Difficult to misrepresent the performance. It clearly works exactly as claimed, and has already demonstrated that.
The problems with reuse of the booster are pretty much understood, and the savings. As has been described before, the problem is that they are not the dominant costs of a launch. He can drop the overall cost of the service Space-X offers, but the price to get a payload to orbit won’t drop nearly so precipitously. Eventually it might, but it will require commoditisation of much more of the package. That may be encouraged by the lower cot of the rocket, as it then becomes worthwhile addressing. But Space-X, at least for now, is not in that part of that game. Such commoditisation would mean less optimisation of payload designs, which may be reasonable if the overall value for money improved. There are standard satellite bus designs, but they only address a part of the overall market. If Musk were to partner with one of the manufacturers of satellite busses to create an easily integrated standard package, maybe the next wave of cost reductions could happen. It would not surprise me (or, following he previous MO, he announces a new venture to sell them.)
Musk is remarkably candid about the risks and the future. In a recent talk he basically said that he would consider it a major win if the first Falcon Heavy launch simply cleared the launch tower and didn’t destroy the facility. He promised that the first launch would be “exciting” to witness.
Be fair, Musk has built most of Space-X on the back of NASA providing him the assured income and up-front money. Without NASA Space-X would be nothing.
One might also note that NASA have been out of the commercial launch business since after the Challenger disaster. That was in 1986. Other than the Shuttle NASA has been a customer, not a competitor.
Francis Vaughan his candidness is a recent thing, after a string of embarrassing failures. Before that he was brash and boastful; remember he accused one rival of using “Soviet” technology for engines, rightfully betting that most people would read that to mean “poor” rather than extremely reliable as what was the situation.
Look, I have been following Elon Musk for years and as a technology buff I hope his ventures succeed. Tesla, SpaceX, the Hyperloop, each of them promises to be a game changer. Plus they have had encouraging successes. And lets face it, many of the greatest captains of industry in history have skirted the line between snake oil salesman and innovation, Musk ain’t the first. I think it was Richard Branson who said that you could either go to prison or be a millionaire, the line is pretty thin.
However, fanboys tend to obscure at times serious issues and atack when they feel their hero is slighted.
[QUOTE=Elon Musk]
One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punch line to a joke. It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the ’60s. I don’t mean their design is from the ’60s—I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the ’60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere.
[/QUOTE]
So your characterization is wrong. The thrust of it isn’t about them being Russian engines (let alone “Soviet”), but rather that they literally sat in a warehouse for decades. Which is true: the AJ-26 engine is a mildly remanufactured NK-33, produced in the 60s for the ill-fated Soviet N-1 moon program.
Oh, and then one of them exploded at launch, almost certainly due to a latent defect in the turbomachinery, caused either by poor conditions in storage or poor quality controls when they were manufactured. So the claim about them being extremely reliable is also a bust.
Other, more recent engines like the RD-180 have proven to be reliable. That’s not what Musk was commenting on. Musk has to my knowledge never said a bad thing about the quality or performance of the Atlas V rocket, just the costs.
No. They’re not doing what NASA did and still does at all. They’re launching small payloads into low earth and geostationary orbits. NASA is all about space exploration, and SpaceX isn’t doing any exploring. Soon, SpaceX will be launching large payloads with the Falcon Heavy (assuming it doesn’t explode on the pad), but that still won’t be exploration.
What SpaceX is doing is trying to commodify access to LEO. If they succeed to the extent of Musk’s plans, then that will certainly open the door to space exploration in a way that hasn’t been possible before, but just launching big payloads into LEO is still not what NASA is about.
Exactly. Satellite launch has been done by private companies for decades now. When NASA builds space probes or science satellites, they pay ULA (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture) or some other company to launch it. SpaceX is now one of those companies.
What’s new (in the past decade) is contracting out Space Station resupply flights and crew flights to private companies. NASA has been helping out commercial launch companies by funding the development and being a paying customer, through the Commercial Resupply Services and Commercial Crew Development programs.
Keep in mind, NASA is not a business. It’s a government agency that does technology development, science and exploration. “Technology development” means helping US companies develop capabilities, not compete with them.
Even a lot of the exploration is contracted out. Although JPL is not exactly a commercial entity, it has over time been the primary contractor for a large fraction of the exploration the US has done. There been some tension between NASA as government agency and NASA as provider of services. The early flights of the Space Shuttle did include commercial launches - but this all ended after Challenger. In the early days they believed the Shuttle could become cheap enough that it would be the dominant launch system - flights once a week etc. Even when it was obvious that the Shuttle would never meet these goals they persisted with commercial launches. But post Challenger congress mandated that NASA stop competing in the commercial launch business.
