Red Dragon confirmed!!

[fredinno]

11 hours ago, 78stonewobble said:

1. Well to be fair... there are no obvious numbers to calculate this from. As you can see in nibb31's picture... The prices are for fully reuseable launches, but the performance numbers, atleast in the case of the falcon heavy, are based on not reused rockets.

According to that picture... one must ask, why don't they simply use a falcon 9 to send red dragon? Since according to it... it should be capable of it.

a. F9 v1.0, a cheap ELV, is 0.87% the cost of a 1st stage only reusable RLV, F9FT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_v1.0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_full_thrust

30% cost savings from reuse- 13% cost increase from larger LV= 17% total real savings

http://spacenews.com/spacexs-reusable-falcon-9-what-are-the-real-cost-savings-for-customers/

b. F9 cannot send 6T to Mars transfer.

11 hours ago, 78stonewobble said:

3. 710 million for the Saturn V vehicle itself... That's for 140 tonnes to LEO for a vehicle, which prise is based around 1960's technology and manufacturing.

Now, what does spacex'es numbers include?

Launch service, spacecraft processing, payload integration, tracking, data and telemetry, other launch support requirements and whatever else people can think of?

Actually, the quoted Saturn V cost of 1.22 Billion is EVERYTHING to launch.

Accounting for everything, except fixed costs like R+D.

11 hours ago, 78stonewobble said:

Let's go by the figures in Nibb31's graphic tho:

Saturn V: 140 tonnes to LEO = 710 million dollars (rocket only) or 1.221 (rocket and launch and all 2016 dollars offcourse).

 

Falcon 9 FT: 22.8 tonnes to LEO = 62 million dollars (list price).

Number of launches to deliver 140 tonnes to LEO = 6.14

Total cost of delivering 140 tonnes to LEO on Falcon FT with listprice: 380.7 million dollars.

If we go by the prices nasa are getting from dragon ISS deliveries: 816.6 million dollars.

If we go by the price for the DSCOVR mission: 595.6 million dollars.

 

Falcon Heavy: 54.4 tonnes to LEO for 90 million dollars:

Number of launches to deliver 140 tonnes to LEO = 2.57

Total cost of delivering 140 tonnes to LEO on Falcon Heavy with list price: 231.62 million dollars.

However... the 90 million price is based around actually only delivering 36 percent of the payload in Nibb31's graphic.

Number of launches needed to deliver 140 tonnes to LEO at circka 20 tonnes per launch: 7.15

Total cost of delivering 140 tonnes to LEO on Falcon Heavy with presumed reuseability: 643.38 million dollars.

 

Yes, spacex does seem cheaper even tho the numbers are somewhat "confusingly" presented, but it's not a revolution...

PPS: Personally and humbly I think we would have been closer to that revolution, if we had applied spacex's talent for innovation and energy on a decidedly non reuseable saturn v. Mass produced "big dumb booster". Again... subject to the fact that that also needs a market or be good enough to create a market.

The F9H cost increases if you use the 53T number, by 30%, as the current numbers almost certainly assume reuse.

BTW, the tiny payload fairing means that the actual F9H will carry FAR less than its 53T number to LEO- and a lack of a H2 stage make BLEO performance far worse.

Want to see what I mean?

http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_lau/atlas-5.htm

4m payload fairing Atlas V rockets are all limited to ~9T to LEO due to the small payload fairing.

 

[PB666]

34 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

The way I heard it, the limiting factors were a combination of launch availability, launch price, and launch capability constraints. Particularly for smaller companies. The actual launch price itself may not be the majority of the investment, but launching itself represents such a large bottleneck in the whole process that it drives up costs all around it. Cheaper launch costs means that cheaper sats can be launched without as much fear of failure, and constellations in particular become far, far more economical.

Wait a sec, we were taling about satellite cost, not ground stations a remote linkups. You are changing the bounds of the debate mid-argument. If you do that i can just argue that if groung communication to the distribution center the have satellite relays. I don't see anyone flooding out to build ground stations at the moment, so ide bet there are economies of scale there also. For one ground recievers work almost as well with thin wire recieves as they do a solid dish, and new space age materials out on the market can build dishes more cheaply than the past, plus you also have better servers and encryption technology, for about 4000 dollars you can buy a computer with 16 cores and 64 gigabytes of memory, and for a few thousand you can have ten terrabytes of solid state storage  and a couple thousand more a hundred terrabyts of long term storage. 

 

[Kryten]

6 minutes ago, fredinno said:

Want to see what I mean?

http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_lau/atlas-5.htm

4m payload fairing Atlas V rockets are all limited to ~9T to LEO due to the small payload fairing.

 

Actually the 9T limit is a structural limit for Centaur; the 5m fairing avoids this limit by redirecting some of the aerodynamic forces around Centaur.

