Blue Origin Thread (merged)

[Nibb31]

My first wording was something more akin to "Physics are a female dog"...

[tater]

Yeah, I read your post that way (it's not like the rocket equation is actually tyrannical, but we all get what we mean by suggesting that  ).

[CatastrophicFailure]

Back to relevance, I just noticed, according to AmericaSpace, JCSAT launch is officially on for May 2/3, 1:22 EDT.

[Streetwind]

Nope:

 

[Elukka]

Well, the quote button refuses to work right so I'll have to do this manually...

Nibb31 said...

Not really. A tech team that works only a few days per month costs more that a team that is busy all month. That doesn't make turnaround a major requirement.

That's if you make the pessimistic assumption that the tech team works solely on the single landed stage and is of no further use during the month. I don't know how SpaceX is organized but it would seem strange to hire a team of people per stage solely for its refurbishment.

Edited April 26, 2016 by Elukka

[Nibb31]

9 minutes ago, Elukka said:

Well, the quote button refuses to work right so I'll have to do this manually...

Nibb31 said...

Not really. A tech team that works only a few days per month costs more that a team that is busy all month. That doesn't make turnaround a major requirement.

That's if you make the pessimistic assumption that the tech team works solely on the single landed stage and is of no further use during the month. I don't know how SpaceX is organized but it would seem strange to hire a team of people per stage solely for its refurbishment.

Sure, but qualified engineers and technicians tend to be specialized. Additionally, the manufacturing folks work at Hawthorne whereas the refurb work will likely be done at the launch sites. People are not completely interchangeable. You're not going to have a painter do payload integration, or get a software engineer to come down do a hydraulic purge between two lines of code.

Fast turnaround only makes sense if you are flying frequently. Even at several times the current flight rate, it's not worth the extra effort.

[KerbonautInTraining]

"Would you kids lighten up?"

[tater]

This thread is a combination of details/news about specific SpaceX missions, and the thread title, which is about reusability within they system. Breaking down the value of that idea seems completely legitimate to me.

Musk's sound bites regarding not throwing away airlines after each use sounds great upon hearing it, but it's in fact a bad analogy. Say an aircraft carries 300 people, and the average fare is $1000 for a given flight (likely a little low for long haul). That's $300,000. The plane costs $300,000,000, so throwing it away would be absurd. If the average fare was $2,000,000, then throwing away the plane upon landing would be just fine, they'd pay for the plane, plus fuel, and still take home nearly 300 M$.

That is what SpaceX and every other LV provider is doing right now. The customer is more than buying the LV, so throwing it away is not remotely comparable to chucking an airliner. The idea of course is that reuse allows airline flights to be less than 1-2,000,000 per seat. Airliners at 1k$ per seat pay for themselves in just ~500 round trips. The trick here is that there is a market for some multiple of that number of flights every single day. There are maybe a couple dozen flights available for SpaceX each year, so the reuse thing doesn't seem all that transformative to me---though I think it's incredibly cool.

[stratvox]

19 minutes ago, tater said:

This thread is a combination of details/news about specific SpaceX missions, and the thread title, which is about reusability within they system. Breaking down the value of that idea seems completely legitimate to me.

Musk's sound bites regarding not throwing away airlines after each use sounds great upon hearing it, but it's in fact a bad analogy. Say an aircraft carries 300 people, and the average fare is $1000 for a given flight (likely a little low for long haul). That's $300,000. The plane costs $300,000,000, so throwing it away would be absurd. If the average fare was $2,000,000, then throwing away the plane upon landing would be just fine, they'd pay for the plane, plus fuel, and still take home nearly 300 M$.

That is what SpaceX and every other LV provider is doing right now. The customer is more than buying the LV, so throwing it away is not remotely comparable to chucking an airliner. The idea of course is that reuse allows airline flights to be less than 1-2,000,000 per seat. Airliners at 1k$ per seat pay for themselves in just ~500 round trips. The trick here is that there is a market for some multiple of that number of flights every single day. There are maybe a couple dozen flights available for SpaceX each year, so the reuse thing doesn't seem all that transformative to me---though I think it's incredibly cool.

