Is there data about the costs of various payloads?
With cheaper launch costs and more frequent launches, there would less riding on any one particular launch which would make payload users less risk-averse, perhaps using less thoroughly tested payloads which would be cheaper and higher performance. Am I correct that the electronics on payloads typically tend to be several years behind and cost 1-2 orders of magnitude more?
Could SpaceX get into the payload business? Are there the same kind of inefficiencies in payloads that there are in launches? Sending a probe to/around Mars would be quite a PR stunt and would pave the way for landing humans.
You mention the Mandalay Bay. With launch costs of 0.05%/kg, it might make space hotels possible. I remember reading something about the potential for economic growth about 15-20 years ago and the author mentioned tourist trips to space as a flippant example of the practically limitless potential for growth.
Sure, you are completely correct. And markets get disrupted all the time. BFR is going to completely disrupt the very large space launch industry.
I don’t think we have a clue what might come out of this. Sure, the easy things to imagine are cheaper science missions and asteroid mining. But the actual value might be found in things we can’t even imagine because they are several iterations away.
As an analogy, when the motor car came along I’m sure people could predict cheaper transportation. Futurists might have extrapolated and looked at the effect of mobile workforces or being able to move goods easily across the country. But the car did far more than that - it created a new social category called ‘teenager’. It is partially responsible for the sexual revolution, and all the changes to society it brought. it enabled drive-in restaurants and theaters, and gigantic industries for car racing, movies about car racing, you name it. Stuff that was utterly unpredictable when Henry Ford was doing his thing,
Maybe cheap space travel will lead to new resource discoveries. Maybe we will find that space vacations are so awesome that in 50 years orbit or the moon will become the biggest tourist destination. Or one big asteroid find will lead to a new gold rush and we’ll see hundreds of small mining companies strike out for the belt. We really have no idea. But it seems likely that space access is going to drop in cost by a factor of 100 or so, and that has to cause that market to explode, so to speak.
Very good points. when a launch costs half a billion dollars, you need to go to extreme lengths to make sure the payload is perfect. That drives up cost even more.
Bit if you can launch your mission for a million bucks, you can afford failures. so instead of having to think of everything in advance and design for every possible thing that could go wrong, you can start doing guerrilla designs, trying experimental techniques, and iterate constantly.
Think about what Musk could have done with cery little extea effort to that car. a set of solar panels, a remote camera, and he could have had a functioning space probe that might have sent back data for years. and if it failed? Figure out what went wrong and try again.
Musk IS in the payload business. SpaceX has a resupply contract with the ISS. And SpaceX plans to use BFR to launch a constellation of internet satellites that will provide internet access to everyone on the planet. Some analysts believe that the internet satellite plans are the real profit center for SpaceX.
Bigelow aerospace has been pushing that idea for a long time. one of their inflatable habitats is now attached to the ISS, but they have a much bigger one in development - a single inflatable habitat the size of a decent townhouse. Their B330 Hab has 12,000 cubic feet of internal pressurized volume, and weighs 20 tonnes. BFR could launch seven of them on one flight. imagine these things attached to a central ‘lobby’ that can be stretched to add as manu of these as you want. There’s your space hotel.
Bigelow also has the B2100 under design. It’s huge - when inflated it would have four levels, and twice the interior volume of the entire ISS today. It hasn’t been built because there are no rockets that could take its 70 ton weight into orbit. And until now, the cheapest future launch looked like SLS, at about a billion dollars.
BFR could launch two of them at a time, for around a million bucks each. as a hotel, each one could house at least 8 guests, giving as separate private floor to each couole. if you want to pack them into cruise ship like cabins, double it.
Suddenly we have the ability to launch a hotel into orbit for little more than $100,000 per room - which isn’t far off the price of a luxury cruise ship. The cruise industry is pretty big, and I can tell you that I’d rather spend a week in orbit than a week on the ocean.
Just remember that the BFR will be 5 years late and launch costs will be significantly higher than Elon is projecting at the moment. I’ve no doubt it will be hugely disruptive, but while SpaceX has been delivering the goods Elon has still been over-promising every step of the way. That’s not even to be critical of the guy, because the achievements have been immense. Just not quite as immense as initially promised.
