SpaceX's New Spin on Falcon 9
aviationweek.com
aviationweek.com
A lot of customers may not want to fly on a used rocket though (no one knows the risks), so SpaceX may end up with quite a large number of rockets, which they'll have to fly to establish costs/risks/etc.
It looks like at least a some part of their satellite internet plan was meant to take advantage of this large launch capacity. I'm also very curious to see what the prices for a used rocket launch are. Rockets are obviously expensive, but so are the operational costs in setting them up.
Anyway, these are probably the most exciting times in spaceflight since the 60s!
I could see SpaceX segmenting their customers into two tiers: mission completion sensitive, and cost sensitive, with who gets which rockets straightforward.
For arguments sake, lets assume that the second stage was 10% of the manufacturing cost and the first stage was 90%. You could argue, that the engines are what's most expensive and the first stage has nine times as many. Ignoring the cost for lunch, landing, refuelling etc. you could at best reduce the cost by 90%, a single order of magnitude. Unfortunately, the first stage might be worth much more. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost distribution is closer to 50-50. The second stage has all the avionics, a special vacuum version of the Merlin engine and might be more weight optimised due to the larger effect on maximum payload.
Lets hope the Mars rocket (BFR) will allow full, low cost reusability. I'm sure SpaceX is working very hard on that.
Also, while expensive, plane changes are still cheaper delta-V-wise than punching through the soup our atmosphere is.
Also, changing orbits is expensive. Remember you need to change both height and angle, and the delta-V is huge.
Bringing them back down is almost certainly the easiest option.
Engineers have been scratching their heads for decades trying to figure out where all the money goes. For shuttle launches, depending on who's doing the accounting, fuel was something on the order of 2% of total launch costs. And the shuttle was reusable as well.
I think it's that disparity that attracted Musk to the rocket business in the first place. You look at the cost breakdowns and think "What? How can this be so expensive?" If everything goes his way he'll have cut the vehicle cost by a factor of at least 20 by the time he's done.
I am certain the insurers will be happy to take a crack at figuring out the risk.
That matters a lot. Whether or not you "want to fly on a used rocket," if your company can purchase a flight and insurance on a used rocket for a lot less than it can purchase a flight and insurance on a new rocket, you might be obligated to try it because of the decreased costs.
(I'm ignorant as to who actually buys the insurance for these flights, the customer or SpaceX or what, but I'm sure the point still stands)
I'd believe most companies could prefer [more certain] safety -- which just means SpaceX will have to work on increasing reused rocket numbers by whatever means.
You are right though, that there are far more than monetary concerns to consider. Sometimes it seems as though people, particularly on HN, believe that money is the only thing of consideration in any endeavor.
Alternately, operators of large constellations, eg. Iridium that can replace the payload relatively quickly and cheaply. Opportunity cost can be mitigated if some of the payload is intended as on-orbit spares.
If you can put a dollar figure on the potential time loss, it's still a pretty straightforward matter.
If you're flying with a "we must get this in orbit ASAP or the world will catch on fire" priority then, eventually, one will probably pay more for that. (the government will contract out a series of flights so it will play out differently for them)
It's going to take some flying for that to all shake out. As others have pointed out, it's not obvious that the first flight will have the lowest risk. It will be the most expensive in the beginning because its risk is the best understood.
It may not seem like it, but launch costs are still only a fraction of the total system cost. Ground for example infrastructure is more expansive by a large factor. Even the sat manufacturing costs overshadow launch costs for most systems. That's why customers might prefer safety until reliability is proven. Cutting corners on launch can jeopardize the whole system.
> Anyway, these are probably the most exciting times in
> spaceflight since the 60s!
I'm still curious though how they got a 30% improvement, and if it was a retelling of the Merlin 1C -> 1D evolution of if this is really a Merlin 1D+. They have also hinted at a project "Raptor" which is a ginormous engine.
And finally it really puts a bad light on "Cost Plus" contracts and the folks at Boeing and ULA who have supplied launch platforms for the last few decades. Clearly nobody in the "old guard" really cared about space, they just wanted to keep the money flowing. I am profoundly glad that they are being shaken up. Perhaps some of the management there will actually listen to what the engineers have been proposing for years and years.
Minimally, the pintle engine technology came out of NASA work and I suspect much of their technical knowledge comes either directly or indirectly from NASA funding.
" Clearly nobody in the "old guard" really cared about space, they just wanted to keep the money flowing. I am profoundly glad that they are being shaken up."
I think many of their engineers cared. But their corporate culture doesn't seem that interested in spaceflight, or at least spaceflight beyond the status quo.
