SpaceX caps 2022 with record-setting 61st Falcon 9 launch

How can the be in the ring if they can't even make it to orbit.

> Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is a competitor in theory

Not really, even in theory. It's only even remote current participation in the orbital market is the very overdue BE-4 engines it is developing for ULA (which I assume is “the consortium” that the upthread poster excluded in asking about competition.) Currently, its a suborbital launch company with aspirations of sometime becoming something more.

For people reading, just for clarification, but all three of these rockets have shown no hardware publicly of any of the vehicles besides some engine testing. They're all years away from launching, let alone reaching any kind of scale.

RocketLab has not had much success in raising its launch rate. Meanwhile SpaceX undercut them on $/kg with their rideshare program which likely robbed them of a large number of potential customers, so RLs segment was not as separate as they would have liked. Indeed in their short history SXs rideshares have launched considerably more payloads and more weight than RL in their whole history. There are of course some payload's that want to go to a specific orbit not served by SXs rideshare.

SpaceX in a single launched more then RocketLab in its whole history.

IIRC ULA's accuracy is also a bit better, so for an expensive payload going high up it can be worth it to spend a bit more if it means your $1b payload is gonna last a few more years before running out of fuel. There's also the whole vertical vs horizontal integration thing

> Obviously a lot of people think this will result in taxpayers overspending and was not a really fair competition.

Part of this is due to SpaceX bidding Starship for NSSL phase 1 (development) and getting rejected by the Airforce, while ULA, Blue Origin, and Orbital ATK (now Northrup Grumman) got development money for their respective rockets. This meant that SpaceX had to amortize the cost to develop vertical integration, a larger fairing, etc. over their NSSL phase 2 (operational) bid.

> ULA and Arianespace have had more success against SpaceX for GEO than LEO missions, though I believe that has lessened over time. GEO is more competitive because SpaceX uses RP1 for its upper stage which is not as efficient as the others that use hydrogen.

From what I understand, this is mostly ArianeGroup. ULA does some high energy missions, but they're mostly for NASA/DoD. I'm sure they're hoping to improve their commercial competitiveness with Vulcan, though.

Many GEO missions were bid so far in advance that they were booked on Ariane many years before.

There is also some reason to believe that some of the European GEO missions were given insentives in various ways to fly on Arianespace. And then finally Arianespace simply had to sell all the Ariane 5s that were left. The Ariane 5 had at base something close to competitive in a very niche market of dual GEO launches and had to go away.

ULA won a larger share of NSSL but have done almost no commercial contracts ever. The slightly larger share of NSSL probably has more to do with the existing relationship and the long history and understanding of airforce processes. However, ULA is already going to miss their target launch dates for NSSL.

So the reality is that Arianespace and ULA are closer to being state entities then anything else.

In terms of actually BUILDING rockets and engines they are not even playing in remotely the same league as SpaceX. Ariane 6 is a slightly upgraded Ariane 5 and cost a huge amount more then the whole Falcon program including reusability and the Heavy (including Marlin development).

And Ariane 6 given its further delays is probably adding another couple 100 million on top of what is already committed. A follow up to the Ariane 6 will likely not show up until more then a decade.

So while these are big players, I don't think they are actually endangers competitors, more like big niches.

> GEO is more competitive because SpaceX uses RP1 for its upper stage which is not as efficient as the others that use hydrogen.

This is actually not true. SpaceX second stage is perfectly capable of doing what it needs and cheaper to produce.

Idk man, I totally expected them to launch in 2022. They don't seem to have much confidence, or they would have done so. Especially since the "regulatory considerations" you mentioned include limits per year. Their production seems good enough that just disposing of them by test flight would be a win. So why no launch attempt, yet? Is risk not acceptable anymore since Artemis? Yeah, no bets from me for now, but will be interesting to see what happens.

This seems generally right for a positive scenario.

One thing which they will need to complete before launching Starlinks V2 from Starship is launch a few from Falcon 9. They'll need some prototypes in orbit before they go into the kind of mass production they would want for Starship.

Thanks that's very useful perspective. And thanks for the work keeping the wiki page up to date!

> Alternatively, many satellites are delayed (or canceled), often for multiple years, because of construction issues, regulatory issues, or funding issues (or sometimes bankruptcy).

I think this was particularly exemplified by Falcon Heavy launches. I think there were supposed to be 5 in 2022. Only 1 actually made it across the line. We'll see how many happen in 2023.

The older model also didn't incentivize the things needed to support a reusable rocketry program. Companies were encouraged to have bloat and making satellites was still extremely expensive so there wasn't anywhere near enough demand to justify producing and reusing a handful of boosters.

Ariane space was still arguing that reuse wasn't viable for them due to their low flight rate only until a handful of years ago. As far as I'm aware, ULA's CEO still insists that anything more than their proposed engine segment reuse is going to require too high of a flight rate to pay for itself (IIRC he said they'd need 10 flights per booster).

This is also part of why SpaceX's model works. Even when disposable F9 is much cheaper than previous rockets in its class.