EDIT:

Wait a sec, we were taling about satellite cost, not ground stations a remote linkups. You are changing the bounds of the debate mid-argument. If you do that i can just argue that if groung communication to the distribution center the have satellite relays. I don't see anyone flooding out to build ground stations at the moment, so ide bet there are economies of scale there also. For one ground recievers work almost as well with thin wire recieves as they do a solid dish, and new space age materials out on the market can build dishes more cheaply than the past, plus you also have better servers and encryption technology, for about 4000 dollars you can buy a computer with 16 cores and 64 gigabytes of memory, and for a few thousand you can have ten terrabytes of solid state storage  and a couple thousand more a hundred terrabyts of long term storage. 

Ground stations are for satellite control and operations and are very much a part of sat cost to the operator; they're not the same as customer terminals. 

Edited May 9, 2016 by Kryten

[PB666]

@fredinno That number is one SpaceX gives, it probably has to do with other savings, like inland ground transportation contracts versus in house, depreciation, taxes,metc on the fabrication, value added on the turn around times, etc. If they get it wrong then chances are you will see a price hike. Some it may also be a driver to the recycling depart to find a way to get the fairings and cone back with th LV. IOW if the cant get the cycle cost to benfits ratio down, some could be looking for work. 

 

[fredinno]

6 hours ago, PB666 said:

15 hours ago, fredinno said:

 

You are in a very argumentative mood, hmmmmm, Engines are the most expensive, but if you recycle the launch engine they become capital equipment instead of variable cost. Capital equipment is depreciated over its lifetime, so if an engine has a 5 year life to expense it 1/5th per year. It does not seem to me that the Merlin 1D are that expensive, less so than a SSME. If you can do 2 flights per year thats 1/10th of an engine per flight. I don't think anyone knows right now how many launch/backburn/lands at 1D+ can perform at the moment. As far as I know tanks have an indefinitely long lifetime, the tanks we use for Liquid N2 reservoir are used for years and go through 1000s of cycles.

Given you are in this mood to hyperbolize the critiques . . . . . .

Let me cut to the chase, is there some existing launch system that you think blows Falcan9 (recyclable) out of the water in terms of economics? That is to say...... without having to take your payload too tim-buc-tu to launch it.

But the maintenance costs increase from a larger rocket with more thrust.

And the increase complexity of a reusable rocket (for example, a large amount of rocket burns instead of a single one.)

 

No rocket actually blows F9 in terms of economics- at least in its payload class.

But that's irrelevant, F9 reduced the cost bar so low due to good operational structure, management, and design, it had a HUGE amount of extra wiggle room for cost increases from F91.0 to FT, which the cost DID increase.

6 hours ago, PB666 said:

6 hours ago, kunok said:

 

Not if they can shift the supply curve downward . If a supply curve is flexible then rate of exchange increases as supply curve shifts down bringing more buyers to the point of purchase, the rate limiting step is launch pads and launch pad crews.

SpaceX has already reduced cost by over 1/2.

Show me to the demand boom you're talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_in_spaceflight#Orbital_launch_summary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_launches_by_year.svg

SpaceX came to play in 2013.

2013: 81 launches.

2014: 92 launches.

2015: 87 launches.

4 hours ago, kunok said:

Source? Because all project I have seen no one started to do anything and personally almost every one looks weird to me.

OneWeb?

6 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Arguably, SpaceX has a major advantage over a BDB approach because they have more flexibility. Their rockets are already pretty cheap even at current economies of scale, so any reuse that isn't prohibitively expensive is basically a free lunch. A BDB approach requires full economies of scale from the get-go.

Reuse isn't a free lunch. The only thing that is free is the rocket itself.

It's like Minotaur. It's cheap, but not a free lunch. Actually Minotaur is cheaper than reuse, the rocket is maintained by the USAF for free via the ICBM program.

4 hours ago, PB666 said:

What if the goods are not that expensive, like providing an LEO fuel station for a Mars attempt. BTW we are in a circumstance right now where some companies are mass producing communication satellites so there is also some economies of scale on the payload side also. BUt if you are a satellite provider the other thing you want is reliability and capability. A few days after SpaceX landed on a barge, they got a military contract award. Time is money also, what good is a really expensive satellite if it takes 2 years to get a ride. In business if you can't get a positive return on the investment after 5 years, the investiment is generally seen as speculative and not worthy of financing, having to wait 2 years takes 40% off and the satellite manf time another 40% you are then down to recouping all your investment through service contracts in 1 year. If they can get the launch time down to months you extend that time alot.

