totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

2 hours ago, Minmus Taster said:

25 years? they want to use starships FOR 25 YEARS MINMIMUN

How long are commercial jets in service? 

[Scotius]

Eh, I'd pay no attention to any long-time plans. Things change every time someone has a new, better idea. Or it turns out previous "good idea" won't work. Which isn't a bad thing - it keeps wheels of technological and scientific progress turning

[mikegarrison]

11 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

How long are commercial jets in service? 

Depends.

Typically about 30 years, sometimes longer. Usually they get retired not because they can't be maintained anymore but rather because the technology is no longer economically competitive for fuel efficiency.

[Minmus Taster]

18 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

How long are commercial jets in service? 

This isn't a JET, it's the largest and most powerful rocket ever made and the first fully reusable one.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

3 hours ago, Minmus Taster said:

This isn't a JET, it's the largest and most powerful rocket ever made and the first fully reusable one.

Right.  My point is that EM wants to make space flight more like commercial jet service than bespoke one-offs. 

"25 years? they want to use starships FOR 25 YEARS MINMIMUN" 

Yep. 

[StrandedonEarth]

 

4 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Right.  My point is that EM wants to make space flight more like commercial jet service than bespoke one-offs. 

"25 years? they want to use starships FOR 25 YEARS MINMIMUN" 

Yep. 

On 8/12/2021 at 6:17 PM, CatastrophicFailure said:

Heh, now I'm picturing some greasy old space mechanic in 2087 wrenching on a beat-up Starship in some asteroid docking bay, grumbling to his droid about "kids these days and their fancy fusion drives, back in my day..." 

I'm sure EM is hoping for and would love to see this scenario

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Right.  My point is that EM wants to make space flight more like commercial jet service than bespoke one-offs. 

"25 years? they want to use starships FOR 25 YEARS MINMIMUN" 

Yep. 

Now the mars ships would spend most of their time in transit or waiting for an launch window.  They will launch a bit more often than every second year. 
Yes the reentry on earth is pretty rough so they probably end up do an full refurbish waiting for next window so yes they could last a long time. 
Some military planes are over 50 years old like the b-52 as they don't fly as much as commercial jets. 
 

[CatastrophicFailure]

1 hour ago, StrandedonEarth said:

 

I'm sure EM is hoping for and would love to see this scenario

Spoiler

[grumbling] fancy Brachistochrone courses… back in my day it took a whole year to get to Ceres! And we liked it like that! Plenty of time to read, and binge watch all 421 Star Wars movies! Why, we explored the whole solar system on nothing but determination and liquid farts!

[gurgles] uh oh, speaking of which… knew I shoulda skipped that third helping of insects! [exit, stage up]

[droid]: [sad beep]

[SOXBLOX]

15 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Some military planes are over 50 years old like the b-52 as they don't fly as much as commercial jets. 

The B-52 specifically will be at least a hundred by the time we retire it. 

"Precision over-engineering" is the term. 

[tater]

51 minutes ago, SOXBLOX said:

The B-52 specifically will be at least a hundred by the time we retire it. 

"Precision over-engineering" is the term. 

The book, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester is a fantastic book, BTW.

Also, farewell BN3:

 

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, SOXBLOX said:

The B-52 specifically will be at least a hundred by the time we retire it. 

"Precision over-engineering" is the term. 

Say its more its work well enough, US air force has looked into replacing the B-52 with an more modern cargo plane but they can not have an bomb bay door able to drop cruise missiles. 
Now an combined transport, cruise missile carrier and cheap bomber against fools  with no air defense makes lots of sense, change the rear door and you have an tanker. But the cruise missile part might run into arm negotiations, the B1 has limits here.
 

[Jacke]

5 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Right.  My point is that EM wants to make space flight more like commercial jet service than bespoke one-offs. 

"25 years? they want to use starships FOR 25 YEARS MINMIMUN"

This is likely impossible to be done in a short-term brute-force manner.  It will take decades and many different spacecraft designs to have them even approach some of the reliability of aircraft.  And there will always be major differences.

Aircraft are an extra level more complex than any ground vehicle, because:

• Aircraft operate in 3 dimensions instead of ground vehicles' 2 dimensions plus rolling terrain.
• Flight incidents and faults are often more fateful than those on the ground.
• Aircraft pilots need much more training and experience and refresher training than operators of ground vehicles.
• Aircraft costs are much higher than similar costs for ground vehicles.

Similarly, spacecraft are much more complex than aircraft.

• Spacecraft operate using orbital mechanics and have limited maneuverability (delta-V) to change their orbit.
• Thus spacecraft need to use launch and maneuver windows (and countdowns to them) to get more optimum trajectories to make the best use of that delta-V.
• Spacecraft systems push technologies and designs closer to the limit of current best available.
• Thus spacecraft reliabilities even for the best and most mature designs are much much worse than for aircraft.
• Spacecraft costs are much higher than similar costs for aircraft.

