Jon Goff has some useful thoughts on space system design goals, and some advice for Elon Musk:

Take a look at the EELV program, and even SpaceX. EELV's goal was to reduce the cost of launching satellites for the military from absolutely obscene to merely ridiculous (ie a 50% drop in price IIRC). So, they tried to make some incremental changes to how they build and operate their vehicles. In some areas they've gotten a lot better, but the reality is that they didn't even acheive the modest goals they set out for themselves. It isn't that they're dumb, or malicious, or incompetent. It's just that they set themselves too easy of a goal, so they didn't actually have to think outside the same high-cost artillery box that they've put themselves in over the years.

It should be pointed out that one of the reason that they haven't achieved the cost reduction goal is the collapse of flight rate. As I pointed out in my New Atlantis piece, flight rate, even for expendables, is a much higher contributor to launch cost than design is.

He also writes something that a younger Jon Goff would have found heresy:

...if they go for the BFR instead of trying to radically change the Earth-to-Orbit transportation market by going fully reusable...They're probably going to get their lunch eaten. I mean, they could possibly acquire one of the companies that actually develops a fully reusable, high-flight-rate orbital space transport. But the reality is going to be that if they don't keep pushing more and more reusability into their Falcon line, it's going to go obsolete.

That's sort of an inside joke to long-time readers of sci.space.*, but once upon a time, Jon was a, hmmmm...shall we say, vociferous proponent of expendable launchers. It would be interesting (and possibly educational to others) sometime to hear a description of how his thinking has evolved.

Now, we just have to work on his politics...

Rand,
"That's sort of an inside joke to long-time readers of sci.space.*, but once upon a time, Jon was a, hmmmm...shall we say, vociferous proponent of expendable launchers. It would be interesting (and possibly educational to others) sometime to hear a description of how his thinking has evolved."

Well, it really is pretty straightforward. I was originally a rocket philosopher. I was a real fan of cranking out rockets like they build Toyotas, but when I started looking at the practical aspects of how to do the development flight test program with expendables, I kept getting pushed down the slippery slope to reusability. I wanted to actually build a rocket instead of just philosophizing about it, so I started thinking about recovery modes. I started realizing more and more that anything short of a intact recovery was going to be a mess to deal with. It was only a few steps from there to the idea of powered landing. Once I was there I realized that if you can do powered landing, why design the thing like and MCD expendable any more?

The transition also had a lot to do with the fact that the concept of having to fly a full-up vehicle and have it work the first timer, scares the heck out of me. The ability to "fly-early-fly-often" isn't inherently impossible for something like the Falcon 1. They could've flown the thing with a dummy second stage several times by now. But that points to a rule I've seen operating out of our own remote test site--the more expensive a test, the more tempted you'll be to skip it if you can rationalize yourself out of it.

I guess it's just one of those things where the closer I got to actual experience, the more of my fears of reusability went away, and the more the supposed benefits of low-cost expendables disappeared.

As for my politics (I assume you mean my foreign policy), I've actually been steadily trending away from your position for years. If you could've read my journals around the time of the first Gulf War, you'd find me just as much of a frothing at the mouth warmonger as you like to be. I like to think that the change away from that has something to do with growing up and actually interacting with those durned furiners. ;-)

~Jon

High flight rates require demand, not merely supply. With low flight rates, higher costs are good for the corporate bottom line. The major players benefit from high costs and will exert maximum influence to keep costs high. Notice that the SpaceX lawsuit has been dismissed.

Related, Jeff Foust writes:

The best example, though, is Boeing, which withdrew the Delta 4 from the commercial market in 2003, citing weak demand and unaffordably low launch prices, and has kept the Delta 4 off the market since then. At the Satellite 2005 conference Dan Collins, vice president for expendable launch systems at Boeing, caused a stir when he declared that Boeing would bring the Delta 4 back on the commercial market as early as the end of the year. However, Collins almost immediately began to backtrack from that pronouncement and today the Delta 4 still only serves government customers.

At this month’s conference, Collins avoided the issue, ducking around questions about the Delta 4’s commercial future. Asked what it would take for the commercial market to become compelling enough to bring the Delta 4 back, Collins gave an elaborate non-answer, emphasizing his company’s commitment to its civil and military customers. “Delta 4 is focused on its customer base, and we are working with the government customer, and we’re focusing on that market and making sure we are providing reliable value-added services to the US government,” he said.

Okay, lets bail out Boeing and order NASA to buy Delta IV at whatever price they choose to charge.

= = =

Genuine re-useable space planes may need to be developed overseas, as far away from the US government as customer as possible. Maybe in Singapore, a potential Anglosphere-ian pro business venue, that happens to be on the equator - and that gives a physics edge right there.

Actually, I think NASA would be immensely better off buying Delta IV's and building their space exploration program around that rather than designing it around the shaft. They could increace the production rate and probably get some reductions in cost. Especially compared to building yet another customized fly-a-couple-times-a-year booster.

I am not entirely sure what MCD entails but with the first few generations of reusable vehicles at least, amortised vehicle costs will still be very high. It seems to me that MCD principles are still required for reusable vehicles. Especially with a continuous design, build and fly approach where the prototyping process is your production line.

of course, Falcon 1 is not even remotely like MCD. a viable first-gen MCD mass produced rocket would probably have very small payload, a few hundred kgs. Obviously no turbomachinery but something like Flowmetrics pump, two stages, ablative cooling etc. Something like MicroCosm ( smad.com ) was/is pursuing.
As for flight test program, a single unit would have to be cheap enough that you could launch and crash a rocket a day or so, which is actually a lot more often than any reusable development program has done this far.

Strikes me you need a relatively cheap, reliable and reusable reasonably high power-to-weight engine. That's going to be the most significant and most expensive thing in a rocket first stage. The second stage will always be significantly smaller and also doesn't need that much thrust to weight.

The power source probably requires turbomachinery, but I don't know much about these things.

SpaceX and Rocketplane use Barber-Nichols as their contractor. The company hasn't been in the rocket business before. The Russian N-1 moon rocket used a big number of sophisticated Kuznetsov NK-33 engines, which worked right (other parts of the rocket didn't). The maker - a jet engine and gas turbine company.

Maybe the thing could be looked from a process industry point of view - yeah, it's not an ordinary gas turbine, but still. Efficiency isn't as important here, but weight is much more.
Liquid turbo-pump rockets are in effect flying power stations with their fuel (and oxidizer) tanks carried along. More so in the first stage. Instead of a generator they have a fuel pump and combustion chamber. The RD-170 engine in a Zenit rocket generates 170 megawatts of power.

I don't believe in big pressure fed rockets or air breathers so you can't really get past the fact that you need big power to launch even small stuff into space. Such big power doesn't come very cheap, no matter what you do. (I hope to be proved wrong.) Maybe you can get 20x reductions in some ways like reusability, simplification, increased production numbers (which are often conflicting goals). Maybe there are some new manufacturing techniques out there, don't know, it's not my expertise how you carve cooling passages into aluminium or shape very high precision turbopump blades. It would be interesting to hear about all this for a while rather than about politics.
(I recognize the importance of politics for getting the launch rate and competition up and thus making space cheaper. It's one view to the problem, but the physics and engineering end is very interesting too. You need both for solving the thing.)

Ah, the NK-15 was the actual engine model used in the N-1 rocket, of which the NK-33 is an improvement. (and NK-15B -> NK-43)