I doubt it’s anywhere close to as high as that. With a handful of exceptions (like niobium second-stage nozzles), rockets aren’t made from particularly exotic materials. They’re mostly cheap, bulk materials like aluminum and steel. High-grade materials, mind you, but still cheap in the grand scheme of things.
The fabrication cost is the non-trivial part. This has gotten a bit easier with sophisticated CNC machines, 3D printing, etc., but is still labor-intensive work.
There’s a spectrum of recovery: on one side, there is so much damage that you aren’t doing much better than material recycling (the Shuttle solid boosters fell into this category); while on the other end the flight and landing are so gentle that most of the equipment works with no refurbishment at all.
Obviously you need something close to the latter to get any benefit from reusability. SpaceX has had a partial demonstration of this–they relit the engines from their (previously) landed stage with no refurbishment, and aside from some fluctuations in one engine (out of nine), there were no significant problems. There’s still a lot of work from there to an actually reused stage, but it’s progress.
Musk has claimed that they plan on reflying the barge-landed stage as soon as June. We’ll see about that!
To be unfair, almost everyone writing in 1950 assumed that atomic rockets were not just possible but inevitable and easy. coughHeinleincough Even Clarke’s 1951 Prelude to Space (also written in 1947), which mostly reads like a 1960 Life magazine article, used atomics.
I’ve worked on reusability studies, and the cost of the fabricated hardware (not just materials but all of the mechanical and hydraulic components, avionics and wiring, external structure, et cetera) works out to be somewhere on close order of 10% of the overall cost of the launch. SpaceX may be higher for not including some of the services that ULA will cost into a launch as part of standard operations (e.g. multiple coupled loads analysis cycles, enhanced cleanliness payload integration, mission assurance performed by independent contractors, et cetera) but I sincerely doubt that more than 20% of their launch costs is in hardware, so even if they can literally fly an entire rocket (all stages) with no refurbishment or additional checkout, they’d have to fly nine additional flights to realize a cost savings of ~18%. Of course, they aren’t going to refly Stage 2, nor are they going to be able to fly stages without some amount of refurbishment, hence my questioning of the fiscal viability. There is more discussion about the manufacturing costs of launch vehicle engines and stages in [THREAD=779191]this thread[/THREAD].
That isn’t to say that there aren’t cost savings to be had over the existing prices. With apologies to your son, it has been long known that ULA could, if they wanted to and were allowed to relax some of the FAR restrictions in the current EELV contract, reduce their costs to about 60% or less of what they charge currently for Delta IV and Atlas V launches while increasing the launch throughput to twice what they can currently build. However, they would have to do this buy performing parallel builds, requiring more people and facilities, while cutting into their overhead costs, so the realized profit would be the same as they are making now, so they have no motivation for doing so. However, comparing the realized cost of ULA launches to the published manifest costs of SpaceX is really an apples-to-oranges comparison; ULA provides an end-to-end service for the government including bringing on the independent mission assurance and payload integration capability, which are things that SpaceX doesn’t do or charges extra for. SpaceX has also been placed in a different FAR category (Part 12) with limited verification requirements for EELV certification versus ULA (FAR Part 15), which has been something of a bitter pill for EELV when it comes to criticizing their costs. On the other hand, SpaceX operates as a purely commercial entity and hasn’t benefited from the subsidies from facilities and prior engineering in developing their engines that ULA has received, nor have they been able to arbitrarily raise launch prices in response to unanticipated costs.
The problem of reusability has been studied to death since the 'Seventies since the Space Transportation System (“Shuttle”) and every realistic evaluation of conventional multistage launch vehicle systems has resulted in estimates of a ridiculous number of repeat flights before the vehicle could break even from development and operating costs; NASA came to an estimate of 50-60 flights/year, and Orbital Sciences did essentially the same study in the mid-'Ninties which concluded the same thing, which is really unsurprising because there is little difference in materials and processes used to develop and fly a launch vehicle.
The shuttle, of course, was a disaster from a fiscal standpoint, not only costing so much to operate and having such a restricted flight schedule even with a fleet of four operating orbiters but also being imposed upon the DoD and NASA as the One True Launch System which retarded development of cheaper expendable alternatives until the ascent failure of Challenger on STS-51-L. This, in turn, imposed restrictions on the number of space missions that could be launched, while the advertised ability of the shuttle to recover and return satellites to Earth for refurbishment and then fly them back to orbit was performed only once.
This isn’t to say that reuse is impossible, or that there aren’t some benefits to be had, especially for a vehicle that could be turned around fairly quickly (either in-field modular replacement of highly stressed components, or just a lower performance system with greater margins) but not with the conventional multistage cylindrical rocket operating close to material allowable limits and built to highly precise tolerances. Big Dumb Booster-type architectures ofter real potential for cost reduction, albeit with a theoretical impact upon reliability, and mostly suited to superheavy lift type applications, although the same innovations could be applied for smaller payloads as well. And revolutionary advances in propulsion systems, e.g. continuous wave detonation engines, could offer better operating margins to overcome the mass ratio sensitivity problem of conventional single-stage-to-orbit designs such that they could carry a respectable payload. But all of that would require substantial investment into research, and a shift away from the comfortable architectures that currently limit our capabilities.
I don’t doubt that SpaceX will refly a stage, and will likely even be successful at it. If they can keep the refurbishment from interfering with new production (e.g. reprocessing in MacGregor and launching at Brownsville) this may even give them a higher volume of throughput than they could achieve without expanding manufacturing capability. But I really doubt they’re going to realize great cost savings without radically rethinking the entire vehicle.
Yeah, and unfortunately we’ve essentially lost all experience in nuclear thermal propulsion engine technology by letting law fallow for two decades. Even if we had actively developed it, though, there are some scaling issues that make it an unlikely choice for small space vehicles, and probably unsuited for ascent applications in any case. An ascent failure can be bad enough with conventional propellants; spewing plutonium or enriched uranium all over Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg would be a bad few centuries for anybody involved.
Any chance you have a link to those studies, or a name? I’d certainly like to read through them to see what assumptions they made. So far I haven’t been able to find anything on the NASA technical document server (my terms seem to be either too broad or too narrow). The only document from the 70s containing “reusability” in the title is “Designing for solid rocket booster reusability”, which is obviously not quite relevant here.
I have high hopes that SpaceX is already learning things from their recovered boosters; things that don’t necessarily apply to reusability specifically, but general reliability. It is not always easy to tell from telemetry if some component is on the edge of its margins. The ability to inspect intact components after an actual flight is a huge boon here.
One more thing to go along with this: in addition to the first-stage resuability, SpaceX has been looking at reusing the payload fairings. It is not so much the cost of these, though, as opposed to the difficult manufacturing of them (being extremely large single-piece carbon-fiber and aluminum honeycomb sandwiches). They believe they will become production limited on them with their future flight rate, and would prefer reuse over spending more on manufacturing.
In other words, reuse can help even when the marginal cost is low, if there are high capital costs for a certain production rate.
Their plan seems to be to catch the fairings with a helicopter.
Ok I respect your experience but Elon Musk is obviously a very smart guy and he wouldn’t go down this path if he didn’t think there was genuine benefits to it. The latest I’ve read is that they’re looking at about re-using stage 1 of a Falcon 9 about 20 times before retiring it. According to what you’re saying that can’t possibly save money. So why is Musk doing it?
The study is entitled, “Economic Analysis of the Space Shuttle System: Executive Study” directed by Heiss, K. P. and Morgenstern, O. of Mathematica, Inc. You should be able to find it under NASA-CR-129570 in the NTRS. The study based cost savings based upon an initial flight rate of 25 NASA missions and 30 USAF missions per year in the FY1979 to FY1990 period with a fleet of five Orbiter Vehicles and corresponding boosters, although it allowed for a minimum of 39 flights per year (with the assumption that the shuttles would each cost about $0.3B instead of the almost $1B per flight unit that it eventually cost plus upgrade and maintenance costs that grew during the life of the program.) BTW the Air Force really wanted nothing to do with the Shuttle based on their prior experiences on Blue Gemini and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, and the notion that they would be willing to fly all critical NRO payloads aboard the shuttle was only viable if they abandoned the Titan and Delta systems, which of course they were forced to do politically in order to support the shuttle program, much to everyone’s peril.
I was also looking online for Dr. Elias’ 2014 presentation to AIAA SciTech Forum on reusability, and while I didn’t find it I found another similar presentation to the National Research Council on reusable booster systems here. Dr. Elias has been on the forefront of Orbital’s efforts to develop and work with reusable booster systems including X-34 testbed and the systems engineering support on the Rocketplane Kistler K-1 (which was the most promising of fully reusable systems developed in the late 'Nineties and early 'Oughts); slides 4 to 9 detail the technical issues with design for reusability; slide 11 presents some ideas on a viable path toward reusability, with the caution that justifying interest relies on a solid business case (e.g. meeting the minimum number of flights per year), and that improving structural mass fraction by using fullerene structures (which is currently beyond the state of the art) is a key factor in improving lift capability while maintaining structural capability.
First of all, let’s be clear about the fact that Elon Musk is not an aerospace or propulsion engineer, and his public comments often reveal that his knowledge of propulsion is superficial at best. (He did, however, hire Tom Mueller, a long time proponent of the TRW Low Cost Pintle Engine which served as a starting basis for the Merlin engine, although it has substantially evolved away from that simple ablative chamber cooled design.) Musk is an entrepreneur, which means he knows how to promote visions and drive people to figure out a way to realize those visions, which is fine in the world of software, but sometimes not as practical when dealing with systems that are limited by material science and energy. Musk has gotten a lot of people to buy into his dreams, both financially and technically, and has enjoyed a significant measure of success but by no means commiserate with his early bombast about the ease at which SpaceX would succeed.
SpaceX has done some impressive feats, but for the most part they are not so novel that no one has ever attempted them, and watching the stages that SpaceX has gone through in its maturing process is very reminiscent of reading of the early days of the Glenn L. Martin Company, Douglas Aircraft Company, Convair, et cetera, before they all merged into a few aerospace conglomerates run by finance people. SpaceX is not the first company to perform commercial space launch, or the first to perform powered landing, or the first to develop a new engine with private funding, or any of a number of other firsts that are often asserted by enthusiasts. They have succeeded thus far in developing a medium lift launch vehicle not based on prior art (i.e. not developed from a former ICBM system) and have demonstrated surprising reliability; one failure in twenty odd flights of a new system (even though the F9v1.0, v1.1, and v1.1 Upgrade are significantly different vehicles) is actually pretty enviable. It doesn’t quite match the success of the Atlas V and Delta IV systems, but it beats the snot out of early development of Titan-, Atlas-, and Thor-based launch systems, which is a tribute to the hard work and ability of their engineering staff to learn. Of course, they’ve also had significant anomalies on the majority of their flights, but that is to be expected with a system that is under such rapid and continuous development, and it is clearly robust enough to tolerate some pretty significant operational flaws.
As for why SpaceX would pursue reusability even if it doesn’t save them money? As I mentioned before, if it allows for greater launch throughput by not having to build new cores for every launch, it may still be worthwhile just to be able to keep a high manifest load. Even if there isn’t a dramatic improvement in costs that Musk and Gwynne Shotwell keep promising, being able to launch twice or three times as many flights as their manufacturing ability can produce cores means more cashflow coming through. So, there is a method to the madness even if it isn’t true reusability in the sense of being able to refuel and refly a stage like an airliner. And SpaceX may learn enough from doing this to develop a subsequent generation of vehicles with more robustness and greater reusability, but I think that is going to require a substantial change to both their vehicle architecture and processing flow. On the other hand, SpaceX is doing a lot of smart things, too, like horizontal integration and trying to automate a lot of the integration testing, so if they can make that work and get payloaders on board with their way of doing business there may be substantial cost savings in that alone.
Bombastic as he is, Musk is certainly not the type to hand the reins over to a finance person. The early days of aeronautics and aerospace were heady, exciting times. And they made a tremendous amount of progress back then. SpaceX is generating a similar degree of excitement and we can only hope that they can sustain it.
Well, that is true, and I have to admit no small degree of personal satisfaction in seeing Tory Bruno admit that ULA can do launches for half of what they currently charge in response to SpaceX’s successes. But I am concerned that when SpaceX fails to live up to overstated promises it will undermine public confidence and enthusiasm, and prevent other parties from investing in spaceflight, and I’m particularly concerned specifically about the obsession with sending people to Mars (which I think is vastly more difficult than Musk believes it is) will overshadow the very real need to develop an infrastructure for sustainable space industry. Hauling stuff from surface to Earth orbit is all well and good, but ultimately we need to be able to utilize space resources for structures and propellants, and eventually finished goods.
No reason to apologize about anything. My son isn’t his employer. And both he and you obviously live this stuff on a plane higher than I can appreciate.
I think my son’s frustrations are essentially twofold. He perceives that SpaceX is freed of many of the regulatory requirements and resultant costs imposed on ULA, and he feels that that regulatory environment and ULA’s corporate culture prevents them from taking advantage of their strengths and expanding into exciting new areas. Sorry - specifics on both of those exceed my level of sophistication.
But it wouldn’t exactly be a new story in business. Industry-dominant behemoth fails to adjust, while the growth areas pass them by.
Yes it does. There are vast areas of Nevada, Arctic Alaska, and a few places in California (e.g. Death Valley) that have very few people. I think it might be more accurate to say that the US does not have any large expanses of uninhabited land that are on an easy landing trajectory for a spaceship launching from Florida.
No, I meant the US does not have a large enough uninhabited area that you could launch a rocket at one end of it, and if the launch fails, the rocket will fall inside the uninhabited area. Though I should probably add that it needs to be at low latitude (i.e. Alaska won’t work). Soviet Union did (sort of, it’s at a fairly high latitude), which is why their launches were from inland. China apparently considers it an acceptable risk that sometimes their rockets fall into a populated area.
White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico is almost 80 miles from end to end, and there is nobody in there during a missile test. Even that isn’t big enough for an orbital launch.
Re: more southerly launch latitudes, Sea Launch was using an equatorial maritime launch platform.
Re: inland launch locations, SpaceX has had (maybe still has) a lease at Spaceport America in NM. SE NM has a low population density, but isn’t exactly empty. Spaceport America - Wikipedia
I’d say that is an accurate assessment. ULA, for those who aren’t aware, is a joint venture between The Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin, each of which developed separate vehicles for the EELV program (Delta IV and Atlas V, respectively) and then were forced to join together as resolution to an industrial espionage case by one on the other. Originally, both had planned to offer commercial launch in competition with each other; now, as part of their worksharing agreement they divide up the launches between them to get an approximate 50/50 split and have previously been guaranteed a sustaining number of launches on the EELV contract, which gives very little impetus to reduce costs or otherwise innovate.
This has been kind of a disaster for the American space launch industry, especially after the Delta II was retired (though it is now being revived to compete with SpaceX and the Orbital ATK Antares vehicles) because until SpaceX and Blue Origin there has been no new development work to completion on large ascent propulsion systems since the RS-68 used on the Delta IV. RpK K-1 and the Taurus II/Antares both used Soviet-era NK-33/43 engines refurbished by Aerojet General as the AJ-26, and while these were beautiful and high performing engines prior to the Antares failures, they were not manufacturable by current technological capability within the US. Atlas V, of course, uses the RD-180, also from Russia, which is a robust and reliable engine with very good performance but after Pratt & Whitney spent about a billion bucks to license the design they learned they couldn’t build it, either. And there has been so little work that from the original big three liquid engine manufactures (Aerojet, Rocketdyne, and P&W) they merged down to two and now one, while occasional players like TRW/Northrop Grumman and Boeing (which owned Rocketdyne for a time) have stepped off the field entirely, judging the business not to be worth it.
So, all of the experience built up over the first fifty years of the rocket launch industry essentially disappeared, and companies like SpaceX are having to relearn the hard lessons of how to do absurd things like balance a hundred tons of volatile propellent-filled aluminum cans atop a small jet of superheated exhaust. And that setback is significant; SpaceX has gotten further in terms of the launch rate and success than any other purely commercial venture to date, and is seeking to rival even the long-standing players in lift capability and realized reliability, but the Merlin engine isn’t especially innovative or high performing, and I’m dubious of claims that SpaceX is going to get launch costs down into the hundreds of dollars per kilogram of payload to LEO by using the existing system. Efforts to develop higher performance engines using features like aerospike/plug nozzles, hybrid combustion cycles, rotating/continuous wave detonation engines, ‘green’ propellants, et cetera are only being done at a limited rate. (Firefly Space Systems in Austin is working on a modular base plug aerospike design for their smallsat Alpha vehicle, but it’s basically just small regular engines clustered around a profiled base, which is about the least innovative of all aerospike concepts.)
Going with basic technology is smart from a business standpoint, of course, but it doesn’t push the envelope to improve the state of the art, and without those evolutionary jumps we’re going to see limited reductions in launch costs. The frustrating thing is to see actual innovations being proposed and developed on a small scale at companies like Boeing or Northrop, only to see them quashed because they won’t guarantee an immediate return on investment to the finance children. I personally think it is possible to get down to ~$600/kg to $800/kg in launch cost using conventional technology, but only by launching in bulk (e.g. concepts like BDB or the Sea Dragon), and down to the $200 to $300 range with some modest technical advances in materials and propulsion systems, but there is only so much demand for bulk launches without an infrastructure that needs materials or can be used to ferry and distribute multiple spacecraft to widely separated orbital inclinations and eccentricities.
Anyway, that’s my rant. Not a fan of ULA, and I hope SpaceX, Blue Origin, and smallsat companies like Firefly and Generation Orbit eat their lunch to the extent that they have to sincerely change their corporate culture and let some of the nerds out of the basement to play with the novel ideas they’ve come up with, but we go through this cycle about every 10-15 years and then the commercial launch industry collapses. I’m hoping this time around that innovations in small satellites and the Earth surveillance business case for them will sustain a robust launch capability for multiple launch providers, but time will tell.
SpaceX only leased space at Spaceport America for Grasshopper test flights, and I don’t believe they ever used it. Spaceport America isn’t really set up for vertical launch, and it is so remote (the closest ‘city’ is Truth or Consequences, NM, and that place is a shithole) that establishing an orbital launch capability would require developing a lot of infrastructure for both people and supply, notwithstanding that there are no land tracks from there that don’t cross occupied land at some point before achieving orbit. Having been there a couple of times, I don’t think there is really a good case for using Spaceport America over the Cape or Sudden Ranch (for high incline/polar orbits), but honestly it makes sense for a company interested in performing a high volume of flights to establish their own launch facility and range capability as SpaceX is doing in Brownsville. (I think they’re going to have problems there, but that’s probably true anywhere.)
I’ve seen a few nifty maps that make the difficulty of inland launches more clear:
First, here is a map of completely uninhabited census blocks in the US (shown in green). While there is definitely a ton of uninhabited land, even in Nevada there are isolated houses and small towns sprinkled throughout.
Second, here is a map of SpaceX launches. It includes the hazard zones for the (failed) CRS-7 mission, as well as larger pieces of debris which were detected by weather radar. In addition there are ground tracks and landing sites for all previous missions. (Map is just my quick copy-paste of relevant layers from other maps made by folks on /r/spacex, in particular thesethreemaps.)
Given today’s rockets, I see no way to launch from an inland site without either evacuating a ton of people or putting them at significant risk.
Someday, if launch vehicles ever have reliability approaching that of airplanes, and perhaps the margins to fly doglegs around larger towns, we could eventually decide that the risk is acceptably low. After all, every so often an airliner crashes on a populated area of a city, killing several people on the ground. As a society we’ve accepted this risk, but I suspect there would be a political shitstorm if there’s ever an accident like CRS-7 over land.
When airliners crash in mid-flight, which is rare because they have multiple engines and enough reaction time for a pilot to compensate for normal failures, they generally come down in one or two pieces with the damaged localized to a small area. When rocket launch vehicles fail in flight, they tend to break apart due to aerodynamic stresses into an array of pieces which create a wide debris field. The recent failure of SpaceShipTwo, which killed one of the pilots and had a near miss with someone on the ground, indicates both the need for caution in evaluating the expectation of casualty (E[SUB]c[/SUB]) and a regulatory authority which is able to guide nascent space launch interests into methods to limit the potential for public hazard without stiffling innovation.
Trying to dogleg around no-hazard zones is very expensive performance-wise. When we launch out of VAFB from North Base on a near polar trajectory we have to fly a dogleg around South Base because of the unacceptable E[SUB]c[/SUB] impact, which turns out to be quite costly to payload capability. For orbital launch, I think we need to assume launching from the East Coast (Cape Canaveral or Wallops Island) for low inclination orbits and Sudden Ranch or Kodiak Island for high inclinations, or else launch from a sea- or plane-based platform that can select an optimal launch point for any given orbital inclination.
Any guesses as to the viability of the “Spaceport” just outside White Sands?
I was considering moving to Las Cruces at the time they were discussing a local bump in Sales Tax to fund the thing.
Virgin was their big “catch” which would, of course draw simply everyone to that patch of nothingness.
They voted to tax themselves and are now looking for a buyer of the place.
I guess it comes down to prospects of the sub-/trans- space tourism - specifically the use of a launch airplane, not rocket.
Are you writing of Spaceport America or the NASA White Sands Test Range (just on the west side of the Tularosa Mountains from White Sands Missile Range)? The only current client at Spaceport America is Virgin. I think Blue Origin has looked at operating their suborbital flights out of there but I don’t think anything has come to pass.
I wouldn’t move to Las Cruces on a dare. It’s not my least favorite place to go, but it is on the short list of worksites to avoid if I reasonably can. It is thr only place someone has actually tried to carjack me. And I have nothing good to say about trying to fly out of El Paso.