We spent more than enough money on NASA to have been decades ago where SpaceX is today. Unfortunately, Congress sees NASA as a source of patronage funding and not a space agency. If it had been run as a space program the shuttle would have been cancelled in the early '80s when it became The Monster That Ate The Budget.
Political systems of organization (organizations of people set up based on the desires of the electorate and controlled by politicians) exist and act for political reasons. Getting to the moon was a political goal, not a scientific one. The shuttle and ISS were political goals. Even privatizing like we've done is a political act.
We really need to build a mass driver on Earth for cargo launches. It would not be crazy expensive, and it would make a huge difference in the cost of LEO construction. Our order of priority should be 1) reduce cost to LEO to 1/100th of what it currently is, and 2) make orbital construction costs as close as possible to other oddball ground-based construction costs, like building underwater or in Antarctica. If we can focus on dropping costs, there are thousands of industries and other actors that will do some really cool stuff with the tools we provide. But that's a really tough thing to sell politically. The real reason we have SpaceX is because nobody wanted to explain to the folks how we lost a huge amount of our launch capacity when we retired the shuttle.
Seriously, the limiting factor in how small you can make an orbital launch packet is atmospheric drag. The more atmospheric drag, the more mass to surface area ratio you need to reduce the losses to an acceptable level. The smaller you can make the orbital packet, the smaller you can make the mass launcher. The smaller the mass launcher, the smaller the capital expense. A small mass launcher also fits on a smaller airplane.
We already have plenty of airplanes capable of flying in the stratosphere which can mount a mass launcher of a few tons weight. If the goal is getting mass up there, it doesn't matter whether it is 1000 launches of 1 kg each, or 1 launch of 1000 kg. But 1000 launches of 1 kg each could be done with much less capital expense.
The whole reason we don't have a mass launcher is because it is perceived as too expensive. Sea-level, or even mountain-level mass launchers need to launch large packets by their nature. But a high-flying airplane could launch many smaller packets with a cost which is actually doable.
I assumed this was the motivator for their satellite internet backbone scheme.
I am constantly blown away by SpaceX. This is an absurd level of improvement for an already mature, commercially successful rocket.
If even 1% of the world's companies in other sectors worked this well, I can only imagine how much our quality of life would improve. Musk seems extremely adept at applying the best of software development practices to hardware design.
Some things that stand out:
-Extreme streamlining of the product range
-Complete control of the design, prototyping, testing and manufacturing cycles achieved by keeping the entire process in-house
- Optimal product iteration roadmap, which balances maximum improvement per iteration with minimum time-to-market
I think Musk should open an engineering management consulting firm, and hire a few smart people to analyze SpaceX and transfer some of its engineering management methodologies into a set of training modules. I'm usually of the opinion that good management is just common sense, but the degree to which SpaceX is outdoing its competitors suggests they've made a significant breakthrough in their engineering/management processes.
It's a nice idea, but it wouldn't make any sense. Big institutions are arranged a certain way because of the incentives. You're not going to change the incentives because the people at the top fundamentally don't understand the way R&D works. Further, big organizations tend to reward a track record of successes no matter how small, rather than rewarding herculean efforts that only succeed halfway (or fail). The culture is generally anathema to taking risk.
Because the organizations are the way they are, nothing will change unless you change management to the highest ranks and empower people at all levels to make things better. Sadly that rarely happens in big companies; people manage to claw their way up and they're not going to risk that job, power or prestige unless it's a sure thing. Which R&D never is.
Musk's companies are two of the very few exceptions to this universal empirical reality, and as such underscore the need to try and understand what makes them (SpaceX and Tesla) different, right down to the psychology of the executive team and founders. In my opinion, nothing is more important for the success of a company than the psychological foundations of the executive team and investors. They set the incentive structures, and their subordinates do their best to carry them out.
In most companies, the incentive structure is to get paid as much as possible by playing office politics. Hence, we get golden parachutes, "cost-centers", and an obsession with stock price and quarterly profits.
Why is this answer unfortunate (for other businesses)? Because you can't really fake caring about something. Many of the problems you see in most modern companies stem from the very fact that they exist primarily to make money, and they comprise of people thinking mostly profit - looking at their company through IAbstractMoneyMakingEntity interface, without really caring about what services or goods the company actually provides.
SpaceX does excellent work, and has an amazing track record for such a young space company. That being said, it's important to highlight that the 'absurd level of improvement' that we're seeing not just the product of good engineering management practices. Much of it comes as a result of some pretty extreme expectations placed on the employees working there.
I've lost track of the number of people who've told me that they'd love to work at SpaceX, if only the culture wasn't so oppressively work-centric. These comments have come from students looking for full time jobs having previously interned within the aerospace industry as well as NASA civil servants and contractors who have been putting stuff into space for decades.
The aerospace industry is practically built around overworking its engineers, and, for almost everyone in it, working here was a conscious sacrifice to be able to do some Very Cool Shit. SpaceX takes that concept and turns it up to 11, expecting people to eat, breathe, and live their jobs. The last thing I would want is a firm dedicated to propagating these ideals.
On the other hand, if that's what you love it starts to not feel like work. In my experience getting that the match right is super difficult but perhaps that's what SpaceX is aiming for - not really looking for employees but members.
What are you basing that on? And an absurd level of improvement can just as easily mean that V1 was just really bad, not that V2 is just that good.
I mean, the Merlin-1D has really good thrust to weight ratio, but the actual amount of thrust and the ISP at sea level is lacking compared to, say, the space shuttle's main engines (even with +30% the 1D is going to come short of 1,000 kN thurst, whereas the RS-25 on the shuttle was 1,860 kN).
It also runs on RP-1 which is a supply-constrained fuel choice that also has a max theoretical ISP that's lower than the ISP that the space shuttle's main engine actually achieved at sea level. And the RS-25's vacuum ISP is so far out of the 1D's reach it's not even funny. Not saying the RS-25 is particularly unique here, there are 17 liquid-fueled rocket engines that have an ISP over 400 in a vacuum, 9 of which also have more thrust than the 1D. The 1D by contrast has an ISP of 340 in a vacuum. 9 engines that have more thrust and more efficiency than the 1D. 9. But somehow Space-X is the one that blows you away?
So sure, it has good thrust to weight - at the cost of using a limited fuel, with low efficiency, and low total thrust. Wow that sure is worthy of just being blown away by absurd level of improvement
The one thing Space-X and Elon Musk do deserve credit on is they sure know how to market effectively. He is really, really good at making mundane tech sound amazing.
>>I mean, the Merlin-1D has really good thrust to weight ratio, but the actual amount of thrust and the ISP at sea level is lacking compared to, say, the space shuttle's main engines (even with +30% the 1D is going to come short of 1,000 kN thurst, whereas the RS-25 on the shuttle was 1,860 kN).
The Saturn's F1 engine had an even lower Isp, and was also KeroLox. Your focus on Isp is a bit misguided. Sure the SSME's have a stellar Isp, but guess what? The shuttle solid rocket boosters had a terrible Isp (Shuttle basically ran the RS-25 at lift off only to verify they'd start. They weren't throttled up until well into flight). When it comes to hauling millions of pounds off the launch pad, past the tower, Isp is not what you want. You want mass expelled at a tremendous rate. In other words, why not use electric ion engines with >2000 Isp for the first stage? Thrust to weight matters on lift off is why.
You'll note I only focused on Isp for engines with similar or better thrust than the 1D. And you can't just blindly ignore this. The lower the Isp of the engine the more fuel you need and the worse the thrust-to-weight of the vehicle total ends up being.
Having a very light but very low Isp engine will not get you off the ground efficiently. And if your claim to fame is being cost-effective, efficiency is kinda important.
Or put another way, the RS-25 at 7,480lb each represents a tiny, tiny fraction of the shuttle's total launch weight of 4,400,000 lbs. Using a 5,000lb engine instead would change nothing. Similarly your claim they only ran at lift off to verify they'd start is wrong. The RS-25 represented 30% of the launch thrust.
Even on the fairly light and small Falcon 9, the total vehicle weight is 1,115,200 lbs. The engine weight here is important but far, far from being the single most important attribute. And with a higher Isp engine with enough thrust you could then carry less fuel. Pretty sure you could spend 10,000 lbs on the engines to save 240,000 lbs of fuel (Falcon 9 has ~822,000 lbs of propellant, the RS-25's Isp is +30% the 1D at sea level)
Also interesting to see that the Falcon Heavy boosters are literally just Falcon 9s strapped to the sides of a larger rocket. They will be producing just two separate rockets on the factory floor. This is how SpaceX will really squeeze out manufacturing efficiencies.
Given the Falcon 9 reusability, we're going to see launch costs drop by two entire magnitudes. Instead of destroying an $60MM launch vehicle, each launch just burns $200,000 in fuel. This will open up space in ways we have never imagined.
There are certainly comparisons to me made, and lessons to be learned, but I think that SpaceX has already met/surpassed all levels of success that NASA achieved in reusability, the only caveat being that they haven't technically done it in a production environment yet.
The shuttle had a number of issues, including design issues due to DoD requirements, engine pressure issues due to internal NASA priorities, and budget trade-offs due to Congressional directives. The most important lesson to take away from the shuttle is that returning the most costly components to earth does not necessarily translate into cost savings.
While I agree with your point I don't think it's necessarily fair to compare a for-profit company to a government agency with no requirements to create a profit. A company should always be moving in the direction of the highest profits while a government agency seems to always head in the direction of higher bureaucracy.
If you look at costs relative to constructing new launchers, reusing the Shuttle was quite cost effective. Cost per launch was in the neighborhood of $500 million, while the cost of building a new orbiter was in the neighborhood of $2 billion. The trouble was just that the system was so expensive that even the reused cost was really high compared to expendables.
None of that applies to Falcon. It's a conservative system and it's already one of the cheapest out there without any reuse. If they match the Shuttle on cost reduction (launching a reused vehicle costs 25% of the original) then they'll have substantially dropped the cost of getting things into orbit, because they're starting at ~$60 million per vehicle, instead of billions.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_reusable_launch_system_d...
Yikes! That's a pretty substantial upgrade.
This isn't the talk by Gwynne mentioned in the article, however it is a government hearing that happened on the same day by the same person.
( Gotta love the title: AAA - Assuring Assured Access... )
The Kessler Syndrome right now is a potentially exponential problem that we should be conscientious of because our access to space depends on open orbital lanes.
I want to submit a YC application proposing an orbital debris mitigation as a service company but im not sure if it's an idea YC will facilitate
The science behind the movie Gravity wasn't too accurate but the scenario the characters found themselves in is very very plausible.
I'm not saying SpaceX has a fundamental problem, I just find it interesting how obvious PR planted articles are.
From the linked article : "In a luncheon talk at the Satellite 2015 show in Washington March 17"
From the Spaceflight Now article : "Speaking at a luncheon in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday"
So really it was just a update where all the information came out and different reporters chose different things to report on.
Meanwhile the helium leak problem & reshuffling of schedule is an actual bit of news. We have known about the helium leaks before, but this is the first time it got so bad they had to so dramatically change the launch schedule. If it is a fundamental problem (which is sure seems to be), it might put this years launch schedule in some jeopardy.
I realize that is sort of semantic hand waving but when you assert something it "not news" you are, in the framework of that definition, making a false-by-definition statement asserted as truth. That irritates me unreasonably.
That said, in terms of impact to the schedule and expectedness the helium leak is no unexpected. So it isn't really "news" by your definition either. The whole point of doing these preflight tests is to ferret out these issues, and by their nature a minimum weight helium tank is a tricky thing to both manufacture and install. You need only search for the phrase "SpaceX Helium Leak" on your favorite search engine and you will find this not an uncommon issue which delays launches.
As SpaceX seems to be fairly familiar with the problem, and they have fixed leaky tanks a number of times, it seems to me that it is close to, if it hasn't already, entered into the operational readyness plan, where there might be "Step 1. Find the helium leak we know is out there. Step 2. Apply the appropiate fix prior to launch." So I don't really see how you could support the claim that this is a threat to the launch schedule.
> A journalist reporting on an event but who was paid by
> a company or working off a PR media release is
> generally not considered news.
Let me put that in a different context, if Obama gives a speech, and releases the speech to the media ahead of time, and a "news outlet" prints, or shows, or somehow makes available a "story" which is consumed by a reader or a viewer or a listener, was that not "news" that they heard? What would they call it? When you listen to the program on the radio they call that segment a "news update" what do you call it?
Do reporters have agendas? Sure they are reporters. Does the same "news" sound different coming from CNN and Fox and ABC ? Yes. And while we can all indict the media for being dupes, I expect stories that unless stories are paid placement (and neither example in this thread appears to have been a paid placement) are considered to be "news stories" by most people. Perhaps biased news based on the biases of the news organization but news none the less.
that's partially why ULA keeps both the ATLAS and Delta family rockets. If one is grounded you have the other to rely on. SpaceX only has the Falcon. Hell, even the Millenium Falcon had problems with its hyperdrive.
Not trying to knock SpaceX here, I'm actually trying to get a job with them in aerospace engineering. They just have both an advantage and disadvantage by having one rocket system.
"Rapid unscheduled disassembly" is a standard space industry term. Just like some other fun euphemisms - e.g. an "anomaly" or "lithobraking" (i.e. crashing hard into the ground). It's just a jargon, not PR. I wouldn't be surprised if whoever invented these terms had a good laugh over them.
I do like and support SpaceX, but they sure seem to have an impressive PR machine also. They seem to get a lot more buzz and press than every other space company combined. Maybe it's a Silicon Valley-inspired tradition of working with and courting the press, as opposed to a more secrecy-focused environment in companies that mostly do military contracting?
We need to judge both by PR and actual performance. So far there is plenty of both to talk about.