Right, for the Space Shuttle the shortest interval on a back-to-back mission was 63 days.

Yeah, SpaceX’s reuse is much, much simpler than the shuttle booster refurbishment. At the extreme, Starship is intended to have no refurbishment between flights - refuel and fly again, so that the cost of each flight will be mostly the fuel cost, on the order of single digit millions. Falcon 9 I believe is trickier since its kerosene fuel generates a lot of soot compared to the methane engines of Starship, and can be fouled. If you’ve ever used a camp stove with kerosene vs methane, one leaves your stove covered in black soot.

Landing the rocket back on the pad requires significantly more fuel for most missions. The reason most Falcon 9s do landing at sea instead of RTLS is due to this. They have to boost up and out over the ocean to the correct insertion coordinates, and then they run out of fuel (for the mission). When they run out of mission fuel, they just use gravity and fall straight downwards to land on a drone ship.

In short, performing RTLS requires additional fuel. This is fuel that can no longer be used to boost the payload into the correct orbital insertion. So all RTLS missions tend to be lower performance missions that don't need the full power of the Falcon 9 / Heavy since they have fuel to spare for RTLS.

Note that for the Space Shuttle, the external tank was large proportion of the fuel-carrying capacity of the vehicle, i.e. "most of the rocket". And for the solid rocket boosters they were not fully recovered as they ejected the rocket engine bell just before impact with the water which sank to the bottom of the ocean on each launch.

Additionally, solid rocket boosters are some of the hardest things to re-use as the process of re-filling them is more like re-manufacturing them than actual true re-use. The sections (they had 4 sections) need to disassembled and refilled with the epoxy that is the solid rocket fuel. They were additionally made of steel rather than aluminum so were not substantially valuable components to recover versus the high end aluminum alloys in the external tanks.

> The innovation here isn't about reusability at all, it's about the economics of reuse.

It's about both.

SpaceX showed that the 1st stage of a rocket can be reliably reused in production. Which is really important from an architecture perspective because 2/3 stage rockets are just more efficient than 1/1.5 stage rockets (mostly due to the propellant mass fraction term of the rocket equation).

To give some examples, the payload mass fraction of some reusable rockets is:

* Shuttle(partial reuse): 1%

* Falcon 9(partial reuse): 4%

* Starship(full reuse, in development): 2%

There is no doubt that a reusable rocket will be more economical. You need cheap rockets first to get economies of scale. It's gonna be big in the future.

Recovery of the first stage of SpaceX rockets is not even close to being the same thing as reuse of the shuttle. Surviving re-entry is a completely different set of specs than floating through atmosphere at a much much slower rate of descent.

This number is total nonsense. It is derived from simply dividing the total cost of the program by the number of launches. This is useless. First, the R&D costs were sunk all the way back in the '70s. Second, the cost of personnel, operations, and facilities do not necessarily scale with the number of launches.

NASA put the cost of a launch at about $450 million in 2011, but that is pessimistic. That is simply the years cost divided by the number of launches in that year. The marginal cost, i.e. the cost of going from N launches to N+1, will always be lower. The Shuttle was designed to fly 24 missions per year and actually flew an average of under five missions per year. The lack of demand was a substantial reason for the high cost.

I find it tedious that every conversation on this topic has to start with the same tired old memes. No, the Shuttle did not cost $1.5 billion per launch. No, reusable launch vehicles are not new. No, not even reusable launch vehicles that land vertically under power are new. No, the price to LEO has not fallen by an order of magnitude. No, ULA is not dead in the water. No, neither is Ariane. Yes, the Shuttle program was badly mismanaged. Yes, the Falcon 9 is pretty cool.

There are estimates that the production cost of Soyuz is less than 20 millions USD, https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/48592/what-is-the-...

It is not clear if SpaceX is there per flight. They still need to spent several weeks on refurbishing of the landed booster.

No outsider knows if Falcon reuse is economical. SpaceX keeps on raising money (they have a lot of going on, so that’s not surprising) and without insight into financials we don’t known if their launches are subsidized by VC money.

You are right that no one knew that Space X's approach would work until they demonstrated it. However, it was clear that the shuttle's "reuse" approach was a dismal failure early on - even before it was built, the sheer mass shuttled to and from orbit every time was a giant red flag to anyone who understands the basic rocket equation. That also drastically limited its altitude and usefulness. In a world where practicality matters, it should have been abandoned early on in favor of a return to expendables, until we figured out something that actually worked.

>mostly flight-worthy condition.

Can you expand on this? I've looked for information on how much rework they require but have never come up with a good explanation. I'm curious because spaceflight requirements are typically very stringent and refurbishing back to those requirements isn't a trivial task. A lot of the cost for Shuttle was refurbishing to meet the quality requirements.

I think someone more familiar with this than me could look at the cost of a Falcon 9 launch with a re-used first stage and compare it to a non-re-used first stage launch cost and make some assumptions/ballpark guess about how much work goes into refurb.