There are a whole bunch of economic models that if SpaceX can perform quickly and reliably that an unprofitable space venture becomes profitable. This is particularly interesting for developing markets that cannot afford a full scale space program but say might want a specific GSO sat that beams programs to say to the communities that surround major metropolitan areas of brazil or another one to predict sea levels and weather patterns in the Solomon Islands, etc. SpaceX could branch into helping make payloads that are componentiallized to add simpler packages, in which case the dev cost on satellites go down.

a. " What if the goods are not that expensive, like providing an LEO fuel station for a Mars attempt."

...and where would you get that money???

A good rule of thumb is if your plans need Mars, or even extensive Lunar settlement, it's probably better staying in sci-fi, at least for the time being.

b. " BTW we are in a circumstance right now where some companies are mass producing communication satellites so there is also some economies of scale on the payload side also."

The only one that has gotten places is really OneWeb. And those sats are less than a ton. F9 is going to benefit little from it.

F1 would have, but Elon chucked that out the window...

c. "Time is money also, what good is a really expensive satellite if it takes 2 years to get a ride"

Which is actually a good reason you might NOT want to choose SpaceX.

SpaceX has a 2-3 year backlog, even with LC39A. Brownsville will take a long time to get built.

d. "In business if you can't get a positive return on the investment after 5 years, the investiment is generally seen as speculative and not worthy of financing, having to wait 2 years takes 40% off and the satellite manf time another 40% you are then down to recouping all your investment through service contracts in 1 year. If they can get the launch time down to months you extend that time alot."

So what does that have to do with anything right now?

e. "There are a whole bunch of economic models that if SpaceX can perform quickly and reliably that an unprofitable space venture becomes profitable. This is particularly interesting for developing markets that cannot afford a full scale space program but say might want a specific GSO sat that beams programs to say to the communities that surround major metropolitan areas of brazil or another one to predict sea levels and weather patterns in the Solomon Islands, etc."

Yeah, and those nations would FAR rather have their own rockets to keeps jobs in their own nations, and would almost certainly start with small rockets, ie a licensed Falcon 1.

Not F9 or F9H.

f. " SpaceX could branch into helping make payloads that are componentiallized to add simpler packages, in which case the dev cost on satellites go down."

For the first time, I agree with you. Only SpaceX doesn't seem to care much about satellites after the space internet scheme didn't pan out too well.

Considering that's a huge part of satellite cost (and profit), it's a real shame.

4 hours ago, John JACK said:

But they do. Only difference with SpaceX is that big old companies do big complex stuff. Like making total new boosters with "time proven" winged or parachute recovery. Not a big surprise, it comes with a huge payload penalty AND huge development cost. And at modern launch rates that cost will pay off approximately never. SpaceX at first made modern cheap booster, and only after that made it reusable with minor modifications. So they had economy of mass first, and economy of reuse second. Purpose made reusable boosters were just always overengineered, all that wings, parachutes, or breaking rocket in half is not needed.

Breaking rockets in half (engine tank breakoff) is not that complex, Atlas did that all the time. Nor are chutes.

 

But wings and jet engines are probably taking things a little too far. I think people have a bias towards wings, and that was the doom of a lot of reusability attempts.

Another factoid is that landing large booster stages automously was only possible relatively recently, just in time for SpaceX, thanks to better computers. Before that, wings were the best choice for a 100% reusable rocket

[John JACK]

4 minutes ago, fredinno said:

Atlas did that all the time.

Breaking is not hard, saving broken off part is. And attaching them to a new rocket — even more.
Parachutes are pretty heavy and do not provide soft landing, they need airspeed to work. Retrorockets, splashdowns and circus tricks with helicopters all have drawbacks.

You are absolutely right about wings and computers though. Putting birds to swine is not useless for putting man to Moon after all. Wings call for jet engines because planes can land on airports, not barges. People had sense not to ask for couple of carriers so spent boosters had to fly several hundred kms on own power. So practical reusable rockets became possible not very long ago, and SpaceX is just first.

1 hour ago, tater said:

Will we start needing thousands of launches per year instead of 10s? Not bloody likely.

And again, why thousands and not "just" 50-100% increase? You do reductio ad absurdum, not real arguments.

1 hour ago, tater said:

They cannot possibly sell a launch cheaper than maybe 5-6M$. So instead of making 10s of millions per launch, they;re making a couple, or maybe 3M.

And exactly why they should sell launches at 5-6M instead 12-13M$, making the same 10M on each, but much more yearly?

 

1 hour ago, Kryten said:

If launch availability was a bottleneck SeaLaunch wouldn't have gone bust.

Wasn't SeaLaunch that halfhearted enterprise with 80% reliable rockets from non-existant country?

[Kryten]

8 minutes ago, John JACK said:

Wasn't SeaLaunch that halfhearted enterprise with 80% reliable rockets from non-existant country?

Not much worse than Proton these days, and people did buy them; just not enough. Difficult to go on in this current market environment as purely commercial, with no government sponsor.