Has he been very lucky, or does he hire better engineers than NASA, or has technology grown to the point that he can do better than the Apollo program?
He doesn’t have to worry that if he screws up the government will halt his programs.
And, perhaps most importantly, he hasn’t killed anyone yet.
While SpaceX has certainly been late, they have by no means overpromised (certainly not every step of the way).
The Falcon Heavy was originally intended to launch 25 tons to LEO, and did not have a recovery system. Instead, we get 63 tons to LEO and recovery of all three boosters (although not at the same time: full recovery costs some payload).
They also promised about $1000/lb launch costs, which it looks like they’ll match or beat.
There are a few things that have gotten dumped along the way, such as propellant crossfeed–although that was made up, and then some, by improvements in the Merlin engines (which, with their higher thrust, can both reduce gravity losses and enable deeper throttling of the center core).
As for the test flight itself, Musk was toning down its odds for success. He said merely clearing the tower would be considered a win. In fact, they delivered on just about every aspect of the flight, from launch to booster separation to booster landing (only failing, in a minor way, on the center core barge landing). They vastly exceeded expectations here.
It’s a similar story for the Falcon 9 previously. Although they’ve been frequently late (though not universally), the Falcon 9 that we have now is vastly superior to what was promised originally. The first one put 10 tons in orbit with only parachute recovery planned. What we got was 22 tons and Buck Fucking Rogers retropropulsive landings.
So yeah–BFR* will be years late. But I would not be shocked to find that the delivered product is better than what they’re promising now.
Maybe BFR should stand for Buck Fucking Rogers instead of Big Falcon Rocket from now on.
That is certainly a big part of it. SpaceX can take risks that NASA cannot. Their recovery program had many, many failures before succeeding. They did not have to worry about Congress cutting their funding on the first sign of a bad test.
As a point of comparison, there was the DC-X(A) program. It was a fantastic program, doing retropropulsive flight decades before SpaceX. It had a lean team and they learned a great deal about how to operate ground support with a handful of people. It influenced SpaceX a lot. They had many successes, but eventually had a hard landing that broke a landing leg and destroyed the single test article. Instead of learning their lessons and trying again, NASA cancelled the program. NASA didn’t like it anyway because it competed with another project. All that work thrown away as far as NASA was concerned (though others took notice).
Of all the aspects that make SpaceX more efficient, it is probably the incentive structure that matters most, as it’s the motivating factor behind all their other decisions. Every dollar that SpaceX saves goes directly to their bottom line, because they work on a fixed price and are a private company. Normal government contractors work in the opposite fashion: they get paid for all the effort they put in, plus some additional profit, and so are highly motivated to essentially invent additional work. Of course there are checks that the contractors do not outright throw money away, but if something can be even minimally justified, it’s in the contractor’s interest to push for it.
These forces have motivated SpaceX to build as much as possible internally. Not only does this mean they avoid the high markups on aerospace hardware, but it also gives them more flexibility for internal tradeoffs. They can better weigh the consequences of, say, saving a kilogram here and adding it in another place (perhaps the materials are cheaper for one item vs. another, and so is more cost effective in some places). These kinds of tradeoffs are difficult with the usual tree of contractors, subcontractors, sub-subcontractors, and so on.
I wonder why they ditched the middle booster. Sure it overshot the landing pad, but did they not have a backup site? Could they not have let it coast in space a bit more, perhaps landing it in Africa? Was it going fast enough to complete a whole orbit so they could bring it down when it came around again?
They didn’t intentionally ditch the center core. It came in hot, and required a 3-engine landing burn. But the two outer engines ran out of igniter chemicals and didn’t start. With only the center engine burning, it could not slow down in time (only seconds left at this point) and hit the water at ~300 mph.
Even had they known about this, it’s likely that nothing could have been done. Single-engine burns are less efficient than triple-engine burns, and so they would have probably run out of main propellant in that case.
It was a mistake, but probably a relatively simple one that can be corrected on the next flight.
Incidentally, the center core never makes it to orbit. There is some flexibility on where it can come down, but it can’t complete a whole orbit (or really anywhere close to one–it only goes a few hundred miles out).
I just wanted to point out that this is one of the benefits of govt spending and waste.
To some extent, the program was a waste of money, in that NASA did not end up using it for anything themselves.
