A rocket a day keeps the high costs away (1993)
fourmilab.ch
fourmilab.ch
Part of the business plan assumed that people would be using the rocket to launch replacement satellites for constellations, and so it wouldn't be such a big deal if a rocket failed every now and then. This would let them use automotive grade parts in some areas as opposed to aerospace grade and reduce costs.
However, it turned out that customers were actually using their rocket to launch prototype satellites and other one-off satellites where failure was actually a big deal. Long story short Astra did manage to make it to orbit, but is unlikely to survive into the future.
It was a huge publicity boost for NASA, but not actually an efficient use of resources in terms of % shuttle missions * total cost of the shuttle program. That’s arguably unfair because of the sunk cost issue and how the budget was setup, but manned missions are inherently expensive and even more so if you’re trying to match arbitrary orbits.
Also no reason why it can't be an ISS, and no reason you couldn't link multiple together.
Pretty useful to have a reusable grain silo you can launch and land.
Most space companies are still doing their prototyping in the JWST style, so losing those prototypes is costly.
Plus, they're kind of at a bad point and time in the market as small launch is not as lucrative as they hoped but moving up to medium lift is a big hurdle. So far, SpaceX is the only 'new space' launch company to have managed it, with all other competitors in development hell.
By saying development hell I'm saying that other new space companies other than SpaceX are in that difficult in between point where they're burning cash on developing the rocket without yet being able to sell significant rides and without the leverage of knowing that the government will give you a blank check if you run out of money.
The important factor being that small launch doesn't make enough money to fully fund medium launch, there just isn't enough demand for small launch with rideshares being cheaper. However, medium launch can fund more medium launch or even heavy launch, as there is much more demand in the medium weight range.
Lets be real here. The business plan 'assumed' a whole lot of nonsense just so they could claim absurd totally unrealistic growth potential. The story shifted to whatever was 'hip' at the time.
It very much started with 'cube-sats' are the future. And when it was clear this was wrong, they started to make up other stuff.
Sure, if we build a million rockets it'll be cheaper, but how do we USE those rockets and get funding at "relative peace time". SpaceX's real innovation was starlink in allowing it to "Soak up" excess production. Besides the obvious of reusability, which wasn't that "Obvious" considering the temperatures of reentry.
SpaceX had a lot of real innovations. Starlink is one of them, but it’s not in the top five.
No. 1 and No. 2 are positing a private space company and mass manufacturing. Those are, hands down, SpaceX's transformational business plan innovations.
COTS, No. 3, is a business-engineering hybrid. Using NASA funds as stepping stones, versus treating them as the ends, No. 4. Maybe we can slot Starlink into No. 5, but it wasn’t unpredictable; telecom was always the moneymaker in space. (I’d argue published pricing with online ordering nudges it out.)
As always, ideas are cheap. SpaceX is doing well because it's actually managing to successfully implement lots of old fantastical ideas.
It just became non-obvious that it was the right approach after a long history of failed attempts at it.
The same in other countries, very little actual large investments.
The Soviet Shuttle was even less reusable then the US one. And that was actually pretty smart of them.
So I don't think that were that many real failed attempts. There was practically speaking one real attempt.
No one has ever had a fully reusable orbital rocket.. still to this day. Althought starships got a shot.
In general, if rocket building costs could really be reduced to almost nothing, reusable rockets would be useless. The only case where reusable rockets have a chance is if building rockets is still very expensive.
That's what blue orgin is doing with the blue ring concept. Take avionics, data telemetry, battery's, and solar panels out of the design and let the customer focus on what end goal they are trying to achieve. I think blue ring is a very good business innovation as well.
All the while many early concepts from the dawn of the space age often had some sort of partial or even full reusability as part of the design.
Did it not pan out as other things suggested back then as it was not realistic with the technology of the time ?
Or was it perhaps due to usable space rockets mainly developing from ICBMs, which were single use munitions ? The military was also not that cost sensitive, especially at the top of the Cold War + possibly pushing on putting stuff to space sooner than the other side, instead of experimenting with some newfangled reusability concepts.
Well, in any case good thing this is over & things are finally at the right track. :)
It was fortuitous but unplanned, not a factor in the original vision of the company when it was founded.
01 - Starlink
02 - military
04 - Starlink
09 - Starlink
12 - Starlink
16 - Starlink
20 - Starlink
24 - Starlink
25 - Starlink
30 - Starlink
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_launches_i...
And also people lose perspective. What we have to remember is how few launches other large rockets used to have. Ariane 5 the commercial success story peaked at 7 launches.
So yes, new costumers, but not enough to go from 7 to 100+.
Still, not being fully dependent on that certainly helps. :)
The book has paper-thin characters whose whole purpose is to explain and counter-point a long list of technical explanations for why the company, vehicle, and manufacturing processes were designed the way they were. The book has a copyright date of 2005.
I really enjoyed reading the book.
The book, in the front, has a section called "Blurbs for The Rocket Company", which has some comments left by John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace, Jeff Foust of The Space Review, Gary C Hudson of HMX, Inc, Eric Laursen of International Launch Services, and Elon Musk.
To quote the blurb directly: "This is an interesting approach to the greatest problem in space exploration: the cost of getting there" -- Elon Musk CEO, Founder Space-X
While perhaps a bit outdated by modern standards, general principles are sound and it's still a very fun read in itself since he includes some general reflections in the text.