[fredinno]

4 hours ago, John JACK said:

Engines are not most expensive part of a booster. Most expensive part is humans that work hours to assemble, check and prepare a rocket. Reusing only engines will be Shuttle all again. Take out engines, take them apart, check everything, replace some parts (at least nuts and pins), clean with surgical tools, reassemble, retest... It may be even worse than just making new. And Shuttle landed engines gently, not with ballistic entry and parachute jerks on a broken off rocket hindquarters.

Tank is light and expensive too. Decoupling and parachutes are expensive, and may weight not less than spare fuel. But most expensive is work to fit reused engines to a new rocket. That's thousands of critical connections, that could be assembled wrong or suffer from decoupling and reentry. Landed stage is already proved working fine, but reassembled rocket need to pass all the tests again, including fire tests, and it adds engines more wear too.

They are, in component cost.
Your argument is good, except the BE-4 is designed to be reusable in the same fashion as SpaceX's Merlin. You will never have to take it apart to reuse it- if they do, than that's Blue Origin's failure.

Tanks are also expensive. The point of SMART reuse is to reuse without huge payload penalties full booster landing needs.

Theoretically they could get down to 15% cost reduction. Will they meet it? Time will tell.

 

And reassembled rockets will generally have to be done anyways. You have to reattach the fuel connections, but otherwise, it's mostly like attaching a 2nd stage to the rocket. Of course that increases complexity, but time will tell if that's worth it.

4 hours ago, John JACK said:

That seems be right. Satellite market may be finite, but it's not even close to full capacity now. And satellites CAN be made cheaper, if launch costs and times go down. Communications or monitoring satellites are pretty much all the same now, and they still are launched in numbers every year.

They can be cheaper, ie. smaller.

ie, they use a smaller LV, and are worth less to launch and don't benefit SpaceX's F9.

4 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

4 hours ago, 78stonewobble said:

 

1/10 is target price with reuse. This is the guess, the part which has not yet been demonstrated.

But you can absolutely be "significantly cheaper" without being 90% cheaper. Right now SpaceX is undercutting its competition by 20-40%. Not necessarily on a per-kg basis, but on a launch service basis. 

Right now, if they are 40%, and going by SpaceX's numbers of 30% cost reduction from expendable F9FT, you get 70% cost reduction, not 90%.

90% might come, eventually. But not any time in this decade, SpaceX has already hit the bottom in efficiency for the most part.

3 hours ago, PB666 said:

You can take a situation like Nigeria, if they launch a internet satellite, eventually it reaches the limit of communication, so they have to launch another, at GSO it has a latency of a fraction of a second. But with a lower orbiting network individuals satellites are moving in an out of communication all the time but when they are optimal latency is about 1/10th the time. So it is more intelligent to place more MEO satellites than to have 1 or 2 GSO satellites. What if you are a business that operates in multiple African companies, the only secure communication right now is satellite so that means that a Nigeria only satellite does not work. And the competitors like Hughes are very expensive and they are in no hurry to place more mega-satellites, afterall you have to sign up for service 24 months at a time and your window is 10AM to 2AM depending on the area.

So in prosperous areas of the third world there is a demand for wireless broadband communication.

 

Sure, only even SpaceX has put the internet comsat idea on the backburner.

They're not a huge fan of it. And for good reason. There was a similar boom in the 90s that bust with the dot com bubble.

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

Quote

However, in November 2015, company Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell indicated that the entire satellite effort was speculative, and low among the company's many priorities. "We don’t have a lot of effort going into that right now. Certainly I think that from a technical perspective this could get done," Shotwell said. "But can we develop the technology and roll it out with a lower-cost methodology so that we can beat the prices of existing providers like Comcast and Time Warner and other people? It’s not clear that the business case will work."^[6]

2 hours ago, John JACK said:

100 tons of diamonds worth exactly nothing if you do not sell any of them. Lower retail prices do mean more customers and more profit. And there sure are more customers that cannot afford current fees, but will pay slightly less.

And more profit means more investment in bigger and better rockets. Isn't Falcon just a testbed to perfect landing tech for more expensive but more effective boosters? Not open-cycle kerosene but closed-cycle methane, with much more ISP and cheaper fuel. Throwing out or crashing better boosters is wasteful, and reusing them makes even more profit. And then — Mars.

Only problem is that through the highs and lows of cost, the satellite market is shown to be inelastic as cold steel. Even in the huge prices per kg of early rockets in the 60s, rockets were launching far more than they are now in the cheaper, modern era.

SpaceX hasn't changed trends and made more customers, they only stole launches from everyone else.