Some of these differences may be reduced in the future, as they have been in the past.  But that's not going to happen overnight or in a year.  And some of the differences will always remain.

People often don't appreciate how much government research (e.g. the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (N.A.C.A.) formed in 1915) and two World Wars and the Cold War pushed the development of aircraft.  Many models made in the hundreds or thousands  and put through the torture test of war and near-war.  Much was learned from each one and some of that became common knowledge used for later designs.  One example, the Sopwith Camel, itself the near culmination of World War 1 aircraft development, had 5590 units produced, but from first flight (1916 Dec 22) to its retirement (1920 Jan) was barely over 3 years.

The Boeing B-52, which others have mentioned, was itself the culmination of World War 2 and post-War bomber then jet-bomber design, as well as several models of B-52, of which now only the B-52H's are operated.  That's produced airframes that will likely see near a century of service, but it was a long expensive path to get to that level of perfection.

Pushed and financed by Cold War concerns and budgets, launch vehicles and spacecraft improved faster than aircraft, but because their role was under harsher conditions pushing the equipment to the limit, that improvement started with much much worse failure rates and still hasn't caught up, with the best launch vehicles still having about a 1% failure rate.

Something like Starship is necessary (though because of Starship's lack of abort modes, it should operate uncrewed or people will die).  If it is still in service in 25 years, then it's the Shuttle all over again: a development vehicle operated for too long that should have had a successor built to replace it.

Edited August 15, 2021 by Jacke

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

2 hours ago, Jacke said:

.  If it is still in service in 25 years, then it's the Shuttle all over again: a development vehicle operated for too long that should have had a successor built to replace it.

No argument there - but I don't envision them stopping with the current test article.  I think that was the problem with Shuttle - it was such a prestige product that once operated the political pressure was to keep the thing flying.  But from my reading, the engineers wanted to keep improving the vehicle - they simply were not allowed to. 

With SS - the vision EM has is a craft that is Mars capable - and I cannot begin to describe the changes to the current vehicle that would allow a crewed SS to accomplish that. 

What we are seeing is analogous to Ford's bespoke Car (Model A) if you knew he was planning on mass producing something once he figured out what would work best. 

We've seen renders of the Moon lander and cargo variant and etc - but nothing close to built. 

Soo - let SX figure out how to launch and land SS and SH... And then we might see the actual working prototypes and final vehicles 

... And, hopefully, like Ford's cars - they don't stop with the T... But keep going until they have a F250 that can run for years and years 

Edited August 15, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[kerbiloid]

Shuttle had clear purposes:
1. Bring up and down heavy and expensive spysats for servicing, to let them work as long as possible. 
2. The only major project for NASA when its funds got cut.

[OrdinaryKerman]

Why are we suddenly talking about Shuttle's purpose? Also spy satellite ops were never Shuttle's main purpose. Possible use case, yes, and it was studied, but not its reason for existing. Its main purpose was to haul station modules and junk to space. With direct human supervision and interaction, without using expendable tugs or module-integrated propulsion that becomes useless when said module docks to a station. STS. Space Transportation System. Lunar and interplanetary reusable tugs were what Shuttle were supposed to interact with. Shuttle was just a part of it, but stoopid led to only Shuttle and Freedom Station (ISS sans ROS) being funded.

Spoiler

Please cut the excrements, kerbiloid.

I believe JoeSchmuckatelli's point was that Starship won't have a major design freeze anytime soon (unlike STS Orb-v1, which practically didn't evolve throughout its flight history), and so a lifetime of decades for a future Starship isn't really insane once you realize that those vehicles will be wildly different from today's SS to the extent that the only things they share are basic shape, general flight profile, engine family, possibly materials, and maybe some design principles. Like successive new models of a vehicle. 

Edited August 15, 2021 by OrdinaryKerman

[tater]

38 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Shuttle had clear purposes:
1. Bring up and down heavy and expensive spysats for servicing, to let them work as long as possible. 
2. The only major project for NASA when its funds got cut.

Nope. 0 for 2.

The NASA budget was remarkably flat in constant dollars during most of the Shuttle era (it was higher in the 90s than 80s). Shuttle ops were about 20% of their budget.

 

[kerbiloid]

24 minutes ago, tater said:

The NASA budget was remarkably flat in constant dollars during most of the Shuttle era

It was cut before the Shuttle era, on the lunar flight cancel.

They had to choose either station, or spaceplane. And the spaceplane was what they could lobby together with Pentagon (who needed something like a spaceplane to rotate the 15 t sats, and who just lost DynaSoar thanks to the same budget cut), while the heavy station anyway required something like shuttle to operate. 

