Virgin Galactic says it charges about $450,000 per seat for commercial space tourist missions and has about 800 would-be passengers waiting to fly. A bit too expensive for me.
It was a success:
NSF just released a walkaround of the Astra factory:
They mention several times that they’ve sized their production lines to “a rocket a day.” They have a pretty neat system for turning reels of sheet metal into a rocket stage. Not so different from what SpaceX is doing with Starship, but this is at a small enough scale that they can hit almost complete automation.
At least in principle. They certainly have lots of expensive equipment and a large factory. But they’re pretty far from even their first Rocket 4 test flight, let alone pumping out rockets at a high rate.
A “rocket a day” keppes per rocket costs away. But still costs 365 * the price of one rocket every year. Better hope there are enough customers to want 365 of what you’re selling.
“Build it; they will come” is lunacy. So is “they will have to buy my product; it’s that cool”.
Instead suppliers and customers grow up in tandem aware of each other’s tastes, strengths, weaknesses, demands, and capabilities.
I make no claims as to whether they have an economic model here.
Rocket 4 has a max payload of 550 kg, and if they really could fly it every day, would imply 200 tons to orbit per year. SpaceX put >600 tons into orbit in 2022, and will likely beat that figure this year, so there’s enough overall demand in that sense.
But to match SpaceX’s current costs, Astra needs to charge ~$2M per launch. Maybe that’s possible, but it seems like a big stretch. So the question then is if prospective customers are willing to pay more for their own ride, on their own orbit, on their own schedule (in the video, they contrast this as “Uber vs. a bus”). It’s surely worth a little more, and maybe a lot more in some cases. But for 365 flights per year? That seems less likely. Most of those will be for megaconstellations and those will optimize $/kg.
First methane-oxygen rocket to reach orbit:
SpaceX will have to be content with first reusable methalox rocket to orbit. Vulcan, New Glenn, Neutron, Terran R, and maybe some others are also still in the running for #2 to orbit.
A bit odd that this happened June 30, but was not reported until July 11.
An impressive degree of OpSec if this is really the first public awareness of the failure.
Tory Bruno says it’s no big deal. That’s probably true, as far as it goes. The engine failed during acceptance testing, and the whole point of that is to catch problems like this. The first two engines passed acceptance testing with no problem. Vulcan isn’t currently limited by the BE-4 engines.
The issue is that this is only the third flight-ready engine. Total. They’re only making one every several months. SpaceX has blown up plenty of their Raptor engines, but they’re making one per day.
So, I would say it’s a big deal because one out of a total of three engines blew up. It made a bad production rate even worse. And it may be that whatever is needed to fix this (additional QA, some extra processing step, etc.) will make the production rate even slower.
Heh. From this article:
As one propulsion engineer wrote on social media: “You learn a lot in development testing. You learn a little bit in qualification testing. Blessed be they who continue to learn in acceptance testing.”
From a suitable distance.
How does Blue Origin survive? They started about the same time as SpaceX, but have had almost no revenue and only raised $571 million in external funding. New Glenn is not ready, they are having trouble building BE-4 engines in quantity, New Shepard blew up…
I know Bezos said he’s committed $1 billion per year to keep it alive, but that company is seriously under-performing and has suffered some serious brain drain of top talent. It makes me wonder if it will even be around in the medium term.
Well, they have managed to put themselves into a position where they’re a national security asset. If Bezos stops dumping money into them, ULA’s gotta do something. And that means the US has to do something, which might include sprinkling some money their way so that BO can be bought. Or maybe just sprinkling money directly on BO.
The story behind those great Apollo 11 liftoff pics:
I thought those were taken by NASA. Thanks.
Falcon Heavy launch tonight:
Nice landing of the side boosters back at the launch site, though the center core was expended. Good to see FH finally getting some decent use (even though they’re usually at least partly expendable). It’s six independent spacecraft, of which five are (in principle) reusable.
According to Virgin Galactic, the company has already booked a backlog of about 800 customers. Tickets have ranged from $250,000 to $450,000.
Galactic 03, the company’s third commercial spaceflight, is planned for September.
I find it hard to comprehend paying $250,000 for a one hour experience.
There are a lot of people for whom $250k isn’t all that much money. Not pocket change, but affordable for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
From my perspective, the problem is that it’s not really space. You get a few minutes at zero gees. Sure, rocket planes are pretty cool and it’s probably a fun ride, but the actual space part is pretty minimal. Plus I have serious safety concerns with their design.
I’m not surprised they have 800 people lined up. But even at $250-450k a pop, it doesn’t seem like much of a business model.
Absolutely. It’s just a gimmick that has nothing to do with any real space program.
As far as I can see there isn’t any useful spinoff or synergy from it either?
There’s one born every minute.
Are they really in freefall from being in a sort of orbit or does the plane simulate it by taking a parabolic trajectory? I guess the distinction is technical.