Thank for posting that. I got busy and forgot to watch live.
I’m glad for another successful mission. That double booster recovery still feels like watching science fiction to me.
The fog made me think for a minute that they’d launched out of Vandenberg. I’d have taken a half-day off for that! But no, it was in Florida. Didn’t realize it sometimes got that foggy there as well.
Yeah, I’m genuinely disappointed that some of the Falcon Heavy launches out of Vandenberg that were kicked around never happened.
Good article from Eric Berger in Ars Technica today:
That is truly astounding. These engines are roughly the same thrust as the RS-25’s NASA is using for SLS. NASA is paying $146 million each for its RS-25s, including paying Rocketdyne Aerojet $1 billion to restart the production line, and a total of $3.5 billion for 24 engines. SpaceX is building 52 per year- RAJ is building four RS-25’s per year under the new contract.
It’s not clear how much the current Raptors cost, but somewhere under $1 million each and possibly as low as $275,000. So 24 Raptors would cost between approx $7 million and $24 million. That’s just a crazy difference in cost.
The quote under the headline, however, does not refer to the engines but to a propellant depot in LEO, which SpaceX is building as a Starship variant. Two key problems to be solved- the actual transfer of cryo fuels in orbit, and minimizing boil-off for the depot which is expected to stay fueled for longish periods of time.
Also, SpaceX is expected to try an orbital launch attempt in early December.
Don’t say it! Richard Shelby might be listening!
Thankfully, Shelby is now retired. But he did succeed in keeping SLS alive long enough to fly (probably).
We probably could have had some very capable systems years ago had NASA continued investing in orbital propellant depots. Falcon Heavy is not as cheap as Starship, but still would have made a great propellant lift vehicle. But no, Shelby correctly realized that depots invalidate SLS’s reason for existence, and therefore fought them every step of the way.
There’s a particular SpaceX subreddit which I won’t link to because it’s offensive and 99% stupid memes, but which nevertheless has an ongoing series of past quotes from old space, or various politicians supporting old space, and generally railing against SpaceX or new space. A good one from today:
“This is the reality of my world,” Green said, entering the discussion for the first time. “The administration says that 2025 would be the launch date for Clipper. And, while the budget we received keeps it on a 2022 timescale, the administration says that we must launch on an EELV. We will not be able to use the SLS.”
Culberson cut Green off here. “The chances of that are zero,” he said.
Narrator: the chances were not zero. It’s going to fly on Falcon Heavy, not SLS. Partly because it’ll save NASA around $2B, but more importantly because Falcon Heavy won’t vibrate Europa Clipper into tiny pieces.
SpaceX is building 365 per year. It’s nearly 100x the production rate. Or maybe more, since I don’t believe Aerojet has actually restarted production yet and shown that they can actually hit a rate of 4/year.
Ugh. You mean there aren’t 52 days in a year?
Thanks for the correction.
At first, 365 engines a year sounds like a lot. But when you need 39 for each Starship, it’s not that much. But it does show how far behind SpaceX everyone else is. So many pieces have to come together to make a concept like Starship work. Your typical vertically-integrated big aerospace firm is just a long, long way from where SpaceX is. Decades, probably. Or maybe never with their existing work forces, management and practices.
It seems like a pretty good number to target for now. I don’t think they’ll need so many in the long run, due to reusability, though it depends on exactly how ambitious Musk is when it comes to Mars colonization. Unlike other rockets, the bottleneck with a fully reusable system isn’t in how many get expended each time, but rather in how many hours they spend in flight. Close to Earth, they get recycled quickly (under an hour for the booster, a few hours for Starship in LEO, a few days for a lunar version, but a few years for Mars).
In the very short term, they’ll definitely lose a few vehicles, so a high production rate is useful. We’ll see how that plays out longer term.
I’d like to build a dragster with a Raptor engine. The engine weighs 1600 kg, and although a typical Top Fuel dragster weighs only about a ton total, I’ll allocate 1500 kg for the frame/wheels/tanks/etc. Finally, 650 kg of propellant, which gives one second of thrust, which will be just sufficient. I allocate no mass for a driver for reasons that will be apparent.
That comes to 3750 kg. The engine produces 2.3 MN of thrust, and so the initial acceleration will be 613 m/s^2, or 62.5 gees. Top Fuel only races on a 305 m track, which means our car takes only 0.99 s to finish. The car will be going approximately mach 1.8 at the end of the run. Actually a little faster since the propellant consumption reduces the vehicle mass, but I don’t feel like doing the integral.
This has a real coyote/road runner vibe to it.
Great idea there Strangelove. May I subscribe to your newsletter?
And just think of the noise. The spectators lining the track will be blown away! In more ways than one.
You wouldn’t want to be the person (traditionally a beautiful woman) who stands between the cars and does the start, that’s for sure. Yes, I realize that’s just for street racing, but if it were a cartoon, I can see the coyote turning to ash and then crumbling into a neat pile.
It seems they got another 51 StarLinks into orbit. Again.
That’s already their fifth launch of the year, or one every 3.8 days. I think they said they were shooting for 100 flights, and they might well hit that at this rate. They were hoping for 60 flights last year and reached 61.
Gwynne Shotwell is a master of logistics, apparently. With all the talk of Musk, let’s not forget that it’s Gwynne keping everything moving smoothly, and now she’s also managing Starship production.
Gwynne Shotwell is awesome. I’m not sure who is in charge of Starlink production, but they’re awesome too. No one else has set up a satellite production line like that before–they’re pumping out several per day. Oh, and they pivoted into being a consumer electronics company as well.
Yeah. And setti;g up production lines for complex products is hard, and they are doing it with rockets, engines, satellites, ground stations, thousands of rocket parts… I’ve seen longer factory buildouts for simple products than the time it took them to stand up multiple assembly lines for crazy-difficult products.
It was billed as the first of the year … from that launch facility. The USA (NASA + USAF) has had Canaveral & intermittently Vandenberg for decades.
It feels decidedly odd to consider a private company with so many launches and facilities you can lose count of what launched from where this week.