Where will we be in terms of Space exploration in 10 years? (Very Optimistically)

[Hannu2]

On 3.2.2016 at 2:35 AM, Bill Phil said:

2018: SLS cancelled

2021: Dark age of spaceflight begins. Lasts until 2050. Perhaps much later. 

Oh, you wanted optimism? Well, what I said us still optimistic. Relative to my usual super pessimism regarding spaceflight.

You was very optimistic. In real life dark age of manned spaceflight began 1972 and there is no real signs that it will end in foreseeable future. There are plans and empty promises but not anyone who wants and can to pay the bill of hundreds of billions of euros or dollars. Single space enthusiast billionaire can not afford it in his lifetime.

Fortunately re-using technology of SpaceX gives little hope that era of robotic space exploration could begin in next decades. If launch costs drops dramatically probes does not have to be so extremely perfect and expensive. If you try to make a probe which have 90 % possibility to succeed it costs at least ten times more than a probe with 60 % probability. This is a guess but last percents increase costs to insane levels. But if you can send 10 60 % probes with same money there is probability of 99,99 % that at least one succeeds and 94 % possibility that at least 4 succeeds. There will be significant decrease of costs per "science point" and I hope that it gives possibilities to space science projects to more universities and scientific laboratories all around the world.

[FishInferno]

On 2/3/2016 at 2:31 AM, Nibb31 said:

Meanwhile, SpaceX is still dabbling with reusable rockets. Since there is little competition, launch prices will pretty much stay the same because they are still the cheapest shop in town, by far. They might have started building mockups for their MCT, but they will still be looking for a business plan or a customer willing to pay for it.

That is the biggest misconception people have.  SpaceX will fund MCT itself with the revenue from their sat launches and internet constellation.

[kunok]

16 minutes ago, FishInferno said:

That is the biggest misconception people have.  SpaceX will fund MCT itself with the revenue from their sat launches and internet constellation.

It's that difficult to understand that there's a lot of people that don't trust every thing Space X or Elon Musk says?

[Nibb31]

9 minutes ago, FishInferno said:

That is the biggest misconception people have.  SpaceX will fund MCT itself with the revenue from their sat launches and internet constellation.

That's the plan. Development is privately funded, but that doesn't mean that SpaceX investors don't expect a return on investment. Throwing away money into a sink isn't much of a business plan, and whatever you might think, Musk is still a businessman and he doesn't have unlimited funds. 

In the end, once they've designed the MCT, it won't be cheap to build and operate, so they still need to find someone willing to pay for the trip.

They might be able to fund development of the MCT from sat launches but I'm not convinced that the current margins are that high (I suspect that any advances in reusability will be aimed at increasing revenue rather than lowering prices) and I don't beleive that an internet constellation is that much of a cash cow.

 

[Hannu2]

30 minutes ago, FishInferno said:

That is the biggest misconception people have.  SpaceX will fund MCT itself with the revenue from their sat launches and internet constellation.

It is Musk's fantasy but it does not sound very realistic objective. Even if SpaceX succeeds to reuse stages in short time, other rocket manufacturers develop their reuse systems soon and SpaceX's window to get ridiculous profits will be short. It is totally impossible to earn tens of billions pure profit in such time, maybe 5 years. Tens of billions are superoptimistic estimate of cost of new manned Mars capable spacecraft totally from scratch. I would say hundreds of billions.

[sevenperforce]

6 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

SpaceX doesn't sell boosters, it sells a launch service.The customer price is based on the weight of the payload and the orbit where they want it, and each mission is taylored around that requirement with a specific flight profiles. The price will probably vary based on whether they use a FH, a F9, a land recovery, a barge recovery, or no recovery, but ultimately, I don't think the customer will need to know how many times the booster has flown. That's SpaceX's business.

