SpaceX set to re-fly a Block 5 rocket for the first time tonight
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It's amazing this happened just a little over a year ago.
This is also the reason reusability doesn't make sense for Ariane. With less than ten launches per year, fixed costs make up a large portion of the cost. If they only needed one rocket per year, it wouldn't really get all that much cheaper because they still need the factory.
'SpaceX is so cheap that Ariane's CEO worries SpaceX could eventually "kick Europe out of space" if Ariane cannot figure out a way to launch its rockets more cheaply'
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/02/europe-complains-s...
It certainly is reliable, but it's not extremely reliable. It's had 2 total failures and 3 partial failures out of 99 launch attempts, including a partial failure this year on SES-14 that left the satellite in-orbit, but inclined 20 degrees to the equator, which will significantly shorten the satellite's lifespan.
Ariane 5 is reliable but the primary reason it is launching rather then ULA is not reliability but politics.
> Ariane's goal is not to win the most commercial contracts or compete with SpaceX on price.
That is false. That was exactly what their goal was all the way up to a 1-2 years ago when they finally realized how badly they fucked up.
They spent the last 10 years laughing at SpaceX and telling everybody how stupid SpaceX is and how nothing is gone work and how much better they are.
> This is also the reason reusability doesn't make sense for Ariane. With less than ten launches per year, fixed costs make up a large portion of the cost. If they only needed one rocket per year, it wouldn't really get all that much cheaper because they still need the factory.
You are repeating what is essentially propaganda that ignores important facts.
The reason Ariane can only launch 10 times a year is because they totally failed in innovating and rested their success for a long time and now that they got 3 billion to develop a new rocket, that they claimed would be competitive. However the totally fucked that up and are not even close to being competitive.
The very reason they go all this money for Ariane 6 was to build something competitive so they could continue to capture commercial launch so that government flights were cheap.
So it is not that re-usability is not worth it, its that they failed to make a commercially viable product and without that they are just monopolistic launch with a low launch rate.
> Ariane's goal is not to win the most commercial contracts or compete with SpaceX on price
Winning commercial contracts is how the price is kept reasonable. As you pointed out fixed costs are very large and launching GTO satellites helps spread them around.
If SpaceX kicks Ariane out of the commercial market then ESA governments will have to pay more for their own launches.
What if the "reasonable price" changes?
Is this an instance where the government should follow the maxim from Contact: "Why build one, when you can build two for twice the cost?"
The maxim in Contact was different - "Why build one, when you can build two, but keep the second one secret", right?
I do hope JWT could be recreated cheaper than costs to create it in the first place. No matter though, we'll still need other space telescopes anyway, so both reliability and price to orbit are important.
First I would ask him to list the various specific missions that the SLS is designed to carry out.
And then I would ask if the BRF lives up to its promises, which of those missions, if any it would not be able to carry out.
Not yet. Costs haven't fallen. The epoch-defining change would be back-to-back commercial launches with the same booster in a short period of time with zero or little retrofitting.
I disagree. I highly doubt reusing a booster has been more expensive to SpaceX than building new boosters. It is also speculated that at least the first few customers of reused boosters were given a discount.
If you are saying customer cost has not fallen, you may be correct. I would counter with the fact that SpaceX is already a low cost provider, lowering their price more may not increase their overall profits.
> The epoch-defining change would be back-to-back commercial launches with the same booster in a short period of time with zero or little retrofitting.
The booster SpaceX plans to reuse today is a "block 5" booster. This is basically the design that SpaceX hopes will enable that zero or little retrofitting reuse.
Well, they are. Which is natural, because the program is still R&D more than mass production.
> This is basically the design that SpaceX hopes will enable that zero or little retrofitting reuse
When that rapid re-use is demonstrated, it will mark the epoch. We could retcon to the original re-use, or even booster recovery. But that's premature.
(I'm still super excited about everything SpaceX does.)