[tater]

12 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

It was cut before the Shuttle era, on the lunar flight cancel.

Of course it was. Apollo was an insane bolus of cash that NASA was never, ever going to see again. It wasn;t the only major project, it was just the largest project.

The Shuttle budget was maybe ~$4B/yr in constant dollars. NASA was flat at ~$20B for decades (constant dollars).

 

[Jacke]

1 hour ago, OrdinaryKerman said:

Why are we suddenly talking about Shuttle's purpose?

Because the Shuttle's use cases were very similar to some of Starship's.  So Starship may recreate in a variant form some of the Shuttle's mistakes.

 

1 hour ago, OrdinaryKerman said:

Also spy satellite ops were never Shuttle's main purpose. Possible use case, yes, and it was studied, but not its reason for existing.

But because the Shuttle was going to exist and was planned to almost completely take over launching US government payloads to space, spy satellite ops and other government payloads massively influenced the Shuttle's final design.

The cross-range requirement that drove the large wings on the Shuttle came from the U.S.A.F.'s desire to have it capable of doing 1-Polar-orbit missions from Vandenberg.  Without that, the Shuttle could have had much smaller straight wings, as it did on some of the earlier designs.

The Shuttle payload bay size and design was strongly influenced by the forecast U.S.A.F. payloads that the Shuttle was planned to deploy and recover.

And so many people talk now about Starship taking over the launch market as if it was a fait accompli.  Before even a test-article Starship has launched to orbit.  Sounds familiar.

Edited August 15, 2021 by Jacke

[Beccab]

3 minutes ago, Jacke said:

And so many people talk now about Starship taking over the launch market as if it was a fait accompli.  Before even a test article Starship has launched to orbit.  Sounds familiar.

Something made to be cost effective is more likely to be cost effective than something made to help the USAF

[Jacke]

2 minutes ago, Beccab said:

Something made to be cost effective is more likely to be cost effective than something made to help the USAF

Just because the source and nature of the requirements change doesn't mean they can't cause their own issues.  As well, we don't know what SpaceX's actual costs are, just what they charge customers.  The Shuttle was also planned to greatly reduce launch costs, but it didn't.  Starship is unlikely to suffer from the reasons why the Shuttle's costs were so high, but it may have its own cost issues we don't know about.  Especially as it's still being developed.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.  The Starship pudding hasn't been eaten, so no one is really sure what it will really taste like.

[Beccab]

8 minutes ago, Jacke said:

As well, we don't know what SpaceX's actual costs are, just what they charge customers

Which gives us a decent approximation of what their launch costs are lower than. Unless you believe they have been selling every single launch at a loss since 2006 and plan to continue to sell everything at a loss

10 minutes ago, Jacke said:

The Shuttle was also planned to greatly reduce launch costs, but it didn't.

It was "planned" to reduce them back when they were trying to get funding to develop it, but as soon as its design was finalised it was already extremely likely not to be any cheaper than an expendable launcher (and even turned out to be *more* expensive). The design of the shuttle, as you have already said, wasn't made to reduce launch costs or even for the NASA necessities. The USAF couldn't care less about lower costs during the cold war, and if you combine:
- crew on every single flight;
- "recovering" SRBs from the sea, which was all but likely to work;
- dropping the external tank in the ocean every time;
you already have a pretty discouraging view of affordable reusability, and this is before the Shuttle started to fly. Add the later foam issues and the difficulties in refurbishing the orbiter and every hope of affordability is gone. Starship starts with none of these design issues against cost effectiveness; the only issues we can think of is issues with Starship upper stage reuse, which has already on the positive side the use of the proven TUFROC tiles tech. So, for the 100th time, Shuttle-Starship is a terrible comparison

[kerbiloid]

The Shuttle was designed to return a 15 t payload (KH-11) from LEO.

As a side effect of ability to bring 15 t down, it was able to deliver 30 t up (not purposedly, but as is).

As a result it became so expensive that they were forced to make it the only payload lifter at all, and to consume all payload launches.

As it was designed to be a heavy satellite taxi and fly up and down every several weeks with minimal servicing, it looked enough cheap to deleiver all space payload (see above).

As a result, it was designed to deliver any payload matching the railroad dimenisons, up to 4.5 m wide.

As the KH-11 was designed to match the same railroad dimensions, it was already matching shuttle cargo bay automatically, but now they could say that everything matching the railroad standard can be a shuttle payload, so it was expected to be a natural way to permanently deliver various manufactured cargos to space.

But three obstacles killed the idyll.

1. KH-11 didn't want to come back to this guilty ground and lived for 15 years. So, there was no need in a taxi.

2. The inter-flight servicing of the shuttle itself appeared to be overexpensive itself, and this killed the two-week schedule.

