SpaceX Launches 19th Rocket in a Year, a Company Record | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX Launches 19th Rocket in a Year, a Company Record

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176 pointsrbanffy96 comments

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They broke four records today:

1. First company booster to fly three times

2. First to launch from all SpaceX pads

3. Now most number of SpaceX launches in a year.

4. Highest number of spacecraft flown on a US rocket

64th Falcon 9 mission. 70th including Falcon 1 and Heavy.

Additionally, this was the first time that the fairings were recovered and are expected to be reused for a future launch:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1069679948103847939

The fairings currently cost a total of $6MM for each launch, or at least 10% of the physical rocket cost, so this could lead to significant savings for future launches.

> The fairings currently cost a total of $6MM for each launch

WHAAAAA?! What are they made of? I thought the fairings were just the covers for the payload. What makes them so expensive?

They have to survive the launch through the thicker part of the atmosphere, yet still be light enough to not eat into the payload much.

Made from aluminium honeycomb and carbon fiber mostly, if I remember correctly. But those things are quite large as well.

I think they play a pretty important role in protecting the payload from atmospheric drag among other things, and it needs to be pretty strong / reliable. That must add to the cost. Don't know what materials are used so can't say about material costs.

They're large or larger than a double decker bus. They're released well after first stage separation so they need to be as light as possible. Stupidly light. Despite being very large and very light, they need to be very resistant to vibration through hypersonic speeds and go through a huge range of temperatures. They need to separate reliably and equalize pressure during ascent. They look like a mere shell, but they're actually advanced composite structures with a fair amount of tech involved.

They also have a built in parachute deployment mechanism which can safely get them down to sea level.

I don't think it's fair to count that as part of the 6M cost that you are "saving", if you just did the typical thing and threw them away you wouldn't need parachutes.

Carbon fiber and aluminum, mostly.

The reason for reuse isn't really the cost (though that's certainly part of it). The main driver is that they are going to become the production bottleneck if Falcon 9 reaches the flight cadence they are shooting for. The fairings are a big, unwieldy shape, and they take up a lot of room during the manufacturing process, so they can only make one at a time.

Elon described it in an interview once as this:

If you saw $6 million, falling from the sky, would you try to catch it? Each fairing is around $3 million, so they're trying to catch it. That gives them $6 million more per-customer they can discount the price should they need to get really competitive. It is really kind of insane that no one has tried this before.

Love that kind of commentary Elon provides.

Link to the interview?

I did look at the past few interviews I've watched, but can't easily find it and google is failing me. It was one of the long hour+ interviews, I do believe.

Musk has used the pallet of cash analogy several times.

Here is Musk using it in regards to saving the fairing @ ISS Research and Development Conference 2017:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cPMS6cT0Ig&t=825

In regards to the first stage (booster stage) at Code Conference 2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsixsRI-Sz4&t=545

The recovery ship(FSV Mr. Steven) has a twitter account (unofficial) https://twitter.com/FairingCatcher

This is the second rocket launch today! The earlier one was Soyuz Launch to ISS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18587943

I didn't know that there are so many rocket launches going on all the time. Here's a list of them: https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/

There a launch almost every second day.

The most interesting ones are Dec 7 Chinese launch to the far side of the moon and Jan 30 launch of India's moon rover.

If all goes according to plan, SpaceX will also be launching again tomorrow for their next CRS mission (resupplying the ISS).

Wow, its starting to look like an arrivals/departures board at the airport.

Also the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft just arrived at the asteriod Bennu today. At some point it will land and take samples to return to earth.

Here is a link to the launch video (cued at T-15s): https://youtu.be/Wq8kS6UoOrQ?t=1179

I love how the lower part of the rocket is battered and burned by repeated re-entry. It's starting to look like something from a gritty sci-fi movie.

these landings are still just magic to me when I watch them. I know one day this will be old hat but for now I will just watch and enjoy them

And this is after only two flights. It's a Block 5 booster, which are supposedly designed for 100 reflights each.

She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid.

So the 'steamroller' is now up to speed.

Does anyone have any ideas if Spacex will actually grow the launch market, rather than just dominate. What new things become possible with lower cost access to space.

Spacex are developing communications satellites for internet, what else?