Like any large government agency there comes a time when self perpetuation and preservation of size and responsibility starts to dominant manager’s thoughts. NASA was not immune. You could reasonably argue that it grew too fast and too big during the Apollo era, and this became part of the reason for the way history unfolded. But its international competitors - ESA and the Russian space agency do compete in the commercial launch business. Also, don’t forget what the first A in NASA is. NASA still do fundamental valuable work in aeronautics.
SpaceX claims that its first refurbed rocket stage cost less than half that of a new stage.
Since that first one, they have been working to reduce refurb costs. For example, the grid fins are now titanium and should survive multiple launches, unlike the old ones that had to be replaced after flight.
Since SpaceX is still claiming a 24 hour turnaround time is possible, we have to believe that refurb costs will be low. After all, there’s only so much money you can spend in 24 hours.
SpaceX has already taken one of the returned cores and static fired it at least 8 times for the full duration expected of a launch, without any refurbishment at all.
In addition, SpaceX is going all-in on the BFR rocket - something that only makes sense if they can get turnaround times and refurbishment costs down to a tiny fraction of the vehicle cost. So the company must be pretty confident in their refurb estimates.
In fact, with a few exceptions very early in the Space Race, crewed program vessels such as Skylab, and some of the older reconnaissance satellite missions, virtually all US-registered satellites have been launched on vehicles developed, integrated, and often operated by private commercial entities. Even when the Space Shuttle system was being ostensibly operated by NASA prior to the joint venture of the United Space Alliance in the mid-'Nineties, virtually everyone actually handling hardware was a contractor of Rockwell-Collins (now part of The Boeing Company), Martin-Marietta (now Lockheed Martin), and Thiokol/Alliant Techsystems (now Orbital ATK, soon to be part of Northrop Grumman). SpaceX is not new in the sense of operating flights to the government by contract, nor are they unique in offering flights on a commercial basis to private industry (Orbital Sciences Corporation, now Orbital ATK, had the first successful commercial orbital deployment). What SpaceX is doing is trying to control the end-to-end development and operation of space launch vehicles including all major subsystems (and many of the individual components down to raw material level) through operation of the launch site and range services (from their Brownsville site, which is still not up and running two years past original estimated schedule).
Whether SpaceX is successful at bringing down launch costs depends primarily on controlling all of the costs–physical hardware, labor, logistics, launch delays, et cetera–going into each individual launch while launching at a sufficiently rapid rate to cover the operational overhead. Historical analyses, based upon empirical cost models and even the most optimistic estimates of reduced overhead, automation, and robustness have required a tempo of many dozens of launches per year to achieve a breakeven cost for reusability. Musk and Gwen Shotwell have publicly opined that their various innovations will allow for such rapid throughput, which will encourage the space industry demand to grow to meet the capability, but it should be noted that they’ve gone from claiming order-of-magnitude reductions of cost to offering a 10% price break for reuse of the Falcon 9v1.1 first stage, and that is only based upon the basic manifesting costs; most missions require considerably more processing and coupled loads analysis costs than are encompassed on the base price structure. So, whatever projections that SpaceX has previously based reductions in launch costs certainly hasn’t held firm since they were made.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory started out as the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), which basically started with Theodore von Kármán getting US Army funding to build a test facility in the hopes of preventing his graduate students from burning down the Arroyo Seco. It later became a NASA facility wholly managed by Caltech, and virtually everyone there is actually a Caltech employee or contractor except for some administrative staff from NASA that oversee budget and management activities.
Any claims of a “24 hour turnaround time” are at best speculative as SpaceX cannot even bring a pristine booster into CCAFS or VAFB and get it on pad and fueled, much less perform all of the booster and payload integration. Being able to turn and burn one vehicle a week at each site would be logistically and functionally challenging, if for no other reason that the time it takes to perform payload integration and checkout. They are dealing with large structures and delicate spacecraft, and it is only possible to move so fast without compromising safety and reliability, and I have a difficult time seeing how that will ever change without changing the payload integration process (and thus, how the payloads themselves are designed and built) for a high degree of automation, notwithstanding even the marginal amount of booster processing you could get away with.
I’ve enjoyed seeing SpaceX challenge conventional players such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin (even though in government contracts they are competing on FAR Part 12 versus Part 15 for ULA), and forcing Tory Bruno of ULA to admit that launch costs can be dramatically reduced. But SpaceX, despite their technical achievements, has yet to credibly demonstrate that they are going to achieve the kind of cost reduction and benefits from reusability that have often been touted, and it is difficult to see how they can achieve them with what is a fairly conventional layout and operational flow. It is true that they’ve adopted some very sensible approaches such as horizontal integration (for payloads which can permit it) and some more efficient workflows, but while reuse may reduce the manufacturing bottleneck for producing engines and first stage structures (they’re still fully expending the upper stage and I’m dubious about their plans to recover and reuse payload fairings), it remains to be seen that this will really present sufficient reduction in operating costs to drive down the price of launch.
