Jaw-Dropping News: Boeing and Lockheed Just Matched SpaceX's Prices | Hacker News Reader

Jaw-Dropping News: Boeing and Lockheed Just Matched SpaceX's Prices

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60 points_dp9d52 comments

Ok so here's the paragraph:

> Last month, the U.S. Space Force announced a series of 21 launch contracts awarded to both SpaceX and ULA. Totaling $2.5 billion in value, the contracts were split between the leading space companies, with ULA winning 11 launches for $1.3 billion, and SpaceX bagging 10 launches for $1.2 billion.

They clarify that space x is launching some heavies in there, if it were just falcon 9 space x might expect to charge 1.1 billion which is cheaper. But good news to be in the right ballpark

Competition is good for consumer pricing! Should be fun when starship is in the mix (iirc you can fit an unfolded jwst in there. No origami necessary)

> iirc you can fit an unfolded jwst in there. No origami necessary

I think starship largest cargo dimension is 17m, jwst longest axis is >20m?

Close, but still pretty cool. Will be hard to resist the urge to go play KSP again

That doesn't preclude it fitting diagonally.

Generally no, but in this case I think yes it precludes it. The second biggest cargo bay axis is like 8m, so you get like <19m on a diagonal. And the third axis doesn't buy you the remaining 2m+ left

Anyways you could fit the mirror unfolded, but not the sunshield with it. Something like that

James Webb's mirror can fit unfolded in Starship. The sun shield is too big though.

I wonder how hard it would be to make a scaled up version of JWST to take advantage of the extra space? Exact same design, but with an origami mirror 5x (?) the size.

If we're still unfolding telescopes I'll be surprised. Seems a lot easier to send segments and just assemble them robotically. Just a bit of actuation in each mirror segment, a scaffold, and then you pick and place your way to a 250m telescope that can pick out continents on exoplanets. (I have not done the math to determine if that's the right scale, but clearly multi launch and assemble scales better than bigger rocket and origami.)

Who do you think you are, some kinda JPL engineer ;) Downvoted /s

Maybe this kind of delusional thinking is why he's no longer at NASA...

I picked up these ideas at NASA. Or rather, JPL. They tolerate some crazy talk if you have a decent value proposition.

Define easier :) if it really were easier I think it would have been done that way.

We can't even assemble JWST robotically on earth in a lab at 1G. On orbit manufacturing is not mature enough yet to assemble something like JWST. There are too many problems that need to be solved.

There was never an era until now (well after JWST design was finalized) that multi-launch was an option. We're referring to the next launch.

> We can't even assemble JWST robotically on earth in a lab at 1G.

> On orbit manufacturing is not mature enough yet to assemble something like JWST.

You may have missed the future-tense-ness of the post.

Ahh I see. Not just an armchair rocket scientist but an armchair futurist rocket scientist to bat!

Oh a straw man! Let's get it!

I drew part of my salary from NASA helping define the roadmaps for in space assembly of telescopes, costs, benefits, and required technology. The pick and place concept is well described in NASA report outs.

Thats the only reason I mention it. It's an interesting concept with well established merits.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/science-enabling-t...

I'm standing on the upper right of that photo. It was a fun study and I'm lucky to have been in the room at the time

Are there good companies focused on robotic assembly in space?

Would we expect this to be something space x develops?

Made in Space is working on in-space manufacturing. in-space servicing is the closest angle, and there's a few players I can't recall at the moment.

It won’t actually built but a larger folding mirror design was explored in the LUVOIR (Large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared Surveyor) mission concept. Scroll down the wiki article for a comparison of the JWST and LUVOIR-A mirror size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ultraviolet_Optical_Infr...

Parts of that research could end up incorporated into the Habitable Worlds Observatory project.

https://www.keckobservatory.org/hwo/

The unrolling of the mirrors is rather neat - https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/luvoir/design/

You would need to increase the size of the sun shield, structures, mechanisms, etc. A scaling up would cascade into a massive amount of design changes. For all we know, if JWST had been allotted 5x the volume they might not have gone with the current design.

If we wanted to naively scale it up and "patch" what needed patching we might end up with an incredibly heavy spacecraft that isn't as good as it could be.

For a rocket that has yet to launch against a rocket that's already mature and yet continued to improves its launch cadence by launching 96 times this year and aspires to launch 144 next years. That means SpaceX can literally compete on price.