2 hours ago, PB666 said:

SpaceX could beat out the European and United launch industries, but that's not where the future competition is going to come from. While we might not have the exact numbers of performance and engineering of the Falcon9, I'd be willing to bet the Chinese are already redesigning their launch platforms based on those plans. If I was Japan, I would be trying to get a SpaceX space port built in Okinawa because its no longer about having a program, it will be about having a competitive program on site. Does anyone remember the Jeep, it started out as a Ford during the war, then became part of AMC, then Chrysler, now its part of Fiat. The company that now manufacturers the Jeep is from a nation that we used the Jeep for fighting against during WWII. Things change, you have to up your game all the time or you will be pwned.

What if spaceX puts a spaceport in India? Can't see them putting one in China, but Ecuador, Okinawa, . . . . .

Lets talk about emmerging nations, Morroco, Nigeria, South Africa, Congo, Qatar, UAE, Saudi arabia, Turkey, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Philipines  all of these have nearby security risk, some of them have security risks that have satellites, but almost none of them have launch facilities.

Quote

SpaceX could beat out the European and United launch industries, but that's not where the future competition is going to come from. While we might not have the exact numbers of performance and engineering of the Falcon9, I'd be willing to bet the Chinese are already redesigning their launch platforms based on those plans.

Yeah, it's not like ArianeSpace is the only launch company expected to reach SpaceX levels in cost in their next generation rockets.

And ULA will likely have high value-payloads for Vulcan if they can meet their cost and 100% reliability goals.

China is apparently looking at reusable lrbs, but it's not huge right now. SpaceX has time. The RP-1 next gen Long March is their priority.

Quote

Lets talk about emmerging nations, Morroco, Nigeria, South Africa, Congo, Qatar, UAE, Saudi arabia, Turkey, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Philipines  all of these have nearby security risk, some of them have security risks that have satellites, but almost none of them have launch facilities.

Because they can't justify having their own rocket. Their market is in the commerical rocket market right now. They probably will never unless they have a huge economic increase (or maybe another EU in Africa).

Quote

If I was Japan, I would be trying to get a SpaceX space port built in Okinawa because its no longer about having a program, it will be about having a competitive program on site.
 

What if spaceX puts a spaceport in India?

NO.

India and Japan have their own rockets.

Personal interests of the nation go above reducing launch costs.

Japan stopped liscencing American rockets for a reason, even though the H-II was hugely expensive.

India kept working on the GSLV, even with its abysmal success rate.

 

If they hadn't been convinced before, they will never be convinced to move to SpaceX (barring WWIII).

 

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

All spacex has to do is dig out a dock berth about three barges wide off south of the brownsville ship channel and they can have a barges line up with rockets on them. They are going to have to do somthink like that anyway if they are going tongive recycling a gonat their new facility. 

And why would you make that? Brownsville is already very close to the equator, the only ones closer are Guiana.

I doubt the small performance increase is worth it.

2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Indeed. 

But if they can sell reused launches at a 30% markdown while increasing their profits, then maybe they end up doing twice as many launches the next year. And three times as many launches the year after that. And as prices continue to drop, demand goes up, and they get better at reuse, and prices drop further. So what if other companies start aping them? Lower cost, higher demand, more customers, repeat. 

2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Getting stuff into space is an end product which a lot of folks want. 

Slash launch prices by 50% and suddenly it makes sense to invest in a startup satellite service provider whose business model depends on several redundant comsats because now you can afford it. With lower-cost and more flexible launches, providers no longer have to overengineer their sats nearly so far, so those costs come down more. Lower costs make smaller companies competitive against the big giants, prices drop across the services market, and demand goes higher still. 

You don't seem to get that people are NOT lining up to launch their 4T satellites, and the main bottleneck is launch cost. Because it's not. Cubesats, maybe, but not the big GEO market SpaceX wants to capture.

http://spacenews.com/40420orbital-to-build-spacex-to-launch-thaicom-8/

F9 is 62 Million in cost. ThaiCom 8, launched on a F9, was about $116 Million, nearing DOUBLE of the F9. And that was a relatively small satellite for the V1.1, not the big ones, like SES-9, which likely are triple the cost of the LV.

 

1 hour ago, Kryten said:

If launch availability was a bottleneck SeaLaunch wouldn't have gone bust. Even after they have, there's still a lot of easy growth potential in that area of the launch market simply from ULA and Mitsubish's spare capability. It might be true if you're looking into the small LEO sat field, but for big GSO sats it's nonsense.

Except those guys are really expensive. Too expensive, TBH.

1 hour ago, Kryten said:

Actually the 9T limit is a structural limit for Centaur; the 5m fairing avoids this limit by redirecting some of the aerodynamic forces around Centaur.

You can still only put so much mass in a 5m diameter fairing. Any more in diameter, and F9 flips without modifications to add fins (which increases drag and mass, decreasing payload.

Any more in length, and your rocket will flip.

[Kryten]

1 minute ago, fredinno said:

Except those guys are really expensive. Too expensive, TBH.

