sevenperforce

I hope it's a discrete payload. Continuous payloads would be...odd.

Yeah, that thing is a monster. Granted, the stretch might not be quite that extreme. It was a very rough estimate. But even so, dang. They must have really uprated the Raptors significantly. With no engine mass growth and only added structural growth (which is linear), we could very easily see a significant drop in the number of refueling flights required for BLEO operation. Elon may be looking toward lunar capability and wanting to simplify lunar operations (e.g., launch a tanker direct to LLO, then launch a crew vehicle direct to LLO, rendezvous, refuel, land, and then return both). Fineness ratio still appears to be lower than that of the F9 so that isn't a problem. What does bother me is the heightened center of gravity on landings. Tip-over is a bigger risk now.

I did a quick comparison workup. Includes Block 5 F9/H, Fairing 2.0, and the uprated two-stage New Glenn with BE-3U engines on the upper stage: Obviously I could have thrown in the 2016 ITS and the original versions of the NG, not to mention additional SLS blocks, but I'm lazy.

Ah, here it is:

As Bill Nye would say.... ...consider the following. There is a global network of transportation modes designed to get passengers and cargo to and from about 20 giant hub airports and an additional ~50 slightly smaller major hub airports. If you need to get something across the world fast, you use your highest-speed transportation modes to get to the nearest hub, then you buy space on an existing flight to the hub nearest your destination. The longest regular airline flight in the world is 18 hours. So, let's say you need to move something across the world fast. You can choose to transit to whichever of the 70 major hubs is closest to you, or let us suppose you can choose to transit to the nearest SpaceX P2P Spaceport site. Let us further assume that the SpaceX flights leave every two hours, all day, every day (which is obviously not true) and take half an hour, and that all international flights take 18 hours (which, again, is not true). Most people in urban areas are less than two hours from a major airline hub. This means, roughly, that unless your origin and destination are both less than 8 hours distance from a SpaceX Spaceport, your cargo will get there faster if you use air travel, even assuming the best-case-scenario approach. Link????

All very good points. I think there is very significant concern about the use of solids for manned flight because of the shutdown issue. Yes, you can design an SRB with a thrust termination system, but liquids are easier to shut off by their very nature. All liquid rocket engines can have commanded shutdown; the SRB's thrust termination system is hardware that must be added in (which also means added weight and volume). If the Shuttle SRBs, for example, had been equipped with thrust termination systems, it would have added weight and reduced payload and performance. Moreover, it would have had to have been VERY carefully designed in order to prevent termination blow impingement on the tank or orbiter.

Shipping companies will need to have a compelling reason to pay a premium to have their product's main transit segment be much faster than usual. A market which can only be served by a fully-operational system/network.

So does anyone have the foggiest what AFSPC-11 actually is? Without more info, I'm going to make it a spysat with hella dV, listening in on geostats.

Well, unless I miss my guess, the only advantage here is cargo size, not necessarily super-speed. An ultrasound machine probably doesn't care TOO much if it arrives in 30 minutes or 2 days. There, again, it will take much longer to transport to the launch pad and from the landing pad to the final destination than the trip will take.

Another thing -- air freight will likely start to shrink, since supply-chain management and globalized infrastructure have made it much easier to anticipate demand and maintain flexibility. Cargo which is in high demand can be inventoried and planned for, obviating the need for fast freight. Cargo which is not in high demand cannot benefit from the economies of scale required to make fast freight viable.

Suborbital cargo flights seems like a very small market. I suspect it will take longer to get the cargo to the rocket, load it, fly it, land it, offload it, and get it to its destination than it would to use conventional high-speed shipping. Air freight is a growing market, but it's hard to see what segments of air freight would see suborbital rocket shipping, even co-manifested with passengers, as a viable and competitive alternative.