Edit: Thanks for all the replies so far, I was thinking more down to earth (di dum ch) things rather than theoretically possible. Eg I know that certain drugs are made in space because the crystal structure requires zero g (or something), so is that something with pent up demand, or some exciting materials that are awaiting lower cost manufacture.

> What new things become possible with lower cost access to space.

Mars.

real time google earth

go outside and wave hello

DigitalGlobe did something like that recently: http://blog.digitalglobe.com/industry/sending-data-from-spac...

Not sure if you're being serious.

On first thought I thought you were joking, but then real time traffic, Forest fire/ eruption/ tsunami alerts. Massive amounts of data to process, but could be useful.

This is essentially what Spire is doing. Their weather processing facility is here in Boulder.

https://spire.com/

In addition to asteroid mining and other industrial activities, once pricing comes down, I think entertainment could be a large market.

Space tourism is one possibility, but tourists have to deal with getting sick going up.

I think entertainment produced in space but sold on Earth could be big - particularly space sports! You could design sports that are just not possible to play on a planet.

More or less you can control Gs going up. The bigger challange will always be Gs when going down thru no atmosphere violently slowing down from 30,000 mph to 150. There is no viable way to slow you down “slowly” when gravity takes over.

“No-grav” sports sounds interesting but I think with relatively cheap travel the biggest thing will be building a smaller (financially feasable) version of Elisium.

The Gs aren't in the range of "danger to human life", at least not for nominal mission profiles (all bets are off if things go wrong, of course). For the foreseeable future you'll likely just have to be willing to deal with "rough rollercoaster ride lasting minutes" if you want to go to space. For a lot of people, that excitement will even be some of the appeal.

People keep say astroid mining but I've yet to see a convincing business case...

A simple use case would be mining asteroids for ice and selling it to NASA for use in the ISS.

The ISS isn't a big enough water market to merit this kind of activity. This might be viable if we had 100x more people in space.

also asteroids generally orbit in the plane of the ecliptic, the delta-v needed to take water mined from a main belt asteroid and bring it to LEO, then match it with the inclination of the ISS orbit at 51.6 degrees inclination is non-trivial.

While it's a non-trivial amount of delta-v, if the asteroid has a large amount of water then the water already present on the asteroid can be used to generate the delta-v.

Attempting to put an asteroid into LEO is perhaps the worst risk/reward ratio humanity ever conceived. No way it's going to happen.

Are you thinking of comets? Asteroids are generally closish to the ecliptic. You'd normally want to find easy to reach asteroids rather than randomly choosing asteroids and there are a number you can get to for just 100 m/s beyond Earth escape, though it'll take a while at that speed.

The problem is that nearby asteroids tend to be dry since they're being warmed by the Sun as much as Earth is and lack Earth's gravity well, ozone layer, and magnetic field. You want to go to Jupiter's trojans or so, or maybe just Ceres if you're willing to deal with its gravity well and dig a bit. For Jupiter's orbit you're looking at 3,300 m/s plus escape. Still a lot less than getting to orbit and you can use an ion drive but hardly trivial.

I agree that cheaper launches will not do much to directly change the business of astroid mining. The majority of the cost, even today, are not related to rockets.

> The majority of the cost, even today, are not related to rockets.

"Even today". There is an opinion that payloads are so expensive because the launchers are expensive. I.e., you can't send replacements easily, because a launch is expensive, so you have to design the payload so that it wouldn't break, and last 9-s of reliability cost additional 0-s in price.

In other words, if launchers would become cheaper, that would encourage sending more payloads which isn't designed to be as reliable and serve as long. If something happens, just send a replacement. The issue of space junk comes to mind, but if launches are cheaper you can include into the launched mass the active means of dealing with space junk, like fuel for deorbiting.

Asteroid mining would require brand new technology. We cannot crash an entire asteroid into Earth's surface, we would need to do zero g mineral processing, regardless of how the minerals are ultimately used. This is a task no one has ever done before. How do you estimate the cost of doing something like this? I'm not qualified, but I do know if a traditional mining organization decided to mine an asteroid the launch costs would be a small line item in their budget.

The traditional NASA ideology is risk averse. It's way easier for them to spend billions doing all kinds of tests and modelling to ensure mission success on the first try. This looks suspiciously related to unwillingness to do multiple similar missions on the side of the customer - i.e. Congress in this case. Once in 1990-s there was an attempt to do things "faster, better, cheaper", which today could be named "move fast and break things", but with some inevitable failures the approach fell out of favor.