If launch was really that constrained their price would not be an issue, and they're not really that far ahead of Arianespace's. They have both received commercial orders in the past couple of years, just not many.

[tater]

28 minutes ago, John JACK said:

And again, why thousands and not "just" 50-100% increase? You do reductio ad absurdum, not real arguments.

A 100% increase in available launches for commercial carriers, and ALL such commercial launches going to SpaceX means about 24 launches.

If they are half as expensive, they just did 2X the work for the same profit.

They need MANY more launches, where are they coming from?

[kunok]

I think we derailed the thread a lot

[Basto]

hmmm seems like this thread is way off topic.  Looks like the usual gang arguing economics.  

Can we get back to Red Dragon now?

[fredinno]

40 minutes ago, John JACK said:

Breaking is not hard, saving broken off part is. And attaching them to a new rocket — even more.
Parachutes are pretty heavy and do not provide soft landing, they need airspeed to work. Retrorockets, splashdowns and circus tricks with helicopters all have drawbacks.

You are absolutely right about wings and computers though. Putting birds to swine is not useless for putting man to Moon after all. Wings call for jet engines because planes can land on airports, not barges. People had sense not to ask for couple of carriers so spent boosters had to fly several hundred kms on own power. So practical reusable rockets became possible not very long ago, and SpaceX is just first.

Attaching them to the new rocket was also done all the time on the Atlas- over 200 times, in fact.

Recovery is the hard part, but landing a booster stage on a barge vertically isn't easy too.

[John JACK]

3 minutes ago, Kryten said:

Not much worse than Proton these days, and people did buy them; just not enough.

Proton is a heavy booster and cheapest in a class. Not if it has much competitors. Zenith is lighter. Also launching rockets from literally middle of nowhere is not cheap by itself, small increase in payload is not worth all the trouble. SpaceX does not overcomplicate, it mostly uses existing infrastructure.

2 minutes ago, fredinno said:

BE-4 is designed to be reusable in the same fashion as SpaceX's Merlin.

Well, we'll watch it. Right now it's still in development.

Reattaching engine is nothing compared to second stage. Between stages there are only thrust structure and some cabling. Between engines and tank there are fuel and control lines, and many times bigger mechanical loads. And tank still costs more money than measures to recover it too.

11 minutes ago, fredinno said:

They can be cheaper, ie. smaller.

Nope. At same tech level, and satellites are always already at best tech level, smaller means less capable. And smaller boosters cost more $ per kg, so two smaller satellites may be as capable as one big, and cost more to launch.
Bigger satellite can be just as capable, cost same to launch, and cost less by itself.

 

15 minutes ago, fredinno said:

Only problem is that through the highs and lows of cost, the satellite market is shown to be inelastic as cold steel.

Is it? We can look at 90s, when cheap Soviet rockets became available to world market. Were then no increase in satellites? 60s are not relevant, spacecraft were heavy and totally state/military in old days.

12 minutes ago, tater said:

If they are half as expensive, they just did 2X the work for the same profit.

You are still throwing random numbers to completely ignore the point.

SpaceX do not need to be half as expensive. They need to be 10-20% cheaper than competitors. So they do 2X the work and get 1.8X the profit. And they get more money because fixed costs are fixed.

5 minutes ago, Basto said:

Can we get back to Red Dragon now?

It's kinda economical justification of Red Dragon here. If SpaceX get more money, they can spend it on cool useless stuff engineering experiments.

[Kryten]

1 minute ago, John JACK said:

Proton is a heavy booster and cheapest in a class. Not if it has much competitors. Zenith is lighter.

Zenit from SL platform is about as capable to GTO as Proton from Baikonur. Those 56 degrees make a pretty big difference.

[PB666]

38 minutes ago, fredinno said:

But the maintenance costs increase from a larger rocket with more thrust.

And the increase complexity of a reusable rocket (for example, a large amount of rocket burns instead of a single one.)

 

No rocket actually blows F9 in terms of economics- at least in its payload class.

But that's irrelevant, F9 reduced the cost bar so low due to good operational structure, management, and design, it had a HUGE amount of extra wiggle room for cost increases from F91.0 to FT, which the cost DID increase.

SpaceX has already reduced cost by over 1/2.

Show me to the demand boom you're talking about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_in_spaceflight#Orbital_launch_summary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_launches_by_year.svg

SpaceX came to play in 2013.

2013: 81 launches.

2014: 92 launches.

2015: 87 launches.

OneWeb?

Reuse isn't a free lunch. The only thing that is free is the rocket itself.

It's like Minotaur. It's cheap, but not a free lunch. Actually Minotaur is cheaper than reuse, the rocket is maintained by the USAF for free via the ICBM program.

You need a longer term outlook than that the worlds economy has been in the tank for the last 3 years. If you are not looking at a rolling average of about a decade, you're not looking.