You're completely ignoring the externalized costs in this scenario. For both rockets and planes (plus pretty much anything else that's not manufactured by your own hands, and even then...) there are plenty of external costs that are not borne by the builder and/or user. Pollution being the classic major externalized cost. Not just the pollution caused by the launch, but by the manufacture of the components.

[tater]

I'm merely setting a boundary value. Launch costs must at least cover the vehicle cost. Pollution? Seems like that would be pretty minor compared to what comes out the bottom during launch/landing.

Dropping costs for a business is a good thing, but I still wonder abut the actual savings, given that reuse at the level claimed must certainly idle the rocket manufacturing business as 10-20 relaunches for a single LV pretty much covers every single launch possible in a year with a single rocket. At most maybe you need 2 or 3 made assuming some have to be expendable (or hull losses in landing attempts).

 

[Elukka]

The elasticity of the launch market remains to be seen. Various companies have made noises about one possible business made feasible through cheaper launches: Low orbit satellite internet, using thousands of small, cheap satellites rather than a few big expensive GEO satellites. The main advantage is low latency, which might make it competitive with non-satellite internet.

Whether that pans out or other ideas pop up, we don't really know yet. SpaceX has talked both realistic near term expectations and highly hypothetical long term expectations for the savings enabled by reuse. Near term, I recall a figure of 30% savings being mentioned. For a potential future launch market with much more launches and a fully reusable F9-scale vehicle they've guessed a launch cost of $5-7 million, or about 90% savings.

One thing you gotta give them credit for is they're usually pretty good about marking speculation as such and schedule slips aside they're pretty careful not to make hypetastic claims on things like this. Musk in particular likes to use phrases like "we may not succeed" and "we're trying to" a lot.

Edited April 27, 2016 by Elukka

[PB666]

On April 26, 2016 at 7:15 AM, Nibb31 said:

Sure, but qualified engineers and technicians tend to be specialized. Additionally, the manufacturing folks work at Hawthorne whereas the refurb work will likely be done at the launch sites. People are not completely interchangeable. You're not going to have a painter do payload integration, or get a software engineer to come down do a hydraulic purge between two lines of code.

Fast turnaround only makes sense if you are flying frequently. Even at several times the current flight rate, it's not worth the extra effort.

@Nibb31 , I think you are being cynical for cynicisms sake, sure there are repaints and recycle, used equip checks, but once that is complete ther are the standard LP venue of strapping payloads and refuelings. It may only be a small proportion, and once they have the BC pad finished they could just fly their crew to Brownsville have them work on that for a few weeks then fly the crew back to canavarel. I know technicians thats all they do is fly from one place to the next and repair stuff.  Think about oilfield specialist or drilling platform technicians and engineers. 

Lifes a beach, for the LP guys, literally. 

Edited April 27, 2016 by PB666

[tater]

^^^ are the same guys building the boosters initially also doing the refurb? That certainly helps the economics of it (given realistic launch rates).

[Basto]

22 hours ago, tater said:

This thread is a combination of details/news about specific SpaceX missions, and the thread title, which is about reusability within they system. Breaking down the value of that idea seems completely legitimate to me.

Musk's sound bites regarding not throwing away airlines after each use sounds great upon hearing it, but it's in fact a bad analogy. Say an aircraft carries 300 people, and the average fare is $1000 for a given flight (likely a little low for long haul). That's $300,000. The plane costs $300,000,000, so throwing it away would be absurd. If the average fare was $2,000,000, then throwing away the plane upon landing would be just fine, they'd pay for the plane, plus fuel, and still take home nearly 300 M$.

