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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

Great post on building extremely complex hardware from scratch.

At the same time I hate to be that business guy, but both this blog post and the abl site are missing a good answer to my first question: Why? Given that SpaceX exists and is quickly approaching feasibility of Starship on top of Falcon, what is the primary goal of this rocket system? How will it compete? Who will its customers be? Is it getting its metric ton payload to orbit faster/cheaper/easier? Is this "from scratch" engine design superior to existing designs in some way? What is its current ISP? Is Jet-A + LOX a better fuel choice given expected mission parameters?

I'd love to see a blog post that tackles these kinds of questions.

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From the outside: Diversification is always great. Build a whole ecosystem of small-scale rocket manufacturers instead of one big monopoly. That will foster competition and innovation.

From the investor: SpaceX might fail. Even if there Falcons are pretty much unbeatable now, you don't know what's going to happen with Starship. And even the Falcons could conceivably be grounded for years after some hypothetical flaw is found. More likely: With the price reductions made by SpaceX, the market will grow and there will be more than enough clients.

From the inside: Because it's a fun challenge and literally rocket science, of course.

SpaceX was looking to reduce prices to orbit by 10x, and they are currently sitting at around 6.7x.

I interpret this as that SpaceX has a high margin between market prices and their internal costs, so they can safely reduce prices when needed while remaining profitable. The competitor of course should aim not to the current prices, but to SpaceX's costs to be able to compete on the market.

I probably over summarized. I think there’s still room to undercut or compete (particularly on specialty projects) until SpaceX hits 10x for sure, and maybe as high as 15x.

And even if there isn't, when SpaceX is booked out for years and you need a launch slot in 6 months, that's when having competition is valuable.

Always look for other ways to compete besides price. (not intended to be as preachy as it sounds :-)

Just curious, how did you calculate the 6.7x?

I found an article that declared pre-and post-SpaceX cost to orbit per kilogram and it was something like 18.5k versus 2.6k (numbers from memory).

Elon before the first Dragon worked was talking about reducing launch costs by a factor of ten.

SpaceX is certainly giving a hard time to its competitors, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't exist. Some of them may actually follow the same route, designing reusable hardware and reducing launch costs. SpaceX took 20 years to become relying on robustly reusable system; maybe some other companies reach a similar state sooner.

IIRC ABL’s specific goal is that you can pack an entire launch setup into a shipping container and set one up anywhere in the world. Also the U.S. government will explicitly buy non SpaceX launch contracts specifically to keep smaller launch companies alive so they don’t get locked into a single supplier.

They can be boxed infrastructure that only require a generator for launch. They can be owned and operated by US gov, allowing them to be launched by land, sea or expeditionary. They can theoretically drop cargo anywhere on the planet in 5 minutes. Which is every military tacticians wet dream.

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