 

38 minutes ago, fredinno said:

a. " What if the goods are not that expensive, like providing an LEO fuel station for a Mars attempt."

...and where would you get that money???

A good rule of thumb is if your plans need Mars, or even extensive Lunar settlement, it's probably better staying in sci-fi, at least for the time being.

From fredinno, cause he's the one who has the money to spend on an SLS to mars.

42 minutes ago, fredinno said:

b. " BTW we are in a circumstance right now where some companies are mass producing communication satellites so there is also some economies of scale on the payload side also."

The only one that has gotten places is really OneWeb. And those sats are less than a ton. F9 is going to benefit little from it.

F1 would have, but Elon chucked that out the window...
 

Put 10 satellites on one rocket and just start pushing them out of the cargo bays.

42 minutes ago, fredinno said:

c. "Time is money also, what good is a really expensive satellite if it takes 2 years to get a ride"

Which is actually a good reason you might NOT want to choose SpaceX.

SpaceX has a 2-3 year backlog, even with LC39A. Brownsville will take a long time to get built.

But they are expanding, and the argument started with the premise, if you read carefully, that lowering the supply curve shifts the demand curve, there is always lag between exchange and shift of supply curve downward. It basically means that changes and responses often lag due to imperfect information, previous contracts and decision making time.  

42 minutes ago, fredinno said:

d. "In business if you can't get a positive return on the investment after 5 years, the investiment is generally seen as speculative and not worthy of financing, having to wait 2 years takes 40% off and the satellite manf time another 40% you are then down to recouping all your investment through service contracts in 1 year. If they can get the launch time down to months you extend that time alot."

So what does that have to do with anything right now?

We are not talking about right now; where did you pull this notion out of your head. We are talking about future contracts, pay attention to the logic. Space X only relanded its first rocket in January, it only has three reusable vehicles. Imagine that the 5 year payoff metric is valid now, 2 years from now, 5 years from now, and 10 years into the future. So that any time spaceX says that it can reduce the price to orbit by 30% and thus can double its number of launches then at that point the decision making for company that wants to put something to space but can't afford it and can't start getting the payback soon enough can then start pushing to get a package financed and built. 

42 minutes ago, fredinno said:

e. "There are a whole bunch of economic models that if SpaceX can perform quickly and reliably that an unprofitable space venture becomes profitable. This is particularly interesting for developing markets that cannot afford a full scale space program but say might want a specific GSO sat that beams programs to say to the communities that surround major metropolitan areas of brazil or another one to predict sea levels and weather patterns in the Solomon Islands, etc."

Yeah, and those nations would FAR rather have their own rockets to keeps jobs in their own nations, and would almost certainly start with small rockets, ie a licensed Falcon 1.

Not F9 or F9H.

Really, most would be far better off giving SpaceX a perk and building a launch Pad on their territory. SpaceX is getting a helping hand from Nasa. Remote country X building a program from scratch is at an extreme disadvantage, only the big ones are doing it, and of the underdeveloped countries they are not doing very well.

42 minutes ago, fredinno said:

f. " SpaceX could branch into helping make payloads that are componentiallized to add simpler packages, in which case the dev cost on satellites go down."

For the first time, I agree with you. Only SpaceX doesn't seem to care much about satellites after the space internet scheme didn't pan out too well. Considering that's a huge part of satellite cost (and profit), it's a real shame. Breaking rockets in half (engine tank breakoff) is not that complex, Atlas did that all the time. Nor are chutes.

 

You are mistaken, Enron ventured on High data high speed downloadables on demand and busted (that was not spaced base), and yet that is what (16 years later) is happening. You come to the table with the basic argument that something failed a decade ago and so it won't work. But many things that failed a decade ago are now working and will work into the future. Your argument is lame.

Only the future can tell whether picking a plum in the past was right. In the case of Enron, it was obvious they jumped the gun, but I was one of the few who saw that they had many overstated claims. SpaceX is not really overstating, they are working hard in the public eye, with full scrutiny and demonstrating that hard work is paying off, I wounldn't bet against them.

There was a company called Amazon, selling books on the internet, everyone predicted its failure, including me, last year I bought my first book from amazon, that is after I signed up for Prime realizing that almost all of my packaged food items are being bought from a internet book retailer. Yeah, the past is always 20/20 the future is always murky, but there is not future unless people are willing to take risk. 

