And to think that just a few years ago reusing a rocket even once was an incredible feat!
Watching SpaceX land rocket boosters on target again and again is kind of magical, like something out of Kerbal Space Program. I wonder how long it's gonna take to get a fully reusable rocket. They're working on the Starship and it's supposed to be fully reusable.
And SpaceX had to iterate a lot to get this working as well
It is rocket science
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.
I assume you mean the cost-plus contracting model? Or is there a different incentive mechanism you're referring to?
Early on, SpaceX's biggest hurdle was getting payload contracts. IIRC they had to sue the government several times to overturn bad acquisition policies. Government acquisition processes weren't suited to supporting small new entrances into the launch market and there was somewhat of a belief that you weren't a credible launch provider unless you were as large as Boeing or Lockmart.
In comparison nowadays it's relatively normal for lower cost programs or ones which can accept some loss to try flying on less proven rockets. New bold approaches to designing, building and flying rockets aren't immediately dismissed as just young naive engineers who haven't had the reality of spaceflight beat into them.
My understanding is that early contracts were awarded to ULA because SpaceX wasn't certified for military payloads. That, combined with your statement, implies the certification process levies bad requirements. Do we know what these bad requirements were?
Besides that, although not a lawsuit, Lori Garver's book "Escaping Gravity" goes into a lot of depth regarding the behind the scenes political struggle regarding commercial cargo and commercial crew and how Congress and some parts of NASA leaned on the idea that they couldn't tolerate any failure as a means of trying to disqualify anyone but ULA,Boeing etc from those programs.
I was wrong about them having to sue "several times" though.
I've seen the paperwork argument cut both ways. It can definitely create a bureaucratic mess. On the other hand, one of the things NASA tries to drive is "risk informed decision making". Part of this process involves writing waivers when a requirement can't/won't be met to document what the new risk is (and they have to document that they find that risk acceptable). A lot of times, this process was dismissed at "just large amounts of paperwork" but in dismissing it, they made it very hard for decision makers to fully understand what the residual risk was. It was interesting to me that paperwork was used as an excuse to not commit to the process, but when it was streamlined, it still wasn't used. To me, that feels more like avoiding accountability than avoiding needless paperwork. This misunderstanding of risk is at the heart of most of NASA's spaceflight mishaps.
I wasn't aware of Garver's book, but thanks for bringing it up. Sounds like a good read.
The innovation here isn't about reusability at all, it's about the economics of reuse. Maybe landing a rocket back on the pad rather than recovering them from the ocean makes it cheaper to reuse, has there been a study around that?
Surely this entails a host of quality checks between flights? What is that cost estimate at?
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.
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.
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%
From Wikipediea: "Out of 270 SRBs launched over the Shuttle program, all but four were recovered – those from STS-4 (due to a parachute malfunction) and STS-51-L (destroyed by range safety during the Challenger disaster).[6] Over 5,000 parts were refurbished for reuse after each flight. The final set of SRBs that launched STS-135 included parts that had flown on 59 previous missions, including STS-1.[7] Recovery also allowed post-flight examination of the boosters,[8] identification of anomalies, and incremental design improvements"
Also the rockets on the shuttle itself were landed and reused.
Falcon 9 First launch attempt 2007 [0]
Shuttle First launch 1981 [1]
I wonder if there's an advantage to having 26 years of watching someone else before designing yours? You also act like the rockets from the shuttle were not reused. They always (except for 2 instances) came back with the shuttle. The SRBs were also recovered, so it's not like these were wasted.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...
How much more of a interrogative statement does it need to be made to be considered asking a non-rhetorical question?
Also, this isn't just SpaceX, every launching country/company leaves second stages in orbit, some, unlike SpaceX, don't even try to dispose of their second stages and leave all second stages in orbit.
I'd recommend reading up more on the topic as I think you read something at some point and think that SpaceX is an especially bad actor in the space when in fact they are one of the most responsible actors, if not _the_ most responsible actor, in the space launch sector at the moment.