As for asteroid mining, Caterpillar was considering lunar base operation equipment on a previous iteration (G.W.Bush program). You probably right, they'd present a hefty bill, but I somehow doubt they'd offer something truly innovative. Maybe with new scrappy startups we can drastically slash those non-launch costs - then we'll come back again to the question of launch prices.

> Maybe with new scrappy startups we can drastically slash those non-launch costs - then we'll come back again to the question of launch prices.

Over time asteroid/moon mining is inevitable. Technology will develop (costs fall), and we'll exhaust the mineral supply of Earth (prices increase). I'm sure, among many other types of organizations, scrappy startups will help us get there.

What are we proposing to mine? The business case for platinum is easy to make if there is a quantity of relatively pure ore. The business case for iron is hard to make. Unfortunately iron is common on earth and on asteroids (I'm confident in making that statement without looking it up so I guess I could be wrong). Platinum is rare on earth and in great demand, and seems to be just as rare in space.

I can come up with other cases, but there is a lot of other technology that needs to be worked on before we are ready to build generation ships heading to other star systems.

Iron in space is worth a lot more than iron on earth. It is expensive to get that iron from earth into space. Possibly cheaper to get it from asteroids to earth orbit, or the moon for building space structures.

Apparently the precious metal content on asteroids is through the roof. Titanium, Nickel, Platinum, etc. One study concluded that there was more than a trillion dollars worth of metal on one asteroid alone.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2015/07/19/trillion-do...

And there's 0.005 ppm / kg * 5.97219 * 10^24 KG * 29540 $/kg = ~ 1 sextillion dollars worth of platinum in the earth's crust.

There's no case for bringing asteroids to Earth in any reasonable time frame. But on the other hand bringing stuff up Earth's gravity well and even loose rubble could be useful if brought to Earth orbit.

Planetary Resources just folded up shop and got sold. The new company is liquidating most of the assets from what I can tell. That's a shame. That looked like a really interesting concept.

> Does anyone have any ideas if Spacex will actually grow the launch market, rather than just dominate.

Total global launch numbers per year has been trending up since mid '00s, when the market was at an all time low. This upward trend predates Spacex and is larger than Spacex. The record number of annual global launches is 120 in 1967. 2018 has had 98 launches so far. There are 172 planned launches for 2019. [0]

> Does anyone have any ideas if Spacex will actually grow the launch market, rather than just dominate. What new things become possible with lower cost access to space.

Spacex is enabling new space projects in two areas. Having the cheapest launches, and having the largest single launch lift capacity. In the future, before Mars, we can expect to see more enabling from Spacex, such as having the cheapest human launches, and having even more lift capacity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight

As any satellite project takes many years from planny to launch, I could imagine it will take the marked quite a bit to fully absorb the availabiltiy of the SpaceX services. Launches get cheaper and with the F9Heavy larger satellites could be designed.

The big growth market right now is earth observation - companies like Planet Labs that rely on low launch prices to make their "cheap" camerasats worthwhile to launch. We'll see what markets come up next.

In the short term, though, SpaceX has actually shrunk the market - there's a slowdown in the historically-dominant geostationary launch market, since there's a lead time of a few years on those big expensive satellites and all the manufacturers put plans on hold a couple of years back while they were waiting to see what would happen in the launch market. Hence it taking until December this year for SpaceX to reach its previous-year launch number - 10%-ish growth is actually very slow by SpaceX standards.

(This is also a motivation for SpaceX to play with things like running its own comsat constellation - they'll have extra capacity for the next year or two while the GEO market restabilizes.)

They also proposed super fast intercontinental travel via BFR. I think they claimed something like ~20m NYC to Shanghai travel time.

Unfortunately it would have the Ryanair problem of 'Shanghai' spaceport being somewhere in the Gobi desert. And 'NYC' spaceport being somewhere in the Nevada desert, so the journey will still take 12 hours.

Plus I can't see China accepting US owned ballistic trajectory rockets firing at their major cities.

Even taking conventional rail tens of miles outside a major city to ride a rocket will overall be faster than conventional air travel. I believe the SpaceX proposal for intercontinental travel involves a ferry boat to a floating launch pad and they don't need thousands of miles of safety buffer.