As for automation, this is one of those things that is great in theory and much more difficult to execute in practice. The automotive industry has been able to implement automation by virtue that they’re building thousands of units a day in very repetitive fashion, and automation (when correctly implemented) actually reduces defects and errors. Automation demands really high volumes and very regular processes, and is intolerant of variation. I know of one effort to produce a really highly automated integration system for a launch vehicle which was technically validated and fiscally a disaster for the company. It is easy to talk about how “AI” will revolutionize inspection and refurbishment, and that day may be coming, but not any time in the next five or ten years, particularly when it comes to evaluating the allowability of defects, which still requires experienced engineering judgment and analysis.
On the topic of reliability, the notion that the “bathtub model” (e.g. a failure curve with an initial high rate, followed by a low random failure rate, and the an increasing age-related degradation) applies to complex systems is popularly held and even presented in basic engineering textbooks, but this model only applies to simple components and systems with a single set of interrelated failure modes and consistent duty cycles that are not maintained or refurbished in operation, e.g. microchips or hard drives; the failures of more complex systems are often a complicated interaction of different effects that are on the “long tail” of probability not exposed by reliability analysis, or are due to aging effects. Launch vehicle systems and their major subsystems and components are extensively tested prior to and during integration by what is termed “acceptance” and “regression” testing specifically because there are so many complex failure modes that they would not necessarily be exposed in any given flight, so they are individually stressed to environments at the maximum predicted levels (MPE or MPL). Most early failures of launch systems are either fundamental design problems (often poorly characterized loads and environments) or failures of quality control rather than latent weakness.
We obviously don’t have many examples of reusable space launch systems but in the one family of vehicles that we do (the American Space Launch System, e.g. “Space Shuttle”) both Columbia and Challenger operated over many flights and years, with much refurbishment and inspection, prior to their largely unsuspected failures. (To be fair, the causes of the catastrophic loss of both vehicles were observed prior to the actual failures but were mischaracterized as acceptable performance degradation and aging even though they were outside of the design envelope.) Under the bathtub curve model, these flaws should have been exposed early but both vehicles operated under near failure conditions for years before catastrophic loss of vehicle occurred. There is no reason to expect that a Falcon 9 flown stage that has successfully flown previously will be any more reliably a second, third, or tenth time, not even accounting for problems or errors that may be introduced or masked in the refurbishment process.
Reusability in a space launch vehicle is a laudable goal (assuming a market that can support it) but it requires a very different design and operating approach than existing launch vehicles. Despite the marketing hype, the Falcon 9v1.1 is a pretty conventional two stage cylindrical RP/LOX rocket with the now-added complexity of requiring supercooled densified propellants, which increases operational cost and difficulty, and an expendable upper stage. Perhaps SpaceX has some trick up their sleeve that lets them turn a dollar’s worth of savings into ten dollars of profit, but I’m not seeing the kinds of cost reductions from first stage reuse, even assuming the bare minimum of refurbishment, that allow for massive reductions in cost of flight.
And I’ll believe what Musk says about the costs and capability of the Big Fucking Rocket when I see it for myself. For the time being, it’s still vaporware.
SpaceX has been fairly clear that “24 hour turnaround” should be viewed as something like a “not earlier than” date. That is to say, there’s no step in the process which provably takes more than 24 hours. This did not have to be true–in fact, their initial target was 12 hours, but that turned out to be impossible. They will never actually achieve 24-hour turnaround, but using that as the target limits the influence of any long poles in the processing.
That’s a little unfair. A scaled version of the Raptor engine is apparently working pretty well and has undergone 1200 seconds of firing time. They have done successful cryo pressure testing on their carbon-fiber tanks.
Obviously there’s a lot more to a rocket than engine+tanks, but those are pretty significant and fundamental components to the BFR (especially as methane is all-new both to them and almost everyone else). The fact that they’re presenting components rather than fiberglass mockups is relatively inspiring.
I will confess I felt a bit of a sinking feeling watching Elon’s presentation. Amongst other things there seemed to be a big element of feature creep coming into play. It even had echo’s of the Shuttle. This is a project of such size and risk that I would be deeply worried if I had shares.
Something that would account a lower than hoped for drop in Falcon-9 prices - Elon basically said that the Falcon-9 was to become the cash cow that funds the BFR. That means he will price it for maximal profit. Which is an interesting game. He might try to drive the competition out of the market (maybe) and price it just below the mark anyone can compete at. He can drive the price so low that the ever forecast flowering of the space industry opens up phenomenal income even with very cheap launch costs. If he provides a vertically integrated one stop shop he might manage that. He might judge it that he is pricing it about right now for the market and maximising profit. But the idea that Space-X is going to only make a small profit isn’t the game plan. Falcon-9 is going to be priced at what the market will bear. No lower. There is a BFR to pay for.