They are already the cheapest launch service around, and they need cash (lots of it) for their Mars projects. So why would they slash prices even more? Why kill the cash cow? It won't get them more customers and they will lose revenue. Reusability is a way to maximise revenue

Oh, I'm quite certain that the customer will be quite aware of whether the booster is brand new or reused. I'm saying that if customers balk about a reused booster, a one-time discount might allow for proof-of-concept, whereafter reuse will become routine.

[Nibb31]

What I meant was that the customer doesn't need to be aware of the flight history of the booster. When you buy a plane ticket, you don't get to know the flight history of the plane you're flying on. Maintenance costs, size of the aircraft, and leasing contracts are transparent for the user. You just buy a plane ticket to go from A to B.

The same is true for pretty much every service. When you subscribe to broadband or a cell phone contract, you agree on a level of service for a given price. You don't get to choose what equipment the operator uses or the backbone that your data goes through. That's the job of the service provider, to  keep a balance between quality of service and cost efficiency.

I'm willing to bet that SpaceX's model will be based on charging customers for putting a payload A into an orbit B. How it's done will remain the sole business of SpaceX, who will set prices and manifests based on the market and the actual cost, just like any other product.

Edited February 4, 2016 by Nibb31

[kunok]

38 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

I'm willing to bet that SpaceX's model will be based on charging customers for putting a payload A into an orbit B. How it's done will remain the sole business of SpaceX, who will set prices and manifests based on the market and the actual cost, just like any other product.

I feel that the biggest problem will come from the insurance companies, they won't charge the same for a reused booster than a new brand one.

[Hannu2]

1 hour ago, Nibb31 said:

I'm willing to bet that SpaceX's model will be based on charging customers for putting a payload A into an orbit B. How it's done will remain the sole business of SpaceX, who will set prices and manifests based on the market and the actual cost, just like any other product.

It may be true on far future when they have much experience and know that used stages are practically as reliable as new. But it is far too risky during experimental phase. If SpaceX had one price then accident of used rocket would hit its reputation and insurance payments. If it sells used rockets as used rockets with higher risks customer takes part of responsibility. If somebody wants to maximum reliability, he buy a new one at full price and if somebody wants to cheap launch even with a little risk he buys an used one. I think that there are markets for both.

[Nibb31]

Used or unused doesn't matter much when it comes to the consequences of an accident. Both will hit the its reputation and insurance payments. We don't really know if a reused booster presents more risk or less risk at this point. Insurance companies could consider the entire system or the launch provider as a single entity.

[fredinno]

10 hours ago, Hannu2 said:

You was very optimistic. In real life dark age of manned spaceflight began 1972 and there is no real signs that it will end in foreseeable future. There are plans and empty promises but not anyone who wants and can to pay the bill of hundreds of billions of euros or dollars. Single space enthusiast billionaire can not afford it in his lifetime.

Fortunately re-using technology of SpaceX gives little hope that era of robotic space exploration could begin in next decades. If launch costs drops dramatically probes does not have to be so extremely perfect and expensive. If you try to make a probe which have 90 % possibility to succeed it costs at least ten times more than a probe with 60 % probability. This is a guess but last percents increase costs to insane levels. But if you can send 10 60 % probes with same money there is probability of 99,99 % that at least one succeeds and 94 % possibility that at least 4 succeeds. There will be significant decrease of costs per "science point" and I hope that it gives possibilities to space science projects to more universities and scientific laboratories all around the world.

That was the idea of Goldin's "better, faster, cheaper." Congress didn't like it because it resulted in higher failure rates despite reviving NASA robotic sciences, and killed it. It's not coming back up any time soon.

6 hours ago, Hannu2 said:

It is Musk's fantasy but it does not sound very realistic objective. Even if SpaceX succeeds to reuse stages in short time, other rocket manufacturers develop their reuse systems soon and SpaceX's window to get ridiculous profits will be short. It is totally impossible to earn tens of billions pure profit in such time, maybe 5 years. Tens of billions are superoptimistic estimate of cost of new manned Mars capable spacecraft totally from scratch. I would say hundreds of billions.

And if reuse turns out to work and significantly lower costs, I give max. a decade before everyone else in the commercial scene aside from a few niche launchers to adapt it.

