(Poll) Your current views on reusable launch vehicles

[adsii1970]

2 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Comparing the space shuttle and falcon 9 is wrong is far more way than its correct. 
Similar Falcon 9 and space shuttle launch stuff into space and is partial reusable. 
different: pretty much everything else. 

Space shuttle was designed by an large governmental committee with conflicting demands. 
It was manned so landing fails was not an option, SpaceX can live with 5% crashes on landing. 
It reused upper stage only, upper stage add an 5-10X mass penalty over reusing first stage. 
Design was so performance optimized it was an hangar queen, this increased launch cost a lot, this again reduced number of launches making each far more expensive as you needed the 2K staff anyway. 
Yes it was cool and had lots of nice features, so has the presidential limo or the beast, and you don't want to use the beast for your commute. 

SpaceX thought outside the box then it comes to reuse. 

I do not see it that way. All we have seen from SpaceX is "promises" and dreams, much like NASA did in the 1970s about the space shuttle program. I was not referring to the hardware of either craft but the concept in general.

Why, as a contractor, should I pay SpaceX ten or twelve million dollars to put my satellite in orbit using a reusable launch vehicle if the next launch is going to be, at the least, three or four months away. I can pay ACME, which uses disposable rockets, half that amount and it's ready to launch at half the time. Both launch vehicles have the similar probabilities/risks of catastrophic failure (it is the nature of the space industry), so even with that -- why pay more when every dollar counts?

SpaceX and NASA both - in respect to their launch platforms - proclaimed that reusable spacecraft is the more environmentally responsible thing to do. They were/are hoping that by appealing to the environmental consciousness, corporations would prefer to pay more for the "benefit" of being environmentally sound over the fears of public outcries about "disposable" launchers. To be honest, most people didn't care during the space shuttle's day and they really don't care about it with SpaceX. While the concept is noble at best, until reusability lowers the price AND can be accomplished within a shorter period of time (think weeks instead of months) there is no real tangible benefit for companies to space companies who rely solely on reusable launch vehicles.

[Pipcard]

1 hour ago, adsii1970 said:

Why, as a contractor, should I pay SpaceX ten or twelve million dollars to put my satellite in orbit using a reusable launch vehicle if the next launch is going to be, at the least, three or four months away. I can pay ACME, which uses disposable rockets, half that amount and it's ready to launch at half the time. Both launch vehicles have the similar probabilities/risks of catastrophic failure (it is the nature of the space industry), so even with that -- why pay more when every dollar counts?

On what basis do you assume that the expendable launch provider would provide it at half the time and half the price? Just as magnemoe said, the Falcon 9 is not designed like the Shuttle was. It was designed to be a transition between expendable and reusable launch vehicles.

[wumpus]

25 minutes ago, Pipcard said:

On what basis do you assume that the expendable launch provider would provide it at half the time and half the price? Just as magnemoe said, the Falcon 9 is not designed like the Shuttle was. It was designed to be a transition between expendable and reusable launch vehicles.

Falcon 9 was designed for parachute landing.  Falcon 9 1.1 was redesigned for powered landing.  Falcon 9 FT finally landed (or at least a landing happened after launching the first FT).  So it was designed when they didn't really know how it was going to land (and this really hits the delta-v split between upper and lower).  So until spacex (or blue origins) finishes a design on another orbit capable rocket, we really won't know what something reusable will look like that lands as it was designed to land (at least other than the Space Shuttle).

Spacex offered about 60% of the price off for the first reusable rocket I doubt the rest will get such a great deal.  NASA spent a ton of money (government accounting says $450,000,000 a launch (2011 money)), but the spent a lot more than if divide the whole program by the number of launches.  I'm certain there are a lot of costs to find and replace with cheaper methods without the huge price of the rocket overshadowing everything, but they have only started on that.

Finally, I'm not sure about "transition" between expendable and reusable.  It manages to reuse ~90% of the rocket, I'm sure that the "shuttle" (orbiter, fuel tank, SRBs)  was less than 90% orbiter (the reusable bit).  Getting that last bit down appears *hard*, and not necessarily the largest remaining cost in launching a rocket.

[Bill Phil]

10 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Falcon 9 was designed for parachute landing.  Falcon 9 1.1 was redesigned for powered landing.  Falcon 9 FT finally landed (or at least a landing happened after launching the first FT).  So it was designed when they didn't really know how it was going to land (and this really hits the delta-v split between upper and lower).  So until spacex (or blue origins) finishes a design on another orbit capable rocket, we really won't know what something reusable will look like that lands as it was designed to land (at least other than the Space Shuttle).

Spacex offered about 60% of the price off for the first reusable rocket I doubt the rest will get such a great deal.  NASA spent a ton of money (government accounting says $450,000,000 a launch (2011 money)), but the spent a lot more than if divide the whole program by the number of launches.  I'm certain there are a lot of costs to find and replace with cheaper methods without the huge price of the rocket overshadowing everything, but they have only started on that.

Finally, I'm not sure about "transition" between expendable and reusable.  It manages to reuse ~90% of the rocket, I'm sure that the "shuttle" (orbiter, fuel tank, SRBs)  was less than 90% orbiter (the reusable bit).  Getting that last bit down appears *hard*, and not necessarily the largest remaining cost in launching a rocket.

Reusability doesn't matter if you have to pay your workers. It's high launch rate that will make costs go way down. Sure, reusability may reduce costs/prices somewhat, but a high flight rate will be what really reduces costs. Of course, the issue is that there isn't much of a reason for high flight rates. Then again, some kind of incentive system and a willing customer could fix that. 

For example, the Shuttle program cost billions just to exist. Relative flight rate was low, and so the costs were huge, along with the penalty of having to pay to launch the orbiter as well as any actual payload (Shuttle-C could have helped in this regard). The Shuttle couldn't maintain high flight rates, with a peak of 9 per year, if I recall. The whole selling point was originally high flight rates, but let's not beat a dead horse. The point is that you need high launch rates. Paying your employees (and contractors) is a big chunk of the cost of a program. 

[kerbiloid]

Unlikely something will significantly change in 5-10 years.

Later - I believe that technical progress will make reusable rockets/stages making no sense.

New construction materials (maybe, storable fuels) will make engines more simple, stupid.
(Like a stupidly squared reinforced concrete VAB vs spiky gothic cathedral with arc-boutants and counterforts).

Additive technologies (3d printing) will make it cheaper to make a new stage rather than bring the reused back, test, partially replace and reuse.

So, I believe that the rockets 10+ years later would be still single-use, but cheaper,.
Though their lower stages after separation would make an active maneuver (like Falcon's) — not to land, but to crash on a special bomb range rather than just somewhere.

***
Later, when orbital nuke engines will be considered enough safe, and current projects will require extraterrestrial traffic (say, Earth-Moon, or so), reusable Big Dumb SSTO VTVL will be in order.
Exactly SSTO (not Sea Dragon or Rombus), because staging makes it much more expensive to use — you need to carry the stages back to the launchpad, couple them and so on.
While SSTO gets into orbit, makes 1-2 turns and lands exactly onto the launch field.
Because for any extraplanetary expedition you have either to put at least hundreds tonnes ship into orbit at once, or fuel it with thousands tonnes of storable fuel, or deliver thousands tonnes cryostats with LH2 or raw material to produce LH2 onboard.
So, no way except Big Dumb Booster (no matter, chemical or nuclear powered).

Also, Nexus hull is a ready-to-use "wet workshop" 50 m in diameter.

Also you can easily calculate that a Nexus-like BDB can put into orbit an additional fuel tank as payload and run itself to Mars.
So, you get standard "wet workshop" hulls right on LMO, on Mars and Phobos surface.
Or a ready-to-use BDB to operate on Mars, delivering 1000 t (instead of 500 t from Earth) from icecaps to orbital spaceport and to Phobos, where you can mine metals and build near Mars O'Neil cylinder for a colony with normal gravity.

Having a Martian colony with thousands tonnes of fuel in orbit, you can refuel interplanetary ships, allowing them to get to the asteroid belt, where, in turn, you can also deliver Nexus hulls and keep a refueling station for Jupiter.

Also, as Nexus hull is 50 m in diameter, you can easily put inside an axis with two counter-rotating wheels with 8-12 radial living modules 3-up-to-8 meters in diameter, making an intermediate orbital station for 100-200 crew inside a safe protected volume. (From outside you can see no movement, just a dull hull).
Btw as Nexus is 50 m in diameter, you can easily have a 10 m aperture in its top and deliver/put inside/mount these modules one by one.

You also can put such "gravitized" living module on any low-gravity body (0..0.4 g) and get a normal gravity apartment for a month-duty shift from the orbital colony.

***

Crews will be delivered from Earth to LEO by reusable spaceplanes with lifting body, Spiral/Bor/Dreamchaser-like. (Of course, not Shuttle/OPT/B9/Mk2 style.)
Just because any big conical capsule mutates into an improvised plane, while any spaceplane tries to have lesser wings, more lifting body. So, 10+ crew craft will be looking such way.
Probably, first launched by expendable rockets, later - nuke-powered SSTO HTHL.

Edited September 9, 2017 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

New construction materials (maybe, storable fuels) will make engines more simple, stupid.

I'm afraid large-scale storeables are the past and not the future, everyone's terrified of UDMH-NTO, let alone more... advanced combinations.

[wumpus]

21 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

Reusability doesn't matter if you have to pay your workers. It's high launch rate that will make costs go way down. Sure, reusability may reduce costs/prices somewhat, but a high flight rate will be what really reduces costs. Of course, the issue is that there isn't much of a reason for high flight rates. Then again, some kind of incentive system and a willing customer could fix that. 

For example, the Shuttle program cost billions just to exist. Relative flight rate was low, and so the costs were huge, along with the penalty of having to pay to launch the orbiter as well as any actual payload (Shuttle-C could have helped in this regard). The Shuttle couldn't maintain high flight rates, with a peak of 9 per year, if I recall. The whole selling point was originally high flight rates, but let's not beat a dead horse. The point is that you need high launch rates. Paying your employees (and contractors) is a big chunk of the cost of a program. 

"Having to pay your workers" has a lot to do with how much you have to refurbish your reusable rockets.  After all the Shuttles were made, NASA longer had to pay those contractors to build shuttles.  They did have to pay the refurbishing crew to keep repairing them each time they went up (and don't ask about SLS existing to keep them on the job).  In spacex's case, presumably the workers who used to build falcon 9 boosters will be building the next generation rocket, and the assembly costs will be lower.

As long as you don't have refurbishment costs, reusability doesn't matter no matter what your launch cadence is.  If they are shuttle level, you are in trouble.  While I'm skeptical of spacex recovering the second stage, I'm vastly more skeptical of it ever being a "gas and go" recovery.  Expect them to need a lot of workers regardless to either build or refurbish second stages.

To a large degree I think we are talking past each other.  Certainly they should be able to reduce costs by launching more often with the same army of workers.  I've been wondering if they have such a large army of workers because "that's how NASA has always done it" and that as Elon Musk burns them out, they shouldn't be so quick  to replace them, but to find ways to reduce that army in ways NASA has never needed to care (not that NASA's budget is so big, just that the other costs overshadowed the launching costs).  Blue Origin appears to have hired most of the people who have looked into this.

[magnemoe]

10 hours ago, wumpus said:

"Having to pay your workers" has a lot to do with how much you have to refurbish your reusable rockets.  After all the Shuttles were made, NASA longer had to pay those contractors to build shuttles.  They did have to pay the refurbishing crew to keep repairing them each time they went up (and don't ask about SLS existing to keep them on the job).  In spacex's case, presumably the workers who used to build falcon 9 boosters will be building the next generation rocket, and the assembly costs will be lower.

As long as you don't have refurbishment costs, reusability doesn't matter no matter what your launch cadence is.  If they are shuttle level, you are in trouble.  While I'm skeptical of spacex recovering the second stage, I'm vastly more skeptical of it ever being a "gas and go" recovery.  Expect them to need a lot of workers regardless to either build or refurbish second stages.

To a large degree I think we are talking past each other.  Certainly they should be able to reduce costs by launching more often with the same army of workers.  I've been wondering if they have such a large army of workers because "that's how NASA has always done it" and that as Elon Musk burns them out, they shouldn't be so quick  to replace them, but to find ways to reduce that army in ways NASA has never needed to care (not that NASA's budget is so big, just that the other costs overshadowed the launching costs).  Blue Origin appears to have hired most of the people who have looked into this.

Yes, you also have to pay the launch crew, here the cost is pretty much the same no mater how often you launch, 3 times a year or every second week.  

Think the point of the next gen falcon 9 is that it should not be much more work to get ready for launch reused than new. 
Its an reason why they just reuse current first stages more than once.
You still want an static burn and an status check after that so an new rocket is not just to fuel and launch either. 

[DAL59]

http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/the-amazing-aldebaran-spacecraft.html

7-30 thousand tons to LEO.  Would probably make a radioactive tsunami though.  It uses nuclear propulsion in space, and hydrofoil wings to ascend.  The wings appear to contain engines of some sort.  Maybe nuclear ramjets?    

[Pipcard]

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[Pipcard]

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Edited September 28, 2017 by Pipcard

[kerbiloid]

They — guess. We — try.