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Blue Origin Thread (merged)

Aethon

By Aethon
in Science & Spaceflight

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YNM

YNM

Posted
Posted
22 minutes ago, Tullius said:

 ...

For you, losing your car on the racetrack, was a catastrophe too, because you only had one car. But if you are a race driver, if you don't drive like that, pushing the car to the point where you risk losing it, you won't win any races. And that is no problem, because your team provides you with spare cars for the subsequent races.

...

Formula 1, the closest automobile industry gets to rocketry, doesn't have that - if you totalled your race car, there you go, nothing else.

Also, if this is all SpaceX is about, they're making sophisticated BDB, nothing else. Certainly not a good lookout on their future visions.

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Tullius

Tullius

Posted
Posted (edited)
22 minutes ago, YNM said:

Formula 1, the closest automobile industry gets to rocketry, doesn't have that - if you totalled your race car, there you go, nothing else

Yeah, you might lose your car for that race. But that is the price for being that tiny bit faster in all races.

Just imagine if you could drive 0.5 seconds faster per lap in Formula 1, but at the same time you would get a 1 in 20 chance of not completing the race, while if you don't drive faster, you have no risk of crashing. What do you choose?

22 minutes ago, YNM said:

Also, if this is all SpaceX is about, they're making sophisticated BDB, nothing else. Certainly not a good lookout on their future visions.

The reason for the costs of the Space Shuttle (the first reusable space craft) exploding so much was that they at the end were nearly forced to dismantle the whole shuttle and rebuild it, just to be able to check that every bit would still work flawlessly, because every flaw could kill the crew. And they still missed some bits,...

If you design a rocket, there comes a point, where every increase in reliability results in an even bigger cost increase. If you plot the reliability of a rocket against its costs, the curve will be exponential. So you have to say at some point that enough is enough and stop increasing the reliability.

If you really wanted, you could design Mercury, Apollo, Soyuz or Orion to have so reliable rockets that you don't need an LES. But the costs involved in making sure that every component is absolutely flawless and doing extra test flights are much, much higher than the costs of a LES that gives you the same security.

For satellites, there comes a point where launching another one becomes cheaper than buying a more reliable rocket. Sure the insurance costs will be higher for the launch on the less reliable rocket, but the rocket will be cheaper. There is a reason, why, during the early days of space exploration, the probes always came in pairs: It was cheaper to launch 2 probes than to test the rocket and probe for enough reliability to be sure that 1 probe would do the job.

So Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and the ITS booster will be designed to be reliable enough, not to be reliable as possible. That doesn't necessarily make it a big dumb booster, since the philosophy behind that is to not care about reliability, if you can just launch them cheap enough. Falcon 9 will still be designed to be reliable, but they won't push it as far as NASA had to do it for the Space Shuttle.

Edited by Tullius
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Kryten

Kryten

Posted
Posted
24 minutes ago, Tullius said:

For satellites, there comes a point where launching another one becomes cheaper than buying a more reliable rocket

For GSO comsat launches, which are most of the launch business, you will never get to this point. A launch on even the most expensive launchers available today is significantly lower than the price of the satellite. 

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Tullius

Tullius

Posted
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Kryten said:

For GSO comsat launches, which are most of the launch business, you will never get to this point. A launch on even the most expensive launchers available today is significantly lower than the price of the satellite. 

I am thinking in terms of insurance, since no company in the satellite business would launch a satellite without being insured against loss.

If you loose 1 out of 50 satellites if launching with rocket A, instead of 1 out of 100 with rocket B, the insurance cost per launch will be twice as high. But what if the price difference between the cheaper rocket A and the more expensive rocket B is higher than the difference in insurance cost?

I just quickly checked some numbers: A launch of a 5-ton satellite with Ariane costs 77 million dollars, while Falcon 9 only costs 62 million dollars. So the difference is 15 million dollars and let's say the satellite costs 500 million dollars. If you loose your satellite 1 out of 50 times on Falcon 9, while you never loose it on Ariane, and you do 50 launches, then Falcon 9 saves you 750 million on launch costs while only getting 49 satellites into orbit, while Ariane gives you 50 satellites in orbit. If you want to get your 50th satellite into orbit with Falcon 9, you need to pay an additional 562 million dollars. So all in all, Falcon 9 saves you nearly 200 million dollars, while being less reliable.

