganda", and, well, they work! Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi?

[0]: Around 1.5 tons, and, no, I'm not discounting the challenges of actually releasing that many microsatellites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSLV-C28

> They'd certainly be served better with fewer (at least not ~90%) old "management"-looking people on their webcasts, which could've looked like they were made in the last five years (and less misleading people with talk of "hundreds of satellites" that in reality, IIRC, weigh just about the conventional PSLV cargo capacity[0]).

Which is why they made this video highlighting the Indian women who powered the mars mission.

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/isro-pslv-women-mars-orbi...

they are all "management looking".

You do realize that ISRO is the third space agency in the world to have a mars capable launch right ? and did it at a tenth the cost ? The only others are US, EU and Russia.

We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it.

>>We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it.

Oh yes we are.

But Jugaad isn't exactly frugal engineering. Its more like badly put together hack.

Also frugal engineering only helps when you have specific goals and you wish to achieve only them. Larger culture of quality consciousness, innovation, precision engineering etc requires larger investments in time and money. Which is why you might eventually do a moon mission, but landing a man on moon will be that harder.

The real problem now for ISRO is mars mission and moon mission satellites are basically the advanced low hanging fruit versions of space work, not easy to pluck but if you jump a little harder you absolutely can. Anything beyond this like say landing rovers, especially big rovers will be very very hard. Or manned missions for that matter or something like a Hubble or James Webb Space Telescope, or the Voyager missions. You not only need bigger rockets, but the engineering and technology challenge there is just a whole lot degree higher. Getting to that requires building the equivalent of MIT's and Harvard's in India.

I think the USA or the western world can build the equivalent of PSLV quite easily. They just don't because there isn't much engineering challenge left in building a slightly larger ICBM. And then compete for profits there. While you can make the same money easily by selling satellite services.

Also though we should be proud of a diverse culture. Very few women are actually in any hard engineering roles there. Most are collect and report kind of jobs, or some management position, or some other desk jobs. Although that definitely counts as being a part of the project. But most of the real hard work that builds competency still sees very little involvement from women. A lot of people come in through reservations and remain dormant because of pension and other government benefits.

You do realise I'm Indian too? And that my point was that a lack of young people in the space agency, of all things, is a very bad thing? ISRO is doing good work, yes, and undercutting the ESA/NASA on price, but they're not doing unheard-of things. And others are. Jugaad can paper over a bug in course correction software or what-have-you, perhaps, but it can't create the propensity to make (metaphorical) moonshots that young people, who are not usually very risk-averse, are more likely to want. Right now, as the sibling commenter puts it, they're just hitting low-hanging fruit, and it's cheap because they have economies of scale and the comparative advantage of being able to get away with paying people less (which is not at all something bad, but it means they can do a lot more).

Anecdata: I have a friend who's wanted to work in this area for as long as I've known him (which is at least 7 or 8 years now), and he's far happier to try and find work outside India -- knowing how hard it is to find aerospace engineering work in, say, the US, with all the "weapons technology" trouble that makes gaining citizenship a requirement -- or, failing that, work at some Indian startup rather than ISRO. To be very honest, that's sad, and it's definitely not an exception. I don't see why that has to be the case: I've accepted with some resignation that math and theoretical physics/CS never will be, but space can definitely be -- for lack of a better word -- sexy. Our Lord and Savior[0] Elon Musk isn't the only one who can (or should) do it.

[0]: /s

I realize that ISRO's accomplishments are nowhere near NASA's or ESA's but to call ISRO's efforts 'jugaad' is a serious insult to the efforts and intelligence of thousands of people involved in getting a rocket to Mars.

>>"can such a poor country really afford to go into space"

Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones.

This creates demand for local talent. Colleges and universities get built. Students come out with good degrees. Even if you say fail executing the the hard engineering project you end up creating a huge population of highly educated and trained people which later on go on to start companies and drive the economy.

This decision has to be made almost every single country, even more so poor nations. Because human resources development is the only way you can be a progressive healthy economy on a longer run.

>>I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers.

ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere. The pay is not all that great compared to the best Multinational corp pays, even by Indian standards.

Another aspect is that of frugal engineering. There a lot of risky things that ISRO only does many other space agencies don't.

Eg:

They were just 18 months away from the launch date, and ISRO was only beginning to cut metal. One of the foreign partners had then asked ISRO managers: "Are you serious?"

From: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/24959866.cms

Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap.

>>Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi?

Why not?

Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?

Preface: I'm Indian, and I genuinely want ISRO to be the space agency: if not today, then certainly in fifty years.

> Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones.

Exactly my point. There was a ton of nonsense around the time of Chandrayaan about whether or not it was right to spend money on such things "when people were starving": in case it wasn't clear, I think that's bullshit. And I'm worried about it coming back, and actually doing some serious damage this time.

> Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?

As some of the other replies to your comment also point out: my problem is not the Hindi. If we launched a space telescope, I fear it'd end up named "Mahakashdoorbeen" or something. Why not something less boring than "Mars Vehicle" (which is what Mangalyaan translates to)? Remember, a 19- or 20-year-old is still young enough to be attracted to shiny things, so moralizing about how this is "useless nonconstructive criticism" doesn't help. The name doesn't increase the maximum pressure the rocket can survive, but it gets you people who can.

> Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap.

That's very interesting: it's reminiscent of Erlang, in a way. Launch a ton of cheap missions, expect some to fail, work on reducing the failure rate while not crying because a couple went up in smoke. I could see this turning into something big if they took it farther in public.

> ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere.

Why does it need to stay that way? It seems you know more than me about how ISRO works, so this just makes me sadder.

It seems from the downvotes that people think I'm one of the rabid "India is a toilet" types that surface on /r/worldnews whenever there's some good news about India. I'm not: it's just I think that more Indian leadership (for lack of a better word, again) in space (and STEM more generally) is something to legitimately care and feel proud about.

>>Preface: I'm Indian, and I genuinely want ISRO to be the space agency: if not today, then certainly in fifty years.

Wanting the end without any focus on means will take us no where.

Like I said in another comment. Focus on development of human resources. Good quality and uniform standard of education for everyone without discrimination. Building high quality higher institutions of the standard of Harvard's, MIT's and Stanford's is what will prepare your next generation of citizens who will build the next space stations and space telescopes.

In short solve social and political problems first. Western perspective on India is right though. You can't have starving people, who don't have access or means to basic hygiene or sanitation, coupled with society deeply in social problems won't take you too far.

What you have at ISRO is despite these problems and initial inertial of the initiatives created by a leader like Jawaharlal Nehru. Unfortunately off late the country's politics hasn't much talent to offer to the challenges and needs of our times.

>> Focus on development of human resources.

I would like to tangentially note that NASA couldn't have done what it has done without the post-WWII Operation Paperclip, in which the USA literally stole Germany's rocket scientists.

I don't disagree, but the point is the 'stolen' scientists actually agreed to work on some top US projects at that time out of their own will.

That says something.

If the best of the world want to come to some country- You have to be doing a lot of right things to build such a ecosystem.

When the alternate is Soviet Russia labour camps no wonder German scientists where falling over them selves to surrender to UK or USA

No, the problem isn't the language it's the name - they should name it the "Splendid Interplanetary Explorer" in Hindi, or something.

I believe they mean call it a more inspiring name - something like america's 'curiosity' or 'voyager'

For some reason you seem to be ashamed of your own culture. What's wrong in calling the Mars mission by its Hindi/Sanskrit name? Do China, Japan and Russia not use names from their languages for their missions? And what's wrong with old people appearing in the webcasts. They are the people behind the mission. They know the most and can inspire the best. NASA always puts their scientists (which are mostly old) in their webcasts. Do you recommend NASA do the same to attract youngsters?

See my replies downthread. It's not Hindi that I dislike, it's the choice of the name. I'm definitely on board about Hindi being a good idea for Indian spacecraft.

Calling the Mars mission "Mars Vehicle" in any language is stupid.

Their mars mission was amazing, not only was it cheap but they did it in a super short timeline and still managed it with such great attention to detail that it succeeded, and lot of martian missions fail.

One of the ways they made it for only $75M was the spacecraft was only 3,000 lbs, so they could use a relatively small rocket to launch with. But the Falcon 9 can put 8,000 lbs in martian orbit for only $65M. That doesn't include the spacecraft, so more expensive obviously, but not much.

India's space program is amazingly economical when compared to NASA. But they aren't as cheap per kg or as capable as SpaceX. They are "cheaper" in that they are launching much smaller rockets than SpaceX.

The GSLV can put 5,000 kg in LEO for around $36M. The PSLV puts 3,800 kg in LEO for around $15M. The Falcon 9 puts 22,000 kg in LEO for around $65M, re-usable is estimated around $45M for probably 15,000ish kg.

SpaceX's quoted $62M is for the first launch of a recoverable rocket. SpaceX does not have a published price for expendable launches.

Their price has been around $65M for years, even before they ever recovered a rocket. Either way it doesn't make a big difference, even if SpaceX was charging $85M for an expendable launch it's still cheaper per pound than virtually everyone.

They have the design expertise they need to compete. They're definitely behind, but they will respond. Besides, at least for awhile they have a quality advantage and they don't have such a huge backlog you can't get your satellite up for years.

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