[Bill Phil]

3 hours ago, fredinno said:

That was the idea of Goldin's "better, faster, cheaper." Congress didn't like it because it resulted in higher failure rates despite reviving NASA robotic sciences, and killed it. It's not coming back up any time soon.

And if reuse turns out to work and significantly lower costs, I give max. a decade before everyone else in the commercial scene aside from a few niche launchers to adapt it.

The funny thing, though, was that you could get a better cost per science-thing, despite the high failure rate. 

[sevenperforce]

3 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

Used or unused doesn't matter much when it comes to the consequences of an accident. Both will hit the its reputation and insurance payments. We don't really know if a reused booster presents more risk or less risk at this point. Insurance companies could consider the entire system or the launch provider as a single entity.

It really wouldn't make sense for insurance companies to consider the entire launch provider as a single entity. When you're insuring really small things in bulk (like people, for example), it makes sense...but at the corporate level, insurance companies leverage ALL the information they have.

SpaceX has made an established practice of selling launches with the express intended purpose of using the launch process as a testbed for future development. That's their whole schtick. If they feature their first re-used boosters with a reduced launch price, then it's understood at the start that the launch is experimental, which reduces the fallout and loss of reputation if there's a failure. If they manage three or four of those successfully, then they'll probably go through the insurance process to integrate reused boosters into their ordinarily lineup.

[Matuchkin]

On ‎02‎/‎02‎/‎2016 at 4:05 PM, Spaceception said:

2026: SpaceX launches 100 people to Mars, the colonization of Mars has begun and NASA/ESA/CSA/RSC establish a small lunar mining outpost

I believe it will be more like:

2026, first manned Mars flyby.

[tater]

Realistically, we can copy and paste this thread back into the forum in 10 years and it will basically be the same discussion.

[Hannu2]

11 hours ago, fredinno said:

That was the idea of Goldin's "better, faster, cheaper." Congress didn't like it because it resulted in higher failure rates despite reviving NASA robotic sciences, and killed it. It's not coming back up any time soon.

I remember that. But they did not have cheap launches. If they could have sent 10 probes at same costs than one before, failures of single crafts would not have led to failures of missions. Only reason why they use hundreds of millions to ensure that probes are perfect is that launch costs in any case hundreds of millions. I am sure that if launch costs drops to one tenth or less there will be cheaper probes and some kind of "mass production" of probes.

[Hannu2]

12 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

Used or unused doesn't matter much when it comes to the consequences of an accident. Both will hit the its reputation and insurance payments. We don't really know if a reused booster presents more risk or less risk at this point. Insurance companies could consider the entire system or the launch provider as a single entity.

I disagree. Everybody knows that used rocket is a risk. Nobody knows exactly how big risk is but it is clear that it is risk. Therefore it would be insane to sell, buy or insurance them at the same price as a new. If insurance companys can take age and model of car into account, if customer's payment is few hundreds of Euros per year, I think that they can also change agreements of tens of millions if rocket is used.

I would compare buying of launch service to buying of car. Every launch consumes large part of rocket's lifetime. It is unrealistic to expect that rockets can be used tens or hundreds of times in several decades, if ever. You do not buy an used car at same price than a new car or without knowing that it is used. It is shame to car manufacturer if new car fails, especially if there are many cases, but it is not shame if old scrap fails. You can save money and buy old scrap but you know that there are much larger risks of failures of missions and eventually every car broke so that it is not sane to fix it.

Maybe at some day, if rockets last hundreds of flights and failures are counted as parts per million instead if percents, like cars, planes of ships, they can sell services without telling which rocket makes the job like plane or ship companies now. But currently we are in very experimental phase and very far away from such situation.

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, Matuchkin said:

I believe it will be more like:

2026, first manned Mars flyby.

(deleted)

Edited February 5, 2016 by kerbiloid

[DerekL1963]

31 minutes ago, Hannu2 said:

11 hours ago, fredinno said:

That was the idea of Goldin's "better, faster, cheaper." Congress didn't like it because it resulted in higher failure rates despite reviving NASA robotic sciences, and killed it. It's not coming back up any time soon.

I remember that. But they did not have cheap launches. If they could have sent 10 probes at same costs than one before, failures of single crafts would not have led to failures of missions. Only reason why they use hundreds of millions to ensure that probes are perfect is that launch costs in any case hundreds of millions. I am sure that if launch costs drops to one tenth or less there will be cheaper probes and some kind of "mass production" of probes.

Launch costs are a very small fraction of the cost of a typical probe delivered to it's destination.   That's the fallacy of cheap access to space.

The reason they spend hundreds of millions is because the instrument must operate nearly perfectly for months to years, to very high tolerances, in an extreme environment, after being exposed to the vibrations and shock of launch, and after being untouched by human hands for months and years - and they must be extremely lightweight.   It's the last that's critical, because if you can increase the mass available to an instrument you don't have to be quite so clever in how you engineer it to match the other preconditions.

Lowered launch costs only significantly lower the cost of the probe only if means you can buy a cheaper launcher with a larger payload.

[Hannu2]

9 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

Launch costs are a very small fraction of the cost of a typical probe delivered to it's destination.   That's the fallacy of cheap access to space.

The reason they spend hundreds of millions is because the instrument must operate nearly perfectly for months to years, to very high tolerances, in an extreme environment, after being exposed to the vibrations and shock of launch, and after being untouched by human hands for months and years - and they must be extremely lightweight.   It's the last that's critical, because if you can increase the mass available to an instrument you don't have to be quite so clever in how you engineer it to match the other preconditions.

Lowered launch costs only significantly lower the cost of the probe only if means you can buy a cheaper launcher with a larger payload.

I think that typical values are something like total budget of billion and launch takes 200 millions. It is not insignificant part of cost. And as you say, saving of launch costs is important thing which increases cost of probe. Only reason why probes must be light is launch costs. If launches costed 1/10 of current costs they could send 10 x more massive probes at the same price. Then there would be many options to lower costs. If large total mass were possible probe could be make with very safe margins and redundancy by using reasonable cheap materials and structures. If maximum mass would be same, scientific payload could be divided to several probes and use extra mass to make cheaper structures. Redundancy would come from many separate probes. Or there could be some combination.

[DerekL1963]

20 minutes ago, Hannu2 said:

I think that typical values are something like total budget of billion and launch takes 200 millions.

Budgets and launch costs vary.  The MRO spacecraft cost $720 billion, it's Atlas-V ride to space cost $100 million. It's operating budget runs around $30 million a year.   So....  coming up on a decade in service, it's racked up a bill totaling about 1.1 billion - of which, the .1 represents the launch costs.  To get up to $200 million you have to go to one of the really big launchers - and the probe costs go up too.   (That's the reason we aren't tossing big heavy "battlestar" probes around the solar system anymore, they just cost too [censored] much for NASA's budget to stand.)

28 minutes ago, Hannu2 said:

Only reason why probes must be light is launch costs. If launches costed 1/10 of current costs they could send 10 x more massive probes at the same price.

0.o

No, that's not how these things work.   The payload of a current Falcon 9 (currently $61 million a ticket) is 28klb to LEO.   The payload of a Falcon 9 ($30-40 million with a reuseable first stage) is also 28klb to LEO.   Probes must be light because the rocket equation is a stone cold [censored].   Significantly increasing the weight of a probe requires launchers size go up and their costs come down.

[kerbiloid]

Congressional committee says NASA’s Mars mission is in critical need of a plan

[KSK]

Very optimistically?

Not going to bother doing this year by year but after 10 years, this would be my wishlist. I'm not fussed about which company or agency does what but I think it's fairly obvious who would be involved for some of these.

• Commercial crew and commercial cargo to ISS both well established with at least two competitors in each program. NASA gets to keep any savings to plough back into Cool Space Stuff.
• D-Prize won. Objective - to demonstrate cost effective deorbiting of space junk. Commercial Clean-up established on the same basis as Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo programs.
• Orbital refueling demonstrated. First propellant depot established in space.
• First privately operated space station completed and continuously occupied by paying customers.
• Lunar Tourist Transporter in operation. Flies free-return trajectories around the Moon (later upgrading to Apollo 8 style lunar orbit flights) before returning to Earth orbit.
• SABRE engine successfully tested. Work begins on testbed spaceplane.
• Prototype solar power satellite launched.

Maybe some of that isn't terribly glamorous but I'm hoping for something to kickstart the development of orbital infrastructure and a more robust spaceflight industry in general. Actually, that's not quite right - a more diversified spaceflight industry would be a better way of putting it. Probably not going to happen but hey - that's why I called it a wishlist.

[Nibb31]

58 minutes ago, KSK said:

Very optimistically?

Not going to bother doing this year by year but after 10 years, this would be my wishlist. I'm not fussed about which company or agency does what but I think it's fairly obvious who would be involved for some of these.

• Commercial crew and commercial cargo to ISS both well established with at least two competitors in each program. NASA gets to keep any savings to plough back into Cool Space Stuff.

In 10 years, ISS will be end of life, and therefore so will the commercial crew and cargo programs.

58 minutes ago, KSK said:

• D-Prize won. Objective - to demonstrate cost effective deorbiting of space junk. Commercial Clean-up established on the same basis as Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo programs.

I don't see how this can ever be cost effective for random space junk. How much are you going to spend to go after something the size of a screwdriver or a bolt? It's easier to make disposal part of the mission profile and to minimize debris by design.

58 minutes ago, KSK said:

• Orbital refueling demonstrated. First propellant depot established in space.

Soyuz/Progress demonstrated that decades ago.

 

[Nibb31]

4 hours ago, Hannu2 said:

I disagree. Everybody knows that used rocket is a risk. Nobody knows exactly how big risk is but it is clear that it is risk.

Nobody has flown reusable rockets yet, so no, nobody know if it's a risk or how much of a risk it is.

Things are more likely to break down on their first test run than after several operation cycles. An aircraft is more likely to have trouble on its first test flight than during after several hundred hours of operation. Reliability actually goes up with continued usage, not the opposite.

Whether this applies to rockets is something that we don't know, since we don't have any criteria for comparison (although we can extrapolate that statistically STS-1 had a much higher risk of failure than the following missions).

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Therefore it would be insane to sell, buy or insurance them at the same price as a new. If insurance companys can take age and model of car into account, if customer's payment is few hundreds of Euros per year, I think that they can also change agreements of tens of millions if rocket is used.

Car insurance doesn't typically cover technical failures. They take age and model of the car to determine its insured value, not the risk. The risk is usually calculated on the profile of the operator/driver (age, gender, history of accidents...).

Launch insurance is a different model. The insured value covers the launch cost and the payload. The risk of technical failure is evaluated based on the success/failure rate of the launch system. Whether that system is reusable or not is irrelevant as long as you have a launch history.

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I would compare buying of launch service to buying of car. Every launch consumes large part of rocket's lifetime. It is unrealistic to expect that rockets can be used tens or hundreds of times in several decades, if ever. You do not buy an used car at same price than a new car or without knowing that it is used. It is shame to car manufacturer if new car fails, especially if there are many cases, but it is not shame if old scrap fails. You can save money and buy old scrap but you know that there are much larger risks of failures of missions and eventually every car broke so that it is not sane to fix it.

Your analogy is irrelevant. Launch customers don't buy rockets, don't operate rockets. They buy a service. 

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Maybe at some day, if rockets last hundreds of flights and failures are counted as parts per million instead if percents, like cars, planes of ships, they can sell services without telling which rocket makes the job like plane or ship companies now. But currently we are in very experimental phase and very far away from such situation.

They already buy a service. It's no different from paying UPS to send a parcel or buying an airline ticket.

Edited February 5, 2016 by Nibb31