I don't think the BFR will deliberately land at ballistic speeds because it would kill all the passengers. Local authorities would have plenty of chances to monitor the reentering vehicles. We fly airplanes the size of strategic bombers to China constantly and there don't seem to be any problems.

Yes I might have been exaggerating. I don't think 20 minutes is likely though. Flying is routine, and what proportion of the door to door journey is actually the flight?

And can you imagine the nimbyism for any spaceport near a major city. I even predict that they'll be using images of Russian children, playing on a discarded rocket, with a farmhouse near by.

Yes a large plane could be a bomber, I think rockets are different. We have had 50+ years of major powers staring at early warning systems waiting for an attack. It will be a hard habit to break.

The “20 minute flight” is the same stage of travel as the “15 hour flight” of a conventional airplane. It’s apples to apples. While a spaceport will have to be farther away than an airport it will not have to be 8 hours away. Mostly because that’s an absurd distance that ends up crossing multiple other populated areas.

How is a spaceport significantly different from an airport? Both are disruptive of their surrounding area. Spaceports will make a lot more noise so they will have to be farther out in unoccupied territory but it’s still completely manageable.

Early earning systems intially looked for planes then rockets. The indicators changed with technology. SpaceX isn’t going to launch a rocket at Shanghai without calling local authorities and working to build local infrastructure. It will not come as a surprise to anyone.

It’s really not complicated.

Well as I said, I was exaggerating, yes there probably will be time benefits, it wont be travelling the world I 20 minutes.

I'm not sure where you're located but here in the UK, every time a Heathrow airport expansion is mooted, the amount of resistance it meets is massive.

We are currently planning a spaceport, but its in Scotland. Although to be fair I don't think good transport links to major population centres was considered in planning.

Then I think of Concorde and think even if you have a product that does what its supposed to do, sometimes that isn't enough.

Maybe it will be released as a product, I just cant see it being successful. Maybe it ends up like Concorde finding a small niche. Maybe its used as a joy ride. Maybe the numbers just don't add up and it dies a death. I just don't see myself going on a summer holiday in one.

> Plus I can't see China accepting US owned ballistic trajectory rockets firing at their major cities.

It wouldn't break mutually assured destruction.

But of course, the great thing about it is that the Chinese then get to send that same ballistic missle back to us.

Kind of a nice way to start to create some trust - it’s not a one way affair.

> [...]lower cost access to space[...]

One thing not covered by existing comments but which has made a lot of difference, and most people don't even think to list since it's taken for granted everywhere else. Price discovery, we now actually know the cost.

Before Space X the costs of the launch industry were shrouded in mystery. Nobody would give you a quote without a meeting and an NDA, and certainly not post prices on a website[1].

Even if SpaceX had absolutely nothing to offer beyond ULA and Arianespace other than the exact same services at the same price but with public pricing it would already have been a big deal.

Businesses can now make plans for getting a payload in orbit without speculation about what the cost are going to be.

1. https://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

It's becoming a lot more economical to launch small payloads, which has led to an increase in noncommercial payloads. Some of these are research-y (like university projects, or a tomato growing testbed that Germany sent up on this rocket).

Some are less practical. This particular launch had 2 cubesat art projects. One is a reflector designed to be highly visible in the night sky, sponsored by the Nevada Museum of Art. The other is a golden canopic jar purportedly containing the soul of the first African-American astronaut (who died before going to space). That one is from the LA County Museum of Art (not to be confused with a different commercial cubesat also on the rocket, which contains the physical remains of many deceased people).

I don't know how much of the lowered cost for these payloads is due to cheaper launches in general, or benefits of ridesharing.

I watched the livestream over dinner on youtube. Really good footage this time. Clear weather and they shot the first stage landing with a zoom lens from land. Including pretty much all of the landing burn.

The first stage landing footage was a total lucky break for us - this was a launch profile that could have made it back to land. However, there was another rocket (ULA, I believe) on the pad at Vandenberg with some delicate payloads, so they asked SpaceX to land on the barge just far enough offshore to give themselves some distance from the pads.

NASA seems to be open-sourcing some interesting projects, ie. https://github.com/nasa/openmct

I wonder if SpaceX will publish some of their tools to the public in the near future.

They’ve now flown 64 times total, and landed 32 of them.

For the sake of completeness, how many have they reflown?