Also, ULA is selling itself, so don't count Boeing/Lockheed stocks, unless you think the stock price will rise with sale of ULA?

Fair point, Vulcan has never launched, but all rocket companies compete with paper rockets. Relativity Space had "the cheapest rocket ever" and "the biggest manufacturing capacity of any rocket company" and that rocket ended up never making it to orbit and was scrapped entirely. Relativity pocketed billions of dollars in funding in the process.

> all rocket companies compete with paper rockets

I don't understand this statement. In this bid, SpaceX is competing with a real, proven and profitable rocket family. Everyone else is competing with vaporware?

Fair. I almost removed "all" in favor of something excluding Rocket Lab and SpaceX but technically Starship is vaporware until it's delivered so I kept it in. But you do have a good point and I concede that SpaceX has a far more credible case for their rockets than almost anyone else.

On first glance, it seems strange to award more contracts to the provider using a totally unproven platform. I would have thought they would ramp up contract awards more conservatively in that case. I have to wonder whether the decision is in part about weighing unease with a new platform against unease with unpredictable leadership. Maybe that’s not a big factor, I could also see it being more about the lobbying power of established defense contractors.

Seems strange for an individual, or even a corporate acquisition, but not for government. The incentive structure for gov contracts has a lot of extra stuff beyond risk and cost, including spurring a healthy market or proving out new technology. And yes, creating new jobs, sometimes.

If that was the case then there would've been a period where SpaceX got more launches. Instead they had to sue to even get a piece of the pie, and ULA has gotten higher percentages of every contract since. It's just regulatory capture and government revolving door.

I said they had extra incentives, not that they were always fair extra incentives.

SpaceX has never had more NSSL

That's crazy. I'm glad SpaceX has pushed the competition forwards. In making their rockets better, they've made the whole space industry better.

IMHO, they've made the whole space industry.

Oh, and of course there has been other players than spacex.

We didn't really have a space industry anywhere in the world until recently. We had government funded space exploration, which is something entirely different.

The implication of this seems to be a change of pace from almost dormant to very frequent activity. Also, an explosive increase in space junk left "out there"

Did they actually get costs lower though or are they just losing tons of money per launch?

Do you mean SpaceX, or Boeing?

Yes

Seems like none of Vulcan Centaur is reusable, how could it possibly compete on price? Genuinely wondering how that math could work out.

And the Falcon 9 was already demolishing the competition on price before they ever landed a booster, reusability is only one of several ways that SpaceX drove down costs.

From what I understand, vertically integrated design & manufacturing was a big factor. Are there any other big things that contribute to spaceX’s low costs? I would be curious to see someone make a breakdown

The launch prices haven't changed all that much and SpaceX is raking in margin.

Reusable rockets have high up front design costs, as well as continuing maintenance costs. The engines themselves are also more expensive per unit, because they must be over engineered.

This is like asking why a disposable diaper is cheaper than a reusable diaper.

100 million != 67 million

And as pointed out, SpaceX is 90% of the way through (just the second 90% left to go!) with Starship that will drop the costs at least 1/10th.

Yeah that weirder me out too - the price reduction is enough to merit an accurate headline. I kept reading waiting for them to justify the headline and it never happened.

It doesn’t seem like we know enough to do a fair comparison. It would be interesting to have more details on how much they are paying ULA per mission compared to SpaceX per mission, like a breakdown of cost per flight.

Hug of death? I can't get to the site - no errors, it just never even starts loading.

Never mind, it was problems on my end. My system completely froze just minutes later.

Ah, use money from other fields to subsidize a struggling field. The last moat

Excellent news and truly surprising.

I shall buy a space launch immediately!

Are they losing money to compete on price?

This is the beginning of the militarisation of space.

Once the military decide they dont like their "supplier" to be a monopoly they will spread their money all over the place to make sure that bottle neck is resolved.

Beginning? Space has been militarized for decades.

The Apollo program was born from the fear of Soviet space military technology.

Avoiding a monopoly of a single launch vehicle has been an explicit goal for decades. For example the EELV program always wanted to have 2 rocket families (even it meant using funds inefficiently... eg paying ULA to keep making both Atlas and Delta even when their capabilities pretty much overlapped)

Pretty sure that started with Sputnik

I was going to say something similar, but (if I remember right) technically we can go back to the V2?

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