Not to mention that the RS-68 has big problems if you try to cluster it. So what, exactly, have we done here? We have leftover rocket bits. Let's build a new rocket that will use those bits! Wait, we want to do more with the rocket. Build a newer rocket that will do more! Redesign ALL the bits for the bigger rocket! This is getting expensive. Let's make it smaller and just focus on using those bits. Those bits don't work so well for what we want. Let's just redesign some of the bits. We are going to run out of bits. We need to make more bits to fit the rocket we designed to fit the leftover rocket bits we had.

Oh, I thought you were talking suborbital.

Isn't that New Shepard?

YESSSSSSSSS

I suppose they could pack more than 100 people in. One of Elon's schticks with Tesla is that they do NOT offer discounts. No employee discount, no friends-and-family discount, nothing. The only time they sell a Tesla below sticker price is if it's used or a showroom model or something like that. The goal of the no-discount pricing is to keep the price the same for everyone, rather than making retail purchasers subsidize the purchases made by "preferred" people. So I would anticipate an honest-to-goodness suborbital BFS commercial flight to have the same sort of arrangement. There would be no discounted economy tickets, no dizzying array of fare classes. Just one full-fare ticket price. A fully-flexible economy-class ticket from NY to Brussels will run around $5000. 200 people paying $5K each will get you $1M. I would guesstimate the propellant cost of a single-stage BFS flight at around $300K, which is far greater than the percentage cost that airlines pay for their fuel. Hard to know. Single-stage has always made far more sense to me. There are only a handful of flights a single-stage BFS couldn't handle, given the right engine config.

Surprised to hear Shotwell so very onboard. Also it's impressive...feels like just yesterday it was "Go for age of reflight" on the first reflown booster, and now we are looking at the last launch of a new F9 rocket before the rapidly-reusable model starts flying.

Added the rest of the mission now that it went off:

Right. End-to-end is a business term in commodity transportation. It means they control transportation and servicing of a particular item from start to finish.

Here's the mission post:

IRNSS-1I This was a really, really fun launch. For one thing, the PSLV is a really neat launch vehicle. Four stages, one dual-engine liquid stage inside the payload fairing, an upper stage solid using a sequential stage's RCS for pointing, asymmetric roll control on the single-engine upper stage, a solid core with bolted-on liquids, and a series of bolted-on solids, some of which fire on the pad and some of which fire in-air? Simply fantastic to build, let alone fly. The destination was cool, too. Going to an inclined eccentric kerbosynchronous orbit required quite a bit of number-crunching. Payload was meh. Hard to make comsats interesting. EDIT: The rest of the mission is now up!

The graphic shows a payload being jettisoned, but this would only work for people who want to pay to have their payloads tested in a fixed but open-to-vacuum microgravity environment AND want it back, since if you jettison something it's almost definitely not coming back. Not unless you are also going to have a payload with autonomous docking ability.

I think the beef is this: "Space Rider will return to Earth with the payloads stowed in its cargo bay" Ergo the customer gets her/his payload back so it is reuseable too. Your X-37B analogy is a perfect match; this does exactly the same thing except the service is sold commercially. Probably a much smaller payload bay though? Indeed. I'm not sure how this has any advantage over a Dragon 1 style capsule approach. Maybe the payload bay is easier to open/close? Or maybe a lifting body has lower gee-loading than a capsule?

Designed, yes. The whole idea of a LES is to give you all-envelope, all-failure contingency escape. Design assumption should be that everything which can go wrong, will go wrong. That being said, the capacity to simply shut down the booster engines (something which can be accomplished in a wide range of ways) makes liquid-boosted aborts far safer than aborts involving SRBs. In an abort involving SRBs, you have to make a decision about when to fire FTS. Too soon, and you could trap the capsule inside the blast radius; too late, and you have a booster-capsule impact. The whole situation must be carefully simulated with the AFTS having a complex decision tree to deal with it. With a liquid booster, on the other hand, there's no decision; you simply MECO your engines simultaneously with abort, and then you can fire FTS at your leisure after the capsule is well-clear.

Ready to launch: