An interesting article. Will Leaking Russian Spaceship Leave The Crew Stranded In Space? - YouTube
An interesting article on the top 10 U.S. launch companies (out of 15-20 total) [I didn’t realize there were that many]
There is definitely a lot of excitement in the orbital launcher space. Unfortunately, 2022 just wasn’t that great a year for anyone except SpaceX. They launched 60 times–by my count, the remaining numbers in the top ten are 8+9+2+2+1+0+0+0+1=23. So well over twice everyone else combined, and that’s with a heavy launch system. Probably >4x by mass.
Still, I do expect to see Vulcan fly in 2023, and despite it having no useful reusability hardware, it at least advances the use of methane propellant. ULA should be fine.
Rocket Lab will probably snag one of their rockets this year as well, and maybe even fly one twice. It’s taken long enough, but non-SpaceX reusable rockets do seem to be finally coming.
There should be a couple of new small launch systems make their first flight, though as always I’m skeptical of the business case.
Relativity Space is probably the most interesting of the up-and-comers, though not entirely in a good way. The 3D printed tech remains to be proven. But they have money, and are bending metal (or depositing it, I guess), so I expect something out of them. And heck, maybe the skepticism will prove unwarranted. I certainly wouldn’t write them off on that basis even if they have to pivot slightly.
Actually, they’re planning on recovering the rocket engines (2 BE4s) for reuse. It will have an inflatable heat shield that deploys after separation. Once slowed down, the engines parachute into the ocean, at which point the shield becomes a floatation device.
There’s a reason I said useful 
. ULA has been talking about their SMART reuse concept for years, but as of yet there’s no evidence that it will appear on their first Vulcan flight, or really on any flight. And frankly, I think it’s a dumb idea. Splitting off the engine section cleanly is no easy task, not to mention re-integrating it. The whole thing is just very finicky compared to just landing a stage in one piece.
If they get a benefit, I suspect it’ll just be from being less dependent on the engine supply from Blue Origin. I understand why they’re doing it this way; their first stage has two large engines instead of 9 (or whatever) smaller ones, which enables deep throttling–necessary to land a nearly empty stage without having way too much thrust. Same goes for the reentry burn, which has the side effect of reducing thermal loads by using the exhaust plume to keep the atmosphere from directly impinging on the engines. Not really possible with just two big engines. And for that matter, reentry is a bigger problem for them in the first place due to the higher staging speed.
Maybe I’m wrong and they’ll get it working quickly and reap the benefits. But they’re the only ones pursuing such an approach, with SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and Blue Origin all taking a whole-stage recovery approach, though with some minor differences in the details. Plus a zillion small copycats in China and elsewhere.
Regardless, further development of HIAD (hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator) tech is a good thing. There are lots of other interesting use cases, on Earth and elsewhere.
Does anyone have a link to the numbers of how much money is saved by landing the first stage? It must cost a lot of money to carry the extra fuel and operate a recovery vessel.
It’s hard to be sure since SpaceX is private, and because costs aren’t always easy to interpret even if you do have the numbers. However, from public information it appears that the cost of a single Falcon 9 launch is between $15M and $30M. That’s a big range, but the $15M was described as the marginal cost, while the $30M is the all-in, fully-amortized cost. That’s for a flight that they’d charge around $65M for. It may be that the $30M is less now, since the boosters have been shown to fly at least 15 times.
We don’t know how much that would be without reusability, but given that $65M is already an excellent price compared to other providers, it’s likely that a non-reusable flight would cost $50+M, for a savings of at least $20M per flight.
The fuel is basically free in this context, but it does eat into the payload. It’s around a 15% hit for a droneship landing, and 30% for return-to-launch-site (RTLS). The latter is probably a bit cheaper in processing, but SpaceX always chooses droneship landings for their Starlink launches, so it’s likely that despite ship maintenance and such, it is still cheaper than the extra 15% payload hit. That would imply only a few million in droneship costs.
Those costs aren’t relevant for every payload. For example, the Dragon launches aren’t mass-limited and generally use RTLS. So there’s no downside to it, and some degree of savings. The same goes for some commercial payloads. However, megaconstellation launches (Starlink, etc.) end up being purely mass-limited, since you can just put more or less satellites on it, and for that $/kilogram is the relevant metric.
Some references, since you wanted a link:
https://youtu.be/gKupr3GFLh8?t=1068
With Falcon 9, of the $15M marginal cost basis, the upper stage is about $10M of that
For the all-in cost:
In a briefing earlier this year, SpaceX director of vehicle integration Christopher Couluris said the company can “bring launches down to below $30 million per launch.”
″[The rocket] costs $28 million to launch it, that’s with everything,” Couluris said, adding that reusing the rockets is what is “bringing the price down.”
$10M is the bare minimum price right now, since that is the cost of the upper stage. Everything else can be reused, though it’s not yet known how much (at least 15 times for the boosters, though).
The booster probably costs in the ballpark of $30-40M new, given the size and number of engines in comparison to the $10M upper stage.
Excellent info, @Dr.Strangelove , thanks.
Thanks.
Sure thing! Incidentally, here’s a nice chart of all of SpaceX’s launches in 2022 (61 total):
Booster B1062 flew a whopping 8 times by itself–including twice in one month. That’s about how many flights ULA and Rocket Lab each did (8 and 9). Or, the peak number of flights in one year by the entire fleet of Space Shuttles (9).
And this isn’t yet rapid reusability. It will take Starship for that.
I think it’s a ridiculous thing to do, and strikes me as a half-assed bureaucratic approach to reusability that didn’t require wholesale changes to the rocket design which is nearly impossible in a consortium with many vested interests, They wanted to tick the ‘reusability’ box without doing the hard work of doing it right.
So this rocket has all kinds of added complexity for separating the engines, additional weight of all the extra hardware, chutes, etc, and in the end they are dumping the engines into the ocean. That likely means a complete tear-down and rebuild after flight, plus repairing potential damage from impacting the water and salt water intrusion.
The only way that makes sense is if they expect to be engine limited by Blue Origin’s production rate and need every engine or engine component they can get their hands on. As a cost cutting measure, I doubt it will help much, or at all.
I doubt the recovery vessel costs all that much. It’s a drone ship, doesn’t travel all that far, and gets amortized over many flights. SpaceX has three of them.
The extra fuel doesn’t even matter for a lot of launches, since they aren’t always mass-limited. The cost of fuel is negligible - fueling the entire rocket costs about $200,000, and tye landing fuel is anywhere from 6% to 15% of that depending on the mission. Call it 10%, or $20,000. That’s little more than a rounding error for a flight that cost $30 million.
The problem with ULA is that “doing it right” means providing lots of jobs for people in various congressional districts.
There is no incentive for cost control, rather the contrary. This engine recovery will likely cost the taxpayers more than just building them from scratch, which is the point, as that means more money going into those congressional districts than building them from scratch.
While I’d normally be the first to agree with this line of reasoning, Vulcan is supposed to be a commercially viable launcher. And in fact has gotten a significant contract for 38 launches of the Amazon Kuiper constellation. That’s not subject to Congressional pork distribution. If there’s a problem related to that, it’s that ULA grew up as an institution dedicated to pursuing pork, and is now incapable of behaving otherwise.
They have some runway left–they’re a reliable second source to SpaceX, and apparently Vulcan costs aren’t so bad that they can’t snag some commercial wins. But things will look very different with Starship and Neutron in the picture. SMART reuse seems too little, too late. As I’ve heard every so often at my own work “you know things are bad when our roadmap looks worse than the other guy’s shipping product”.
Interestingly, the helium pressurant costs more than the fuel. That’s a big reason for Starship to switch to autogenous pressurization (liquid methane pressurized with gaseous methane, liquid oxygen with gaseous oxygen). Also, no helium on Mars (and a non-renewable supply even on Earth).
Apollo Astronaut Walter Cunningham Dies at 90
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/apollo-astronaut-walter-cunningham-dies-at-90
I’m not sure exactly where to put this on the credibility scale since it appears to be unofficial information:
In summary:
- The Soyuz MS-22 capsule (which sprung a coolant leak last year) has been deemed unsafe to use. That means they need a way to return the three astronauts that would have used it as their ride back.
- The Soyuz MS-23 mission will be moved from March to February and only have a single cosmonaut instead of three. The two cosmonauts from MS-22 will ride back on MS-23.
- The NASA/SpaceX Crew 6 mission will launch with an extra Dragon-compatible pressure suit and an empty seat for the stranded American (Francisco Rubio). He needs a special suit since the Soyuz suits aren’t compatible with Dragon.
- All three will stay an extra 6 months; i.e., the duration of the new mission cycle for both agencies.
Anyway, it all makes sense to me, and doesn’t require any emergency measures, just schedule shuffling.
I wonder what they’ll do with MS-22. Burn it up?
They say they’ll attempt to return it in unmanned mode. Might burn up; might not. Or maybe just stuck in a decaying orbit. Useful data either way. Though even if successful, it might not have been safe for the astro/cosmonauts (life support failure, etc.).
Hmm, I wonder if this will be the first case of someone returning from space in a different vehicle than they rode up in? Or vehicle class, at least.