Then how is SpaceX different from McDonnell, Grumann or North American. Or Boeing and Lockheed today. They alao build Spacecraft.
If he can get there [and keep himself alive there], he can squat there even without claiming that it’s abandoned property. What’s to stop him?
The issue here is jurisdiction. Property is a legal concept, and the question of whether I own an acre in (say) France is governed by the law of France. But the ISS isn’t in France, or anywhere else.
The closest analogy we have is that the abandoned spaceship or satellite is a bit like an abandoned ship on the high seas - not occupied or controlled by anybody, not in anybody’s territory. The international community has long accepted that such ships can be claimed as salvage by anybody who takes effective control of them. It remains to be seen whether they’d take a similar view of an abandoned spaceship. But the issue won’t arise unless somebody not only goes to the abandoned spaceship and takes charge of it and claims it, but one of the participating states challenges the claim, and the whole thing gets litigated.
It remains to be seen how sustainable it is, but SpaceX appears to be launching rockets for about 1/4 the cost of ULA (ULA = United Launch Alliance = Boeing+Lockheed partnership). That cost will go down further if their reusability program matures sufficiently. No other existing launch provider has shown any interest in reusability.
Boeing is in fact developing a crew capsule under the same NASA Commercial Crew Development program as SpaceX, along with Sierra Nevada Corporation. The winner is still up for grabs (I don’t think NASA has said yet how many winners they will select–it could be all of them if they meet the requirements).
No, UDS, the closest analogy we have is the ISS Treaty.
SpaceX differs from those companies in that while it is certainly vigorously pursuing government contracts (notwithstanding all of Ms. Shotwell’s complaints about the cost of meeting contract requirements) its primary focus is serving the commercial satellite market. Hence, their focus on reducing launch costs, which ULA with its more-or-less dedicated EELV launches has little interest in. Both McDonnell Douglas/Boeing and Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) have previously tried to enter in the commercial launch business with limited success and almost no profitability compared with foreign launch services, and so have essentially restricted their business to DoD-funded EELV and large NASA payloads which have to fly on American launchers. Orbital Sciences Corporation tried to take the approach of cheaper commercial launch vehicles (Pegasus, Taurus, Antares) with limited success, and their profitability is also largely dependent upon their government programs like The Minotaur family of vehicles.
Whether SpaceX will realize the kind of cost reductions they currently advertise remains to be seen. On one hand, they have implemented a number of operational and design innovations to simplify the intergration and launch efforts. On the other hand, they’ve consistently underestimated the amount of irreducible labor, rework, launch issues resolution, and costs of dealing with government operated ranges. As far as cost-savings from reusability, that is a questionable bet at best. Rockets experience environments and loads which substantially exceed terrestrial environments and perform at a high level with narrow margins, but have to be built as light as reasonably possible. These requirements place significant limits on just how “reusable” a vehicle or stage can be. It certainly isn’t the case that you can recover a stage, restack it, fuel it, and fly again without substantial refurbishment and integration testing, which is the main part of the cost in putting a vehicle on the pad. Being able to reuse engines, avionics, and structure is a cost reduction, but a small one. The real cost reductions are in automating the processing and integration flow (which SpaceX is also trying to do, e.g. horizontal integration, automated VITL testing, et cetera). If they can even get to cutting launch costs in half compared to comparable Atlas V and Delta IV vehicles it will be an impressive accomplishment, and may spur on greater interest in commercial space, which would be fantastic. But don’t take marketing claims as gospel. This is a tough business, and many companies have gone into it claiming the “New Way” of reducing launch costs only to fall flat on their faces.
Ownership of spacecraft is governed by the Outer Space Treaty, which I believe all space going nations except the Peoples Republic of China have signed (but not necessarily ratified). This means that everything in space–even non-operational spacecraft–are owned by someone and are not subject to maritime-like salvage rights by any random party. This is an are of active development in space law becuase of the implication on debris removal/abatement and the eventual desire to recover, refurbish, and recycle spacecraft; currently, only the ostensible owner or nation can grant permission to so much as touch or communicate with a satellite.
Stranger
I thought the ISS was destroyed by an asteroid field earlier this year.
If I may be permitted a hijack:
In this and many other similar threads, you have emphasized that the cost of manufacturing a launch vehicle is only a small part of the whole. What exactly is involved with launch vehicle integration, testing, and assembly? What makes it so expensive?
I get that rockets are big, complicated, delicate, and expensive, so you can’t just order up some replacement parts from the nearest machine shop, or rent any old commercial crane to lift up one stage on top of another. I can infer that every step from factory to launch must be carefully choreographed and double checked by a small army of well-paid technicians and engineers. But what are these guys doing on a day-to-day basis to get the rocket and its payload ready to launch?
For comparison, with friends and family working as engineers in the auto industry, I feel I have a decent conception of the size and outline of the effort it takes to design and manufacture a car. However, in Kerbal Space Program the entirety of assembly and integration takes place with a single click (testing? hah!)