Except the frontier had fertile lands and vast potential. It was not a cold barren emptiness. You could also make access to Antarctica cheap and affordable at scale. It wouldn't suddenly make it economically sensible to go there
I'm skeptical there is a huge amount of pent up demand that is just itching for lower launch costs. It's just a bunch of telescopes looking up and look down at every possible wavelength and then a bunch of telecommunications equipment.. There are some serious diminishing returns at play here
Tourism.. more telecommunications (ex: starlink).. what else is there to do up there? I don't see it being a huge market. Definitely not enough to fund a colony on Mars or anything like that
Not to mention, space tourism being an eighth of the total tourism market is obviously insane. The total tourism market is gigantic, space tourism would do wonderfully if it it were 0.01% of it (so, 8 billion or so? Probably not enough to warrant an assembly-line approach).
Yes. The majority of the population can handle 3Gs. John Glenn was 77.
> Not to mention, space tourism being an eighth of the total tourism market is obviously insane.
I don't think space tourism becoming an eighth of total tourism is insane. I'd guess the fraction of tourism dollars that are spent on travel reached by plane is a lot higher, maybe about a third or half.
He was in exceptionally good health.
> I don't think space tourism becoming an eighth of total tourism is insane. I'd guess the fraction of tourism dollars that are spent on travel reached by plane is a lot higher, maybe about a third or half.
The cost of a plane ticket is typically less than, say, a quarter of the total spending on a holiday (including hotel, food, attractions, souvenirs). Also, people go to certain destinations to spend time there, they don't go for the plane ride - which is all space tourism can be.
Just think about the number of civilian airports in the world, and compare to the number of locations where rockets can be launched from. There'll be more money to make in taking people to see the rocket launches than in actually putting tourists on rockets, I can guarantee that.
The only way space tourism might catch a break is if a space plane is ever actually successfully designed. That gets rid of many of the problems of rockets. But even then, it's a once in a lifetime experience, not something people would do every year like actual tourism.
Yes, but he was nevertheless more fragile than the majority of the overall population (all ages), which was the original concern you raised.
> The cost of a plane ticket is typically less than, say, a quarter of the total spending on a holiday (including hotel, food, attractions, souvenirs).
Agreed for LEO flights, but (1) I don't see why that difference matters much and (2) the cost breakdown of Mars tourism will similar to international travel now, i.e., 5-30% spent on transportation, and the rest spent on location.
> The only way space tourism might catch a break is if a space plane is ever actually successfully designed.
I don't really see why a space plane would be make a big difference here. Are you thinking of cost or the physical rigors? Space planes still require ~3 gees on launch (unless you're talking about something really exotic like JP Aerospace's Airship to Orbit").
And even IF a colony on Mars is ever created, the amount of tourism it could ever imaginably sustain would be tiny compared to, say, New York or Tokyo or Paris - and neither of those, nor even all three together, are 1/8 of global tourism. Not to mention, a colony on Mars would just be tunnels in a desert (except it's a very very cold and highly radioactive dessert). Only a tiny handful of people would even be conceivably interested in spending months on a cramped rocket to visit it.
Then we spent the next 150 years conveniently writing them out of history.
Due to nonlinearity of the rocket equation some assumptions are really really really off [a] [b]. V2 only has 2500m/s deltaV [5] and the launch vehicle's delta-v needed to achieve low Earth orbit starts around 9.4 km/s [6] (the actual delta-v is typically 1.5–2.0 km/s more for atmospheric drag and gravity drag). [7] Therefore V2 only deliveres (2500/9400)^2 (7% or 1/14 of the needed kinetic energy)
Trouble is we only get to convert 1-4% of the launch mass into payload in LEO with chemical engines. And that's for large rockets with economies of scale.
Sputnik (rocket) Mass: 267,000 kg Payload to LEO 500kg [3]
The smallest orbital rocket is the Japanese SS-520 with the following characteristics: It can launch 3 kg to orbit in 4.4 minutes. It's a modified sounding rocket with three solid-propellant steps. It's only 9.54 m long, 0.52 m dia., and has a mass of 2.6T @ liftoff [google]. The SS-520 rocket cost less than $5 million [google]
Bolting a 2nd stage on top of V2 was tried in [2] programme and with both stages at ~0.7 reliability things only work half the time. Not commercially viable.
Is there a market for small & cheap rockets? [8] What about dual purpose ? W54 "Davy Crockett" Atomic Projectile was the smallest nuke designed to maintain fission and could be carried around in a backpack! The final weapon was 10.862 inches (275.9 mm) in diameter, 15.716 inches (399.2 mm) in length and 50.9 pounds (23.1 kg). I guess this could be worked with. With the current risk of global war everyone should be mass producing a small launcher. However this way we still only get 1cubesat into orbit per $1m, not what the autor aimed at.
To get below $1000/kg into orbit we will need a bigger boat. And that's what SpaceX is doing.
(sorry to not have these in the nice order)
[8] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/36261/why-isnt-the...
[a] assume that our bigger, more complicated (two-stage), and higher tech (LH2/LOX instead of Ethanol/LOX), launcher costs ten times as much as the V2
[b] If our mass produced LH2/LOX launcher equals the performance of the Delta 6925 by placing 3900 kg in LEO, the cost to LEO is US$333/kg; if we achieve better throw-weight, this figure goes down accordingly. If we build the thing so cheap, dumb, and heavy that its payload is only 1000 kg--one metric ton--the cost rises to US$1300/kg, which is still a factor of ten lower than the comparable cost to LEO for Ariane, Atlas, Delta, and Titan.
[1] So yes, a stripped-down stretch-tank engine-augmented two-stage V2-derived rocket, massing 351 tons as opposed to the 12.5 tons in the original, would be able to reach orbit*. :)
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTV-G-4_Bumper
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_(rocket)
[1] https://www.quora.com/If-boosters-were-strapped-on-the-V2-ro...
[5] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/59879/how-much-del... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_orbital_energy