OTOH, all of the data and experience they got with their early program was in the public domain for other commercial enterprises to pick up on. Without NASA wasting quite a bit of money on a failed program, SpaceX would have had to start from scratch and go through all the trials that NASA had already cleared.
That’s true, to an extent. We shouldn’t forget that NASA came from NACA, whose explicit role was to perform fundamental aeronautics research and disseminate it to industry. And of course we have them to thank for the NACA airfoild, the NACA duct, and others.
You could see the DC-XA program in that light, though it was never intended for that. They didn’t even initiate it; the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization did, and it was eventually transferred to NASA more or less against their will. I’m not sure we ever got a real data dump of their findings the way we’d expect if it were a pure research program.
So although I certainly appreciate the existence of the program and that we might not have retropropulsive landings today without it, they could have done things far more efficiently and effectively if it were intended to be a pure research program instead of being treated as a “not invented here” thing competing with their own projects and cancelled at the first opportunity.
The story of the DC-X shows exactly what is wrong with government bureaucracies when it comes to innovation. DC-X showed that retropropulsive landings were possible. NASA didn’t continue it after they took control because it was just too far outside their comfort zone.
The same is true of densified propellant. NASA studied it in the 1970’s, and knew that it could give them a 15% performance boost. They even built test ground hardware in 2000. There was talk of a future upgrade to Shuttle to make use of it, but that never happened.
So here we are, where the two great innovations SpaceX is using to disrupt spaceflight were known to NASA decades ago and even successfully tested. And yet, NASA’s ‘New’ rocket uses neither. it’s basically just the same kind of big dumb expendable booster they’ve been using for 50 years.
So how come NASA can’t pull the trigger on new tchnologies for heavy lift? Lots of reasons. They are an old and sclerotic organization with a lot of inertia. They are extremely risk averse. They have no profit motive. A 15% increase in launch cost might be an easy thing for an administrator to throw away in favor of not taking risks on new technology, because if he or she signs off on the risk and the mission fails, they’ll be held accountable. But a 15% increase in launch costs? Well, when you are already looking at a billion dollars per launch, does it really matter? We’ll just ask for a few hundred million more in the next appropriations bill.
Then there’s the politics. Gotta keep all those legacy manufacturing facilities open. Senators won’t vote for a plan that closes that old factory that makes 40 year old space shuttle engines or shuttle derived solid rocket boosters, so we have to figure out how to incorporate that old tech into anything new we do…
NASA is good at deep space probes and satellites. They’re good at basic science. If Nasa dumped SLS and refocused the 3.5 billion per year saved from that on deep space hardware, they could really accelerate space science. Instead, they’re going to blow billions on a rocket forced on them by the Senate, which they didn’t want. Then when it finally flies it will be old school, way too expensive, and a visible reminder of how much better the private launch industry has become.
NASA should be reviewing every one of their deep space probe plans anyway, because BFR changes the equation substantially. A Europa probe designed around the constraints of a Delta IV launch will be radically different than one designed for a launch vehicle that can put 50 tons of payload in Saturnian orbit for a million bucks, without the need for long gravity assisted flight times. NASA should be completely re-evaluating its entire deep space plan.
Yes, they were. with a clean sheet of paper, very specific requirements, and a nearly unlimited budget. It was a reasonably new organization filled with young people all focused on a grand mission. There was no room for scope creep, there were no existing jobs to save, etc.
Fast forward to today, and NASA is top heavy with administrators and old people. They have a very poorly defined mission, and every project they undertake has to please a dozen political masters. They are mired in red tape and have a culture that is extremely risk-averse. Their bloated management means engineers doing the actual building of things have very little say in how they are built, and communicating new ideas and having them be taken seriously is very difficult.
This isn’t unique to government. I used to work for a small company that was purchased by a large one, and after a few years you could really see how all our people were disempowered and just working to rule, while the remote managers made decisions increasingly disconnected from what customers needed. Large bureaucracies develop emergent behaviours that are not conducive to innovation and rapid change.
What can help large organizations avoid that pitfall?
Would this be chiefly for currently poorly connected areas or could it change things in well-connected areas too? Could comms satellites offer something advantageous to North American and European cities?
I’m surprised that’s not already a management sim video game.