If in reality, the realiability scores of Ariane vs. Falcon are 99.5% and 99%, this skews the balance even more into the direction of Falcon 9, even covering the insurance costs that companies like SES have to pay to get insurance against their financial losses of not having a satellite in orbit.

This also explains, why a company like SES is so eager to launch their satellites on the untested Falcon 9, while there are many well tested and reliable rockets out there. Since they are putting their satellites onto the test launches, SpaceX is probably charging even less than the projected launch costs. Falcon 9 is for them the cheapest launch vehicle on the market, all while being the least reliable.

Edited by Tullius
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Kryten

Kryten

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Posted

If you lose a satellite, you lose the revenue for that sat for the several years it would take to secure a replacement. That's going to be a far larger amount that the difference in insurance between two launchers. 

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Tullius

Tullius

Posted
Posted
14 minutes ago, Kryten said:

If you lose a satellite, you lose the revenue for that sat for the several years it would take to secure a replacement. That's going to be a far larger amount that the difference in insurance between two launchers. 

That is why you better have an insurance against that revenue loss on top of the insurance of the satellite and launcher.

The difference in insurance is rather small, since despite there is a difference in reliability, this difference is pretty small and the reliability scores are pretty high (probably targeted to be above 99%, i.e. less than 1% of the total cost can be expected to be lost). Losing 500 million dollars of rocket and satellite together with 1 billion dollars of revenue loss, is still only 15 million dollars per launch, if you loose on average 1 satellite in 100 during launch. Losing only 1 in 200, only saves you an expected 7,5 million dollars per launch. So even, if the insurance company wants 33% more than the expected loss, you only pay 10 million dollars extra, while saving 15 million dollars on the launch vehicle.

And you can be pretty damn sure that SES is considering Falcon 9 the cheapest option, despite it having not the best reliability record.

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Aethon

Aethon

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  • Author
Posted (edited)

 

 

 

Building the Orion spacecraft.  

Well I was posting some funnies in the KSP steam chat, had the wrong link in cntl v, and for some reason can't edit out the Seinfeld.  Mods feel free to delete the first video.

Edited by Aethon
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Frybert

Frybert

Posted
Posted (edited)

spacex-lc39a.jpg

 

SpaceX's first launch from LC39A, as well as the first launch from LC39A since STS-135, has been set for January 15, 2017 with the EchoStar 23 satellite!
Static fire date scheduled for Jan 10th. Launch window for the 15th is 23:50-02:20L. Night launch/ASDS landing!

Edited by Frybert
There, is that better?
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Frybert

Frybert

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Posted (edited)

Bah, the picture made it, the text didn't. Hang on, editing.

 

Edit:

 

There we go, was cross posting from the orbiter forum.

 

IIRC they are keeping it for FH and Crew support.

Edited by Frybert
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CatastrophicFailure

CatastrophicFailure

Posted
Posted
14 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

 

Is that an older pic? It looks the Shuttle's RSS is still there, or are they just leaving it there?

AFAK, they are leaving some/most of it, and may reuse it manned D2 launches. 

 

Ah, 2015. No wonder there's no sign of a strongback. 

40 minutes ago, Frybert said:

spacex-lc39a.jpg

 

SpaceX's first launch from LC39A, as well as the first launch from LC39A since STS-135, has been set for January 15, 2017 with the EchoStar 23 satellite!
Static fire date scheduled for Jan 10th. Launch window for the 15th is 23:50-02:20L. Night launch/ASDS landing!

Yes, much better :D

and cool! I think Vandenburg is kinda/sorta scheduled for the 9th as RTF, that would be a real coup if they can pull off both so close. 

 

(After the pic above, I was kinda hoping they'd go for the PR slam dunk and start right off with the Heavy.)  

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Oliverm001x

Oliverm001x

Posted
Posted

Finally the launch dates are in :) ! Hopefully 2017 will be a year with much needed prosperity for Spacex. Looking back at 2016, I would classify the year as successful, despite the AMOS-6, explosion and delays. Happy New Year Spacex!!

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