That is what SpaceX and every other LV provider is doing right now. The customer is more than buying the LV, so throwing it away is not remotely comparable to chucking an airliner. The idea of course is that reuse allows airline flights to be less than 1-2,000,000 per seat. Airliners at 1k$ per seat pay for themselves in just ~500 round trips. The trick here is that there is a market for some multiple of that number of flights every single day. There are maybe a couple dozen flights available for SpaceX each year, so the reuse thing doesn't seem all that transformative to me---though I think it's incredibly cool.

I think the analogy is actually pretty apt. If we had to throw away an airliner after every flight and someone came around and said "I have an idea, if we reuse the airplane we could make things cheaper". You would probably have a bunch of people telling them it doesn't make any sense because we only fly 10 planes a year. 

I agree that it remains to be seen whether SpaceX can really pull it off, but I also think that they are least trying to make things less expensive vs the old guard just going business as usual. 

[tater]

Except there really isn't that much demand for rocket launches.

[Basto]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

Except there really isn't that much demand for rocket launches.

Time will tell. 

[CatastrophicFailure]

17 minutes ago, tater said:

Except there really isn't that much demand for rocket launches.

Do y'all not see the vicious cycle here?

"There's not many rocket launches cuz they're too expensive cuz there's not many rocket launches."

I seem to recall similar thoughts around a few decades ago. 

"The wold only needs a dozen or so computers, they're too expensive!"

Yes, it all remains to be seen, but the history of industry in general is one of "if you build it cheap enough, they will come."

Automobiles, telephones, music players...

[Cuky]

post from about half an hour ago on SpaceX's Facebook page:

 

Edited April 27, 2016 by Cuky

[tater]

10 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Do y'all not see the vicious cycle here?

"There's not many rocket launches cuz they're too expensive cuz there's not many rocket launches."

I seem to recall similar thoughts around a few decades ago. 

"The wold only needs a dozen or so computers, they're too expensive!"

Yes, it all remains to be seen, but the history of industry in general is one of "if you build it cheap enough, they will come."

Automobiles, telephones, music players...

Products respond to demand by customers. At what price point does demand start to increase? It might well, I'm just saying there is no data.

9 minutes ago, Cuky said:

post from about half an hour ago on SpaceX's Facebook page:

 

This is very interesting. I suppose if they are launching a FH anyway as a test, they might as well use a real payload.

[KerbonautInTraining]

10 minutes ago, Cuky said:

post from about half an hour ago on SpaceX's Facebook page:

Now that's something I can sink my teeth into.

[CatastrophicFailure]

9 minutes ago, tater said:

Products respond to demand by customers. At what price point does demand start to increase? It might well, I'm just saying there is no data.

 

This is true. However, based on historical data, I shall remain optimistic until current data dictates otherwise. 

[tater]

2 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

This is true. However, based on historical data, I shall remain optimistic until current data dictates otherwise. 

Historical data is that SpaceX can at most take all commercial launches that are available for American companies to get, which is about 12.

[Kryten]

12 minutes ago, tater said:

This is very interesting. I suppose if they are launching a FH anyway as a test, they might as well use a real payload.

It's doubtful they could get this running as soon as the test launch. There's no legal framework in place for it right now; no government agency has the authority to authorise or supervise activity by a commercial entity beyond earth orbit, as would be required by the outer space treaty.

[tater]

Here's actual news, vs a tweet:

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/04/spacex-debut-red-dragon-2018-mars-mission/

Quote

SpaceX has entered into an agreement with NASA for a Dragon mission to Mars, set to take place as early as 2018. Known as “Red Dragon”, the variant of the Dragon 2 spacecraft will be launched by the Falcon Heavy rocket, ahead of a soft landing on the surface of Mars. The spacecraft will carry a suite of scientific instrumentation as part of the NASA agreement.

So NASA is presumably coughing up actual money.

The outer space treaty needs to just be ignored, it's nonsense.

[Kryten]

6 minutes ago, tater said:

The outer space treaty needs to just be ignored, it's nonsense.

There's nothing wrong with the treaty, at least this part of it; it's no different than having ships be registered to nations and having those nations be legally responsible for them. The regulatory issue is entirely on the US side.