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Comment by cloudwalking | Hacker News Reader

"It's about a 30% increase in performance, maybe a little more." That's pretty amazing increase in performance for an existing platform.

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.

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I agree that the changes will be revolutionary, and drastically reduce launch costs; but SpaceX is only prepared to recover the first stage in the near term, and the second stage is still quite costly. In the long term, launch costs will go down as much as you say, but SpaceX is not quite there yet.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_reusable_launch_system_d...

Yes, yes, definitely agree they're not there yet, but when you look at space technology from the 60's to now, and how quickly SpaceX has moved from inception to first successful stage landing, it's extremely impressive.

That was their original plans for the shuttle. Not saying they won't be able to save money this time, but it's never that simple.

Part of the Shuttle's reusability problems stemmed from Congress (and other decision-makers) forcing NASA to use facilities in ~40-50 different states and multiple subcontractors. And, full & rapid reusability was never in the Shuttle plans. They aimed for moderate reusability and then failed spectacularly at that. SpaceX is much more centralized and much more efficient.

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.

We should put less focus on reusability, and pay more attention to labor (inspection and repair time) per launch. If you compare SpaceX and NASA under this paradigm, or by looking at launch cost per unit of mass, SpaceX has long since surpassed all other launch providers.

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.

'What percentage of a launch vehicle (rocket to space) do you think is the cost of labour? It's about 80-90%! It's labour!' Peter Diamandis, X-Prize

Here is an example of how inspection could be done by professionals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dWCI4S4fGg

Just because a problem has been solved poorly in the past doesn't mean it can't be solved correctly in the future.

> That was their original plans for the shuttle.

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.

I think it's more accurate to say that companies exist to make money, so that's what they optimize. Government agencies exist to provide political capital to their supporters, so they optimize both the political capital created and the number of supporters it's created for.

The Shuttle pushed the envelope in a dozen different ways and always operated right on the edge, which made it incredibly complicated and caused it to require extensive refurbishment after each flight.

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.

The Shuttle's design was also complicated by the military who required it to have a huge 1000 nm cross range capability.

30% increase can mean a lot of things.. it's almost certainly not a 30% thrust increase (helpful but not earthshaking) or 30% increase in specific impulse (nobel prize time). From the wording of the quote it sounds like it's probably a 30% increase in payload to LEO, which is certainly nowhere near 2 orders of magnitude in cost reduction.

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