That is false. You already pay 10 million less. That is 15% of the launch price. And 15% of the extremely cheap price that SpaceX was already selling.
The reality is that SpaceX simply increased its margin. The technology is still epoch defining.
If any competitor comes even close to SpaceX in price, they will simply drop the price again.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/russia-may-lack-the-... sums it up nicely.
Nitpicking on the language: why would SpaceX be a steamroller? Steamrollers are slow. Also, what does it mean for a steamroller to be in full force? Steamrollers push downward at a constant force, don't they?
I understand that SpaceX is crushing its competition, so you want to bring the steamroller metaphor, but perhaps for what you are saying other metaphors would be a better fit.
Further reading: Orwell, Politics and the English language[1]
Referring to SpaceX as a steamroller is a metaphor[1].
"In full force" is, indeed, an idiom that generally means "in entirety", "completely"[2]
"Steamroller in full force" is neither a metaphor nor an idiom. It's a mashup of the two, and a phrase hitherto unuttered because it doesn't carry meaning.
Put simply, the set of things that can be "in full force" generally does not include steamrollers.
Please see Orwell's essay I linked to. "Fascist octopus has sung its swan song" is an example there that is a similar mix of metaphors.
There are many ways this can be fixed; steamrollers can gain momentum, for example.
As I said - it's not a principal point; I'm nitpicking. However, I believe clear communication is important - so here is an opportunity to improve.
When the stages separate, the first stage is going about 1.5 - 2.5 km/s. Then the second stage takes the payload the rest of the way to orbital speeds of 7+ km/s, and the first stage returns to earth.
So the first stage is going fast (several thousand miles per hour) but not as fast as things that re-enter from orbit. It still does need heat shielding, but not as much as the space shuttle or a capsule.
There is heat coating on the new rest of the rocket.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13935/how-does-the...
However, they have development costs of something like a billion dollars to pay back, and no reason to lower the price drastically at this point, so new launches on reused rockets are going for ~50 million instead of 62 million.
[1] https://spacenews.com/spacex-gaining-substantial-cost-saving...
I had no idea they were aiming for this level. That is just mind boggling how drastic a change it's going to be.
This is important to keep in mind when wondering why a corporation would continue pushing its costs down after obtaining an effective monopoly. As long as Mars is the goal SpaceX won't turn into a ULA or Ariane. But if for some reason SpaceX ceases to pursue Mars then it would likely recapitulate the same business decisions of every other spacefaring corporation.
I think this in particular is really the hugest benefit of privatizing space. When we had the government in charge of space, it living or dying was really subject to nothing more than the whims of a gaggle of politicians. As space has become a prominent part of the private industry with ever increasing competition, you remove that aspect of a single point of failure. I think the odds of us entering into another era of stagnation come regression are rapidly approaching 0, and that's incredibly exciting!
I have serious doubts about this, but it's about time that people who have the means and ability to make incredible things happen became so aggressively technological that their ideas seemed doubtful. It wasn't that long ago that many believed that complete rocket reusability impossible (to say nothing of autonomous retropulsive landings on barges getting rocked around in the middle of the ocean). Then it changed it uneconomical. Then it changed to 'oh shit, we're now a decade behind technologically.' I now find myself on the doubter side and look anxiously and happily forward to being proven wrong!
You can get a 50% reduction in costs just by going to India for launch..
Is SpaceX going for 2nd stage reuse at all? That's going to be a lot harder than booster stage reuse, since you're returning to land at orbital velocity.
And then there's the whole issue of increasing reliability of the 1st stage for reuse hundreds (or thousands) of times needed for new business models...
You can't take a rocket to India and you can't manufacturer that rocket in India (Skilset, US based corporation, ITAR) so you can't achieve your savings that way.
Even Russia - which is using a very old tried and true rocket design - can't match prices at this point. In addition, the budget cuts in Russia have resulted in a massive reduction in reliability, which has blown up their insurance cost recently.
