Hacker News Reader

Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

This (thunderf00t) is the same person that said that the Falcon 9 was a scam and a reusable rocket wasn't going to work.

The defence of Musk is "Musk has lots of ideas, and some worked out and some didn't".

View on HN

The fastest Falcon 9 turnaround time was still 54 days, the same as the fastest Space Shuttle refurbishment. Gwyne Shotwell herself said that it needs to come down to a few hours.

The shortest turnaround time was 21 days, and it gets shorter and shorter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...

Falcon 9 isn't designed for a few hours turnaround time. That's what Starship is for.

I don't see why that matters since they already have a fleet of some 20 or so falcon 9s. They launched almost 2 times a week all this year.

I think if we had built 10-20 shuttle orbiters turnaround wouldn't have been an issue either. (not really, shuttles were eyewateringly expensive).

The economics of Falcon 9 do suggest that it currently is a lot worse than space shuttle on cost per unit of mass to orbit, and that the promise of cheaper launches due to reusability has not happened. Sure, the rockets are somewhat reusable (with a lot of reconditioning, it seems), but that definitely hasn't translated to lower costs to orbit.

"Somewhat reusable"? One Falcon 9 has already flown a record 18 times!

What are you talking about? According to NASA (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200001093/downloads/20...) Falcon 9 is 20x cheaper than the space shuttle in terms of $/kg to LEO

Space shuttle cost $54,500 per kg to orbit, Falcon 9 costs $2720 per kg to orbit.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093

Yeah even if there's an order of magnitude error in those calculations Falcon 9 still comes out on top. Plus, the proof is in the pudding, SpaceX is launching more frequently and putting more mass into orbit than anyone else. They could never afford it if Falcon 9 was more expensive than the Shuttle. It's crazy the mental gymnastics people will do once they've decided to hate someone.

Ah yes, the one NASA paper that Musk fans love to cite, including all of Space shuttle's R&D costs and a very low estimate of the Falcon 9 cost. Falcon 9 launches currently sell for about $80k per kg to LEO.

Until there is competition or they aren't filling their rockets anymore SpaceX has no reason to lower it further.

Exactly. They don't need to sell at cost, they just need to slightly underbid the competition. Which they've executed perfectly. EU has no flying rockets right now and Ariane6 is basically DOA if it ever gets over the finish line. ULA has launched only 3 rockets this year.

SpaceX has eaten the entire western launch market by simply pricing their launches slightly below legacy prices. And at the same time they give themselves (starlink) the at-cost price so no one can compete with them there either.

Maybe Jeffery Bezos and his deep pocket book will eventually present some competition, but Blue will be fighting headwinds the entire way down to the bottom price. SpaceX has this down pat and BO will be learning on the go. Any price improvement BO makes for years to come can be matched effortlessly by SpX.

The only other plausible challenger is China, but those launches are not really available to the west.

Don’t forget Rocket Lab.

RL's current offering is a smaller rocket. There are a handful of small launcher companies out there, but I was talking about the launching of big payloads. Rocket Lab has plans to enter that category too, but hasn't flown anything yet.

That's absolutely ridiculous, their costs are nowhere near that. Their rideshare price is $5500/kg, and every kg they sell is displacing their own payloads so there's simply no way they're pricing it at 7% of their costs. Even excluding R&D Shuttle was far more costly.

All rocket ridesharing is really cheap, because it's essentially free once the rocket has been paid for by the main payload. The only real cost to the rocket provider is ensuring that you don't interfere with the main payload.

That would be true if the main payload left the rocket with spare capacity but that just isn't the case. SpaceX's main payload can use every last kilogram of capacity. Every kilogram they sell as rideshare is a kilogram they lose for Starlink. They'll still have to pay the cost to launch that kilogram later so there's nothing free here. As I already pointed out...

Starlink satellites are huge (500 kg) and a small number of them are often are the main payload.

SpaceX hasn't launched any production Starlink satellites as extra payload. They have all been full groups on dedicated launches.

There are two types of Starlink rideshare. Transporter goes to SSO and is dedicated to rideshare. But the other is Starlink adjacent LEO which bumps a Starlink or 3 for your payload. There haven't been many of those but there have been a few.

Yup, they're not comparable. The Shuttle values are cost, the Falcon9 values are price. Which makes the comparison even worse, because we know that Falcon9 flies with a very healthy profit, meaning their costs are significantly below the price that NASA pays.

I don't think that includes all of the Space Shuttle's R&D costs - those are more like $50 billion in 2023 money. The actual paper says "Total cost per launch".

Besides, Nasa doesn't uses SpaceX because they are secretly a bunch of Musk fanboi's... I suspect they are actually cheaper!

I really appreciated thunderf00t for a long time and liked his debunking videos. There came a point where he had such a hard-on for hating Musk that he seemed to lose a lot of objectivity, particularly when it comes to SpaceX.

That seems to be a pretty big and weird theme of his. For a long time he was focused on creationists (first VenomFangX, then Ray Comfort), and at the time that didn't seem to be a big deal, because creationism deserves mockery. Then he did a hard pivot and obsessed over Anita Sarkeesian for years, and that started to make it clear that it he was more interested in hosting a 2 Minutes Hate, and didn't care as much about the subject his targets cared about.

Got to do what sells. There’s more than one subreddit dedicated to hating on everything he does up to the minute. I’d imagine there’s a large market for it on YouTube. View counts push creators to certain niches as much as personal beliefs.

> Anita Sarkeesian

To be fair she's very easy to hate. She has no identity but to be a victim.

None of the stuff that worked was his idea. The difference between Musk's companies and more tradition one is professional managers as Steve Jobs said are bozo's.

He had one bad take in your opinion and you discredit his entire existence? Hmm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com