It aint rocket surgery!
Because there are so many flight critical components on a rocket, especially anything in the propellant feed system, the engines, avionics, and any seperation/deployment/release mechanisms, it is critical to assure that these components will function under maximum possible environments. This means testing at the component, subsystem, and system levels, all the way up to hardware in the loop (HITL) and vehicle in the loop (VITL) testing which prove out the components and all of their myriad of connections in as flight-like a manner as possible in a terrestrial environment.
All of this is complicated by software, which despite having the functions of telling everything when to operate and interpreting all of the inputs, is usually the last part of the rocket to be finalized and fully integrated, which incidentially makes it the shit bin to deal wirh all od the other problems during development. Software is by labor effort and vulnerability the most complex and critical system on the entire vehicle, and because it is often debugged and fixed in testing (“regression testing”) it requires a lot of last minute labor. I’ve literally seen final flight software loads an hour before flight. Imagine adding a new engine an hour before flight with any confidence that it will work perfectly in flight. In the days of analog avionics with no software, such testing was relatively easy and was mostly continuity and “wiggle” functional testing. With modern digital avionics and complex software, we have many more capabilities and can reconfigure the system essentially at will, but there are many, many things which can go wrong and thus it has to be checked in every possible way and any anomaly–even a single clock step error–run to ground to assure that it won’t cause failure in flight.
All of this is bring done by a dedicated team at the test and launch sites, backed up by the design engineers and analysts. Even a simple single stage sounding rocket takes a couple dozen people to do this in a thorough fashion. A complex space launch rocket takes over a hundred working engineers and all the overhead that entails (administration, management, quality assurance, and in the case of government missions, all of the gov reps and their subs.) This ends up being the majority of cost for a flight. By contrast, fabricating the hardware (structures, engines, avionics boxes) is typically <10% and fuel is 1-2%.
Stranger
Stranger’s description of the process and my own limited experience makes Mr. Musk’s plans all the more puzzling.
“What about a reusable Falcon? Musk says he expects “single-digit hours” between landing and next flight, at least for the lower stages.”
Mr. Musks plans, which are clearly backed up by a lot of money, engineers, and success, seem so outlandish I wonder what planet the man is speaking from. OTOH, he has a 1.6 billion dollar contract with NASA. So he isn’t the con-artist he sounds like. But I sure can’t figure him out.
So, smart money is on SpaceX failing in their claims?
Depends on exactly which claims you’re talking about. Create a self-sustaining Mars colony in under 20 years? Yeah, smart money bets against that. Successfully land their first stage back at the launch site within one year? The odds are high that they’ll succeed since they’ve already done many of the hard parts. Achieve a net savings through their reusability program? Probably 50/50 at this point.
If you actually read up on everything they say–not just their TV or popular magazine appearances–they’re actually pretty realistic. They freely acknowledge that much of their roadmap has a low probability of success.
I can’t help but reflect on how ironic this is, considering the frenetic space race after Sputnik and America’s eventual clear dominance of manned and unmanned space travel.
Also, Russia may want to spend a bit more time inspecting their own trampolines, especially given this spectacular incident less than a year ago.
Well, there is “totally divorced from reality” outlandish, and “not excluded by the laws of physics” outlandish. Musk’s claims are mostly the latter. It may be that “hours” is practically impossible, but there is nothing physically impossible about it. Besides: if they shoot for *hours *and hit days, then that is still better than the *weeks *that it currently takes.
Elon Musk is not an aerospace engineer or propulsion expert, and while he can talk a convincing game if you examine many of his prior claims you’ll find the bombast to actualization ratio pretty high. That being said, SpaceX has thus far performed beyond reasonable expectations after their first three faltering flights of the Falcon 1, including developing the first domestic large LOx/RP-1 engine since the RS-27/H-1 (but with a high range of throttleability thanks to the TRW-based pintle injector engine), achieving controlled recovery of the first stage through the transonic transition (even though control was lost at low altitiude it was still the most challenging aspect of recovery), and numerous other successful achievements. But this isn’t a carte blanche to accept any given claims uncritically, especially when it comes to cost savings that have been traditionally difficult to realized and are based upon estimates which aren’t validated by information readily available to the public.
I think–and certanly hope–that SpaceX will be successful because even a factor of two decrease in cost will still open up new markets, and the excess capability that the Falcon 9v1.1 has (which significantly exceeds nearly all modern commercial satellites) means that the costs will be shared between multiple payloads and there will be plenty of capacity for ancillary ride alongs (e.g. CubeSats and other secondary payloads) which opens further capabilities for commercial and scientific interests. But as anyone even cursorily familiar with the STS is aware, claims of delivery truck like reliability and turnaround times run into thr hard reality that space launch is nothing like any terrestrial operation, and the tools and practices we use to automate operations on the ground are not matured for use in this application.
Stranger