In terms of second stage re-usability, they are looking at that for FalconX, and it's designed in at the start for BFR. Landing something from a second stage is as difficult comparatively vis-a-vis landing the first stage, as landing the first stage was compared to the suborbital hops that Blue Origin is doing.
The latest SpaceX idea (judging by Elon's tweets) appear to be some sort of Ballute based approach.
The first stage re-use should be good for 10 flights without a overhaul, with a complete tear-down on flight 10.
Out of curiosity -- can they _fly_ a rocket to India (maybe have a booster return to India instead of a drone ship ? Too far/out of the way ?
That may not help much since stage 2 would still have to be shipped around, which is probably not cost effective, and there might be other regulations that make it infeasible to launch anywhere but in the USA.
With Falcon, no way. The boosters land out at sea, but nowhere near that far out ;-)
I have not heard of that one and neither has google.
Yes, they are (and yes, it will be): "SpaceX also continues to study the feasibility of returning and reusing the second stage of the Falcon 9, and Musk said he’s confident it can be done. The question is what “mass penalty” will have to be paid, primarily in terms of the fuel needed to slow the second stage down so that it can make a controlled descent back through Earth's atmosphere.
"Still, Musk believes the Falcon 9 will get to full reusability. In terms of the rocket’s overall cost, the first stage accounts for 60 percent, the upper stage 20 percent, the fairing 10 percent, and the remainder are costs associated with the launch itself (fuel costs are between $300,000 and $500,000), Musk said."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/spacexs-block-5-rock...
All new work is now on BFR, which will have 2nd stage reusability, orbital refueling, better economics etc. I think you're also underestimating how far this Falcon will get them - their timelines suggest that this is what they'll use to launch their global internet satellite network, not BFR.
By going to a much larger class of rocket, those concessions for re-use become a smaller fraction of the total stage 2 mass.
My guess is the first full-reuse rocket you'll see will be the SSTO BFR.
[citation needed] - I don't think BFR is intended to be single-stage to orbit?
Really there's no point to doing an SSTO launch in practice since the BFR first stage will in theory be just as reusable (if not more so) than the BFS second stage. Using the first stage booster greatly improves payload to orbit and has relatively low marginal cost once you've built and tested the whole system.
Logistically, to me it seems that it would be a great idea to have a refueling station in orbit which is supplied by BFR cargo ships ..say.. once a month.
Launching a BFR for each launch of BFS would require a lot of transportation and duplicated effort. Is this intuition wrong?
The fuel for your station has to get there somehow, and so does the station itself. The BFS-tanker ships would need to be launched with a BFR booster to bring up a meaningful amount of fuel, and there are going to be way more of those than there will be BFS-crew launches (ignoring the Earth-to-Earth transportation segment, where a centralized fuel station wouldn't make sense since each route will take a very different orbital path).
SSTO-ing the BFS-crew would require another BFR booster-plus-cargo launch anyway to replace the fuel and cargo you could have carried up in the BFS if you had launched it on the BFR booster to begin with.
The only angle that makes sense to me for doing a BFS-crew SSTO with minimal payload would be if it is deemed to be less risky for loss-of-crew. In that case you could have a BFS-tanker already on orbit and fully loaded by multiple BFR-plus-tanker launches, ready to rendevous with the BFS-crew ship after it reaches orbit on fumes.
I think that is unlikely though since such a launch might leave the BFS-crew without the fuel margin required to divert or de-orbit and land propulsively without refuelling.
For intuition, consider moving to a new house. What’s better, renting a tiny car with room for one suitcase, or renting a big truck? The car is cheaper and easier to drive, but unless all of your stuff fits in one suitcase, the truck is going to be much cheaper and easier for this task.
Orbital refueling is critical for the Mars plans. BFR can’t launch for Mars without it, so the capability will definitely be there.
I am guessing a BFR + specialized fuel container payload will deliver far more fuel to orbit compared to BFR + BFS + fuel.