SpaceX has just announced that they’re going to attempt to add another vehicle to their reusable fleet, with another landing attempt at sea early next Wednesday morning from the Cape.
Meanwhile, here’s the most comprehensive analysis I’ve seen so far of how much they can reduce cost and prices, but it’s based on a lot of assumptions.I found this curious:
Musk said the fuel used on a Falcon 9 is between $200,000 and $300,000. Reserving fuel in the first stage for landing adds mass to the vehicle and deprives it of performance, effectively carrying fuel instead of extra payload — a penalty that expendable rockets do not need to pay. Musk was addressing not the performance penalty, but the issue of fuel cost, which is a non-issue in the overall economics of reusability.
Actually, much of the point of reusability is to get to the point at which one cares about propellant costs. It’s expendables in which they are a non-issue.
Yeah I concur with the article vis-a-vis the future of ArianeSpace. It will require EU fiat to require all EU companies to do business exclusively with ArianeSpace if it is to survive using its existing launch model.
What the article doesn’t address is the potential for market expansion should the cost come down, and flight rate expansion. Including “leasing” space on a rocket tasked for a “primary” customer or the US Gov. i.e. cubesat’s etc. I could envision the possibility of an “expendable” sat market. Launch of small sats in particularly low orbits with lifetimes of only a year or two for use by individuals or small co-ops (like farmers) that avoid the administrative overhead of LEO because of their limited lifetimes. These would be the sat equivalent of drones.
The problem with this article is over-reliance on “old-space” experts trying to come to grips with “new-space” economics. I don’t fault the article’s author too much. The relevant information is going to be closely held for obvious reasons. Not an envious task.
“Just announced?” Elon said that the next two missions would attempt drone ship landings in his April 8 press conference.
He emphasized that these would be trickier than the CRS-8 landing, due to less fuel margin given the payload trajectories to GTO – and appropriately warned that there was a while to go before there would be 100% stage recovery success.
I do fault the article’s author more than Mr. Spain does. De Selding has usually been at the trailing edge of recognizing the principles and plausibility of SpaceX’s approach. Maybe that comes from being based in Paris….
I meant the date was just announced.
Arianespace still does not get it. With additive manufacturing there will be a lot less overhead (molds, tooling, etc) which enables cost effectiveness even at low production and flight rates. Also any comparison with Shuttle is besides the point. Shuttle was only minimally reusable. SpaceX has more potential for reusability because the first stage has to handle a much more benign return environment than an orbital capable second stage.
I kind of expected Arianespace would be bit by the decision by the ESA members a couple of years back not to fund the development of any new booster engines. Had they properly funded the development of the LOX/Methane staged-combustion engine for example they could still be competitive. It does not help that their stage construction techniques are utterly obsolete as well.
The only way for Arianespace to remain competitive is with a whole new launcher but there is no stomach to fund it. No money and even worse no time either.
So I expect SpaceX and perhaps even Bezos to have the market for themselves in a decade. Especially with embargoes on Russia and China.
If you think additive manufacturing is going to print rockets cost effectively, i just printed a bridge that i’d like to sell you.
Engines and engine parts can surely be 3D printed with modern printers. The tanks and the vehicle are basically a rolled sheet of Al-Li friction stir welded. Neither seems particularly expensive to me.
Print me a pressure regulator, and we’ll talk
Additive manufacturing will be increasingly important, but mainly for enabling lower total part counts and eliminating the expensive tooling and multiple setups often required by conventional machining processes. Such processes will still be needed to some degree, though. 3-D metal printers can’t get anywhere near providing surface finishes equivalent to those obtainable by conventional grinding, machining and polishing technologies. 3-D printing allows one to make, say, turbopump impellers with novel geometries to very near net shape, but it does not allow one to skip the polishing and journal grinding needed to make a finished, usable part.
Good news for SLS though. The SSMEs were supposed to last 55 flights on the space shuttle. That’s like 55, or more, years of SLS launches. SpaceX only plans on getting 10-20 launches before they have to do a major refurbish. People have been worried about the limited stock of SSMEs but NASA might get a hundred years of launches out of them.Who said NASA can’t compete? Of course, NASA’s refurbishment costs might be slightly higher…
Your wit is so dry, sir, I do not think there was even a bottle of vermouth in the room when you mixed that one.
Slightly OT, what happened to the dragon 2 max q abort test?
Also someone here with aerospace structure manufacturing knowledge, is a tapered cone much harder and or expensive to build than a cylindrical rocket tank?
I’m thinking a re-entering first stage that is conical is fluffier than a long tapered cylinder and will have a lower terminal velocity than a skinny cylinder. Engine first attitude.
I recreated his spreadsheet to see how cost relates to the number of re-uses (G).
He calculates other costs (F) as $9.2 million and the first stage cost (E) as $27.5 million. Then his pro-forma direct cost (I) (which he gives as $11m for 15 reuses) is really just the formula I=F+E/G, or I=$9.2m + $27.5m/G.
As I’d expected, even for small reuse rates you realize most of the cost decreases
Uses cost
1 $36.7
2 $23.0
3 $18.4
4 $16.1
5 $14.7
10 $11.9
15 $11.0
20 $10.6
50 $9.7
100 $9.5
1000 $9.2
So long before you worry about using a stage more than 10 or 20 times, it would be better to focus on those fixed costs. Keeping the upper stage cheap would really help. Once you’re reusing the lower stage at a good rate (10 to 20 times) the upper stage starts determining the bottom line and you’d want to move away from a high-performance, high-price upper stage to a really cheap upper stage.
Or figure out how to reuse it, as ULA (sort of) is.
Do you mean ACES?
Separating the engine from the tank and having it re-enter with a heat shield and parachute is an obvious solution, especially for an extremely expensive, high-performance engine like the RL-10.
Elon also said he’s going to look at recovering the payload shroud because they’re so expensive.
As re-usability bears fruit, costs will keep dropping, and the logic will be that you either have to re-use it or make it cheap enough to throw away, where cheap might eat into your payload mass (such as replacing a carbon fiber shroud with a stamped aluminum one), but dropping your $/lb to orbit because you’ve replaced a million dollar shroud with a $100,000 dollar one. Then the question will be whether you can build a throw-away item cheaper than you can send a boat or a drone ship out to pick up a re-used one.
Meanwhile, in government world, the Orion is going to be plucked out of the sea by a giant Marine Corps San Antonio class amphibious transport dock with a crew of 650 or more.
I doubt the RL-10 would be as expensive if they redesigned it to use more modern manufacturing methods.