I didn't read anything one time in weird corner of the internet like seem to want to insinuate. There are plenty of sites where you can see the items being tracked. There is a large number of second stages in orbit that are not coming back any time soon. It might have been some coincidental bit of luck that on one particular perusal of one of these sites I just happened to click on 2 such items. Again, as they continue to increase the rate of launches, this will become an issue. And obviously, I don't believe SpaceX is the only such party doing this. That's just an unintelligent comment to have made.
You seem to be saying that all entities globally should as a whole launch less objects into space, as you imply that putting more objects into space is a net negative. That's fine to think but I strongly disagree that we as a planet should launch less objects into space.
> There is a large number of second stages in orbit that are not coming back any time soon.
I agree, which is why we should push for regulations that require satellite operators to have plans to de-orbit their satellites at end of life and/or not launch to orbits where the launching stage cannot quickly de-orbit within a set number of years. However simply pushing for all countries to launch less things into space, as you seem to be saying, is not a good idea.
From what I've seen, it sounds like many kids these days feel the same way about SpaceX launches now as you did about the shuttle (incredibly inspiring). I hope that's reassuring.
What do kids ever have to do with anything? They are the next generation that may or may not want to be involved in whatever they might be getting inspired by.
>The goal is to get to space affordably and reliably; the shuttle failed on both fronts SpaceX is succeeding at.
Shuttle had ~135 missions (number from memory) with 1 failure at launch. The second failure was at re-entry, so assumption is that the mission deployed whatever was being deployed (if that was part of the mission). How many missions has SpaceX lost payloads on? >1? If we do percentages, sure, but to say that 1 failure at launch is unreliable is just farcical.
That’s one of the worst takes I’ve ever heard
Anyway, coolness factor doesn't really matter for space. Economical things also tend to end up looking cool over time anyway simply because streamlined designs which are efficient tend to also look cool..
Exactly. The shuttle program was designed by bureaucrats to be "inspiring." Which explains why it was such a dismal failure economically and in turns of safety - killing 14 people which is far more than any other rocket, and costing insanely more than expendables.
The shuttle program set the U.S. space program back by decades. We are only now finally starting to recover from its dismal failure.
It was designed in an environment they couldn't iterate and test, and tried to go from very little knowlage directly to a massively complex system.
And no only that, they were very limited in terms of funding, so anything that required to much development had to be kicked.
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.
It's a useful clarification that the Space Shuttle program had a large amount of reuse in the design ... but it still cost over a billion dollars for each reuse, many multiples of e.g. fully expended soyuz. So until SpaceX proved that reuse could be done well, and economically, it wasn't obvious. Now it's super obvious and practically all space programs are frantically trying to catch up.
(The SS could carry fairly large ISS module payloads into orbit, while cheaper rockets/spacecraft couldn't ... but couldn't get to high orbits or beyond ... details details.)
It is not clear if SpaceX is there per flight. They still need to spent several weeks on refurbishing of the landed booster.
You link seems to be specifically about Soyuz MS, a capsule. No idea how much SpaceX spends on refurbishing dragon.
However, this only works if there is enough demand to use all their capacity. At the moment this demand simply does not exist. SpaceX manufactures its own demand. The majority of its capacity goes to launching its own satellites. This lets it keep its cadence, but literally burns the company's own resources to do so.
Whether or not you think Starlink makes any sense in the long run, at the moment it is losing money hand over fist. It serves as an indirect subsidy for SpaceX's other customers.
SpaceX is getting the entire first stage back in mostly flight-worthy condition. Nobody outside the company truly knows how much work is done between flights but it appears to be vastly less than Shuttle.
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.
B1061 launched both Crew-1 & Crew-2, B1067 both Crew-3 & Crew-4 (with a commercial launch in-between). Crew-5 was new and Crew-6 seems to be planned as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...