3. The 30 t payload was not anything actually required, it was an overkill. 

So, they had to keep using it as an overexpensive cargo lifter, to perform 2-week long Spacelab trips instead of a normal orbital station.
And finally, after being adapted to Mir, it gained a purpose in life - to build and supply the ISS.

None of that is about Starship.  Everything but lunar flights doesn't need so much now.

While the lunar expeditions will start making sense in late 30s.

(Just because their purpose is a geological survey for lunar industry, which will start making sense not sooner than the fusion reactors will become a thing. I.e. in 2060s-2070s.)

[Jacke]

1 hour ago, Beccab said:

Unless you believe [ SpaceX ] have been selling every single launch at a loss since 2006 and plan to continue to sell everything at a loss

I don't know what SpaceX's costs and per-launch profitability are because that information has not been released, certainly not released in sufficient detail to be audited.  As SpaceX isn't a publicly traded corporation, there isn't even good information on any of its cash flows, so only the crudest knowledge of what's going on financially can be made.

Here's what I found for relative prices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competition

It's a bit of a rambling article, but there's this table of recent costs (with that of the Vanguard launch vehicle thrown in for context).

Quote

Launch vehicle estimated payload cost per kg

Launch Vehicle	Payload cost per kg
Vanguard	$1,000,000 [19]
Space Shuttle	$54,500 [19]
Electron	$19,039 [20][21]
Terran 1	$9,600 [22]
Ariane 5G	$9,167 [19]
Long March 3B	$4,412 [19]
Proton	$4,320 [19]
Falcon 9	$2,720 [23]
Falcon Heavy	$1,400 [23]
Starship (planned cost, commercial price may be higher)	$10 [24]

These numbers may not be properly comparable, because I'm not sure enough was done to make sure they could be properly comparable, even to compensate for costs to LEO, ISS, or GTO.  Digging into the sources, even excluding Vanguard, they come from a wide spread of years, from 2006 to 2021.  I couldn't find a recent source that gave more certain numbers.

But I think they're close enough to be at least roughly comparable.  The Falcon 9 is priced low enough compared to all competitors to give enough incentive to payload customers to shift, which is about 38% under the next cheapest, Proton.  That jives with SpaceX wanting to gain market share.

We really don't know what SpaceX is doing to allow it to price its payloads at that cost per kg.  We may assume it's at least covering the marginal costs of a launch, but that's still an assumption.  I could see that reduction compared to its competitors just by having a much better supply chain. 

To gain market share, other corporations have done all sorts of things, even for many years, to deliver lower prices than competitors, with varying amounts of risk and various outcomes.  Again, we don't know for sure what SpaceX is doing, because they've not put out enough of the data for us to be sure.

Edited August 15, 2021 by Jacke

[Beccab]

10 minutes ago, Jacke said:

I don't know what SpaceX's costs and per-launch profitability are because that information has not been released, certainly not released in sufficient detail to be audited.  As SpaceX isn't a publicly traded corporation, there isn't even good information on any of its cash flows, so only the crudest knowledge of what's going on financially can be made.

Here's what I found for relative prices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competition

It's a bit of a rambling article, but there's this table of recent costs (with that of the Vanguard launch vehicle thrown in for context).

These numbers may not be properly comparable, because I'm not sure enough was done to make sure they could be properly comparable, even to compensate for costs to LEO, ISS, or GTO.  Digging into the sources, even excluding Vanguard, they come from a wide spread of years, from 2006 to 2021.  I couldn't find a recent source that gave more certain numbers.

But I think they're close enough to be at least roughly comparable.  The Falcon 9 is priced low enough compared to all competitors to give enough incentive to payload customers to shift, which is about 38% under the next cheapest, Proton.  That jives with SpaceX wanting to gain market share.

We really don't know what SpaceX is doing to allow it to price its payloads at that cost per kg.  We may assume it's at least covering the marginal costs of a launch, but that's still an assumption.  I could see that reduction compared to its competitors just by having a much better supply chain. 

To gain market share, other corporations have done all sorts of things, even for many years, to deliver lower prices than competitors, with varying amounts of risk and various outcomes.  Again, we don't know for sure what SpaceX is doing, because they've not put out enough of the data for us to be sure.

We don't know, but we can use logic. It possible that SpaceX is spending money developing rockets and spending even more money by selling every single one of them at a loss to try to trick every other launch provider that reusability can be cost effective without ever gaining anything, all this for 15 years, for whatever reason. We can assume SpaceX is reusing rockets only as a PR move and that they are extremely ineffective, but they want to ridiculize the Proton so they continue spending hundreds of billions so that maybe one day they will be able to raise prices by 100 times and gain millions. Or we can think that SpaceX is gaining some money as a launch provider and that reusing rockets 10+ times has finally become less expensive than throwing them in the sea. Which of these is more likely?