I am not a rocket scientist. So someone please explain to me why this quote isn't the single stupidest thing I've read all day.
If they keep component X too long, they'll need to reimplement / rebuild X from scratch in a few years when the original factory/production line doesn't exist anymore. This would require a lot of up-front cost that may be higher than just producing a new element of that type for every launch.
I don't think the message was completely negative though: "depending on the level of reusability" sounds more like "this is hard, but if you pull it off with cost of restarting production << cost of reusability over N years, that's an achievement"
Edit: many words
If the cost of those launches drops by a significant margin (such as a 90% reduction as suggested), there will be many more launches as every country with two pennies to rub together launches communications and land monitoring satellites.
But if you are SpaceX, you've brought all your manufacturing in-house, so you can produce things at cost. If you need 4 more nozzles just like the last 100, you walk to the nozzle guy inside the SpaceX facility and ask him for 4 more nozzles, and he makes them for you just like he made the last 100.
I'm sure it will still cost SpaceX money, but not as much money as it would cost someone else.
My favorite SpaceX story:[1]
> Significantly, the Merlin engines—like roughly 80 percent of the components for Falcon and Dragon, including even the flight computers—are made in-house. That’s something SpaceX didn’t originally set out to do, but was driven to by suppliers’ high prices. Mueller recalls asking a vendor for an estimate on a particular engine valve. “They came back [requesting] like a year and a half in development and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just way out of whack. And we’re like, ‘No, we need it by this summer, for much, much less money.’ They go, ‘Good luck with that,’ and kind of smirked and left.” Mueller’s people made the valve themselves, and by summer they had qualified it for use with cryogenic propellants.
> “That vendor, they iced us for a couple of months,” Mueller says, “and then they called us back: ‘Hey, we’re willing to do that valve. You guys want to talk about it?’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’re done.’ He goes, ‘What do you mean you’re done?’ ‘We qualified it. We’re done.’ And there was just silence at the end of the line. They were in shock.” That scenario has been repeated to the point where, Mueller says, “we passionately avoid space vendors.”
[1] http://www.airspacemag.com/space/is-spacex-changing-the-rock...
LATE EDIT Apparently at a Q&A SpaceX said their new factory will make 400 Merlin engines a year. That feels way enough to get out of "prototype" territory and into "economy of scale" territory.
If you have a market for 400 engines a year and build 400 engines a year, you will get good at building engines and you will have a lot of opportunity to improve your ability to build all those engines.
If you have a market of 400 engines a year but reuse each engine 40 times, your build rate will converge on building 10 new engines a year. Once your initial production is done and you are in the sustaining level, you will be back in the boat of all the other rocket companies that are only building ~10 engines a year. The inference is that 10 engines a year doesn't give you the volume to sustain (and refine) your low cost build process.
Where I think the argument goes wrong the worst is that Christophe Bonnal is mapping traditional rocket making experience - low rate production of very complex, very expensive hardware - onto SpaceX. SpaceX is rewriting the rules. They appear to have rewritten the rules on the cost of expendable rockets and, with reuse, will rewrite those rules again. That should rewrite the rules on the number of launches since they will be much more affordable.
The (counter) premise is that dropping prices of reusable rockets will allow more launches which will absorb what would otherwise be excess SpaceX rocket building capacity.
Now what? What do you do with all your expensive stuff? Maybe you can just build a whole bunch of them at once, and leave them stockpiled? But that's not very efficient is it? What if it turns out there's a major flaw that has to be corrected, or what if it turns out you're not needing as many rockets as you need?
Maybe you can stretch out your production time more - but since 4 months is the longest 'efficient' time you can spend on a rocket, then you're just increasing your costs.
Rocket (and airplane, and tank, and ships, and other expensive hardware things) production lines can't just spin up and spin down. This is why military procurement is partly so screwed up - because it's not really aimed at producing stuff at the best rate, it's aimed for the dual goal of getting Congressmen in office, and maintaining the manufacturing base for the future.
Shuttle operations were so complicated they required a standing army of engineers and technicians just to keep the fleet operational and perform all the refurbishments in between flights. The cost of that standing army plus the limitations of flight rate imposed by the duration of refurbishment operations meant that ultimately every Shuttle flight ended up costing about $1.1 billion. Contrast that with the cost of building a new orbiter, which was around $2 billion.
This was a huge problem for the Shuttle program from day one, because the huge ongoing costs meant that NASA manned spaceflight were locked into the Shuttle system and incapable of budgeting for developing improvements or alternatives. And indeed, they ended up stupidly flying more or less a prototype design for 3 decades.
But that sort of insanity isn't a universal problem for reusability. Indeed, the idea that any sane entity outside of deeply entrenched government bureaucracy would embrace a "reusable" system where each flight cost 1/2 as much as brand new hardware is a bit of a stretch on its own. However, that's a problem which is not even remotely possible for SpaceX, because the cost of the vehicle is so much lower. SpaceX already manufactures reusable F9 first stages, they are just ordinary F9 first stages plus landing legs. They cost a few million dollars to produce, not billions, and SpaceX pumps out several of them a year. SpaceX is planning for a very low cost of operations for reusability. They'll land the stage, retrieve it with a vehicle, bring it into a warehouse where it can be run through some tests then assembled into a full launcher, fueled, and relaunched. There is a very low cap on the costs for that operation, because if it starts costing more than pumping out new stages then SpaceX will stop doing it. So there's no "trap" possible for SpaceX. If they get reusability working then they'll just have that much more manufacturing and R&D capacity plus profit margin for working on the next generation of rocket.
If you're doing six launches a year, then building six new rockets a year is not really much more expensive than building one rocket once and refurbishing it for a new launch six times a year. Especially when you complicate the design to an extreme degree to achieve reusability, thus causing that one rocket to cost a ton of money to build and a ton of money to refurbish.
Where he gets it wrong, I think, is that Falcon 9R is not a pure reusable system. It's an expendable system that's been lightly modified for reusability. This is important because it means that the rocket is still cheap to build and cheap to refurbish.
Look at the Shuttle program: they built four orbiters initially, then a fifth as a replacement after one was destroyed, and that's it. They operated these things for decades.
Compare with the Falcon 9R program: they built, launched, and deliberately threw away one already. They'll do this several more times. The vehicles are cheap enough that they can intentionally lose hardware as part of the test program. The vehicles are capable enough that they can get paid to test them by still using them to launch payloads into orbit while doing it.
The Shuttle had to fly dozens of times a year just to break even compared to the cost of building new expendable rockets. They could never come anywhere close to that. This is the sort of thing that M. Bonnal is referring to, and it makes sense in that context. The difference is that Falcon 9R costs little more than a regular Falcon 9 to build, and on the second launch it will already be past breakeven and saving money. Perhaps it can be reused 40 times, but unlike the Shuttle, it doesn't need to be reused 40 times to justify an extremely high initial cost and extremely high ongoing overhead.
There is so much more margin of error with the Falcon 9, the industry veterans have no idea what they are talking about. Their experiences are built on a generation of excessive complexity.
Anyway, you are right. The amazing thing about Falcon 9R is just how little was added to the standard Falcon 9. Slap some legs on it and give it some fancy software and call it a day, pretty much. It's a completely different world from custom-designing a reusable spaceplane from scratch.
I don't know that too many people make that distinction, but it does seem to be the accepted definition of "sailplane". There's nothing wrong with calling, say, an ASW-20 a glider, but calling the Shuttle a sailplane isn't quite right.
F22's would be a lot cheaper to make (than today) if everyone had one in their backyard, like a Honda Civic.