This was the first time that SpaceX has launched-and-landed the same rocket on three separate missions.

https://mashable.com/article/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-launch-r...

From three different launchpads. A hat trick!

19 times as of today

https://www.spacexstats.xyz/

For IoT simplex data and things that need functionality similar to Iridium SBD, but at much lower cost and are not time sensitive, I am very optimistic about the Hiber satellite network:

https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/hiber-1.htm

https://hiber.global/

They're claiming "a few dollars per month" for low usage volumes, per terminal.

Also, Gunter's space page is a great general reference for a lot of new small-sat/micro-sat/cubesat programs.

Serious question. Why do you post WSJ articles? Either someone subscribes in which case they don’t need to discover content or they don’t in which case they haven’t discovered anything. WSJ posts are literally just advertisements for a mediocre closed website.

Seriously why do you bother?

because people like me want to read the article, and we are happy it was posted.

It's also extremely easy to get around the paywall.

I think after it's first flight, the booster should get a cool nickname that is mentioned each time it flies afterwards.

https://outline.com/DXV9H2

At its current rate thats a rocket every ~19 days

I would just like to point out that this story dropped 18 places in 5 minutes:

http://hnrankings.info/18591766/

This is something I've seen before, but solely with stories pertaining to Elon Musk. It is very clear that HN rankings are being manipulated for a specific agenda. This saddens me, as HN is otherwise a place I trust for informed and balanced commentary.

(Note: I am not necessarily accusing the moderators of HN of anything here; I almost always agree with their interventions, even when seemingly heavy-handed. I know that running a community is hard. I suspect that something else is going on here.)

Hilarious fanboy conspiracy theories

> "This is something I've seen before, but solely with stories pertaining to Elon Musk."

This is likely selection bias. I've seen plenty of stories on other topics sink in rank as well that had nothing to do with Elon Musk.

See the FAQ for more details on ranking:

> "How are stories ranked?"

> "The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way."

> "Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which downweights overheated discussions, and moderator intervention."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

How much of this success is because of Elon?

Success works on an inverse veto system, where everyone has to perform right for anything to happen at all. That includes Elon, who invested a lot of his own funds in the beginning, and as I have heard manages actively.

How do you measure something like that?

Without Elon, SpaceX wouldn't exist (and in all likelyhood no comparable company would exist in its place), so all of it.

Without everyone but Elon, SpaceX wouldn't exist, so none of it.

A better spin on this question is probably along the lines of:

Does SpaceX still need Elon? As a figure head, maybe. As a leader? More complicated, there's probably still some risky path-finding left but the biggest moon-shots are now out of the way and as long as it doesn't become a quarterly returns focused company anyone slightly bullish could probably do a good enough job.

Musk owns 60+% of SpaceX, and it is private so quarterly returns are irrelevant.

> but the biggest moon-shots are now out of the way

You'd think so, but if Elon is correct in his words, some bigger moon-shots are still comping. BFR program could be interesting.

Does SpaceX still need Elon - compared to what - for what?

Does SpaceX still need Elon to control ownership of the company as opposed to selling to "average" investors in order to colonize mars? Almost certainly.

Does SpaceX still need Elon as the CEO as opposed to the "average" other CEO they could hire, to profitably launch satellites into space? Almost certainly not.

At least we reach theoretically answerable questions with this sort of construction, but I don't think we have enough information to answer any but the most obvious versions such as those above.

SpaceX's biggest moonshots, if they keep succeeding and Elon keeps leading, are yet to come.

SpaceX has accomplished only a few percent of their stated mission: "SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets"

There's still so much work to do.

Eventually some other investor would be convinced boosters could be reused multiple times and that it'd be a huge competitive advantage and a qualitative change in the launch and space operations marketplace.

There is no way to tell accurately when that would happen.

All of it, because he founded the company. But most people agree none of it would happen without Gwynne Shotwell.

If Microsoft does well, it's because of Satya Nadella's brilliant leadership. If Space X or Tesla does well, it's definitely not because of Elon...because he tweeted a bad thing once?

You have to keep in mind "if not but for me" is not the same as "all because of me".

SpaceX is a huge collaboration of many essential individuals who's absence would have made it impossible.

A better question is, "How much of this success is because of Gwynne Shotwell?"

And the answer is: Most of it!

Tesla is lacking a leader equivalent to Gwynne, sadly (and I'm long 100 TSLA)

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