The old saying, don't pick the plum until it is ripe. Getting information into Africa has a huge developmental potential, and developmental opportunities for the information providers because there is a large abundance of inefficiently and underutilized labor and resources in Africa. The problem has been that information comes at the mercy of the powers that be, generally corrupt and tribalistic in nature. Many areas of the world are like this, to break the privilege of knowledge means that technology and technology use will spread faster. Any village in Africa is potentially one windmill or solar panel away from the entirety of the internet and from their individual empowerment. But that is not the reason for doing it, right now there is a problem that many companies (e.g. ATT) are forcing people into broadband programs (Uverse) before (147 kbyte/sec max) they actually supply effective broadband , at the same time crippling traditional phone services. There are many markets opening up to an alternative to both traditional telephone,internet and cable services, because the traditional models for distribution aren't working. I know many a folk who have cut the lined access and get all information from cellular transmissions, after being forced into one of these contracts. In many areas you have a choice between 1 or 2 providers, and still in other areas no providers. Increased satellite service increases competition on the ground via landline (no moving to CatN) and coaxial cable. Its not fantastic, and neither ideal but when your traditional phone company cannot handle keeping a connection for more than 2 years without an act of nature, some contractor, or just lack of investment giving user downtime, the high end user is opting away. Cell phone services are an option when there are towers, but again its frequently not competitive. There are local communities looking at tradition AM/FM transmission towers as a means of distributing broadband to customers that live too remotely to have access to traditional wired internet and phone access. These customers are frequently being told no, and the next best is an expensive contract from Hughes aerospace for 24 months.

This thread needs to be merged with the spaceX relieability and reusablility thread, I have said this before and look, its basically not talking about Mars, but SpaceX economics, as I predicted.

 

 

 

 

[tater]

54 minutes ago, John JACK said:

You are still throwing random numbers to completely ignore the point.

SpaceX do not need to be half as expensive. They need to be 10-20% cheaper than competitors. So they do 2X the work and get 1.8X the profit. And they get more money because fixed costs are fixed.

That is my point, exactly. Slightly cheaper than their competitors means that they take that business.

That means maybe they get all 12 available launches. Maybe that tiny price reduction results in a few on the fence enterprises launching a few more satellites, or starting a new business.

We've now upped the total market to what? 15 launches? 18? (and we are assuming 100% of all commercial launches are now SpaceX).

12 launches, that's the market. If you imagine more launches, you need to imagine what cost would be so transformative that it creates a new, unimagined market. 10-20% cheaper is incremental, not transformative. My thought experiment was how cheap such LEO access could possibly become. Even at single-digit millions per launch for a few tons to LEO I'm not sure what new market emerges. How many pieces of cubesat junk do we need in LEO?

Note that for private enterprise to Mars, they need to generate huge piles of money---and Mars is a money pit with no possible RoI.

Edited May 9, 2016 by tater

[fredinno]

1 hour ago, John JACK said:

Reattaching engine is nothing compared to second stage. Between stages there are only thrust structure and some cabling. Between engines and tank there are fuel and control lines, and many times bigger mechanical loads. And tank still costs more money than measures to recover it too.

As I said, it was done 200+ times on the Atlas.

[sevenperforce]

For anyone paying attention, S1 from JCSAT-14 is now visible on OCISLY via binoculars off Port Canaveral.

[fredinno]

1 hour ago, John JACK said:

Is it? We can look at 90s, when cheap Soviet rockets became available to world market. Were then no increase in satellites?

Nope. Not at all.

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

The downward trend of rocket launches at the time was unchanged, for the most part.

1 hour ago, John JACK said:

2 hours ago, fredinno said:

 

Nope. At same tech level, and satellites are always already at best tech level, smaller means less capable. And smaller boosters cost more $ per kg, so two smaller satellites may be as capable as one big, and cost more to launch.
Bigger satellite can be just as capable, cost same to launch, and cost less by itself.

A smaller satellite is still cheaper, and the smaller size may be good when coverage is important and accuracy/capability isn't as important.

In any case, how do you make a satellite cheaper and keep it at the same size?

Lower reliability? Might work once Vivisat can repair sats, but it's probably not worth it right now, as satellites are EXPENSIVE.

Lower cost components? Doubt much can be done that hasn't been done already. Using cheaper solar cells won't save much.

Standardization? Already done.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

You need a longer term outlook than that the worlds economy has been in the tank for the last 3 years. If you are not looking at a rolling average of about a decade, you're not looking.

Look at my response above to @JACK, please.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

From fredinno, cause he's the one who has the money to spend on an SLS to mars.

Hah. Funny.

Said no one ever.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

3 hours ago, fredinno said:

 

Put 10 satellites on one rocket and just start pushing them out of the cargo bays.

Each Oneweb sat is 200kg.

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

Put that on a RTLS Falcon 9, and you get 45 sats (allowing for dispensing system and margin).

You need 15 F9 launches, dispersing that among RTLS F9 launches.

Assuming the system uses 24 inclinations (which is what GPS uses) that means that F9 will have to do inclination changes, or fly overcapacity, just to launch all those sats.

Soyuz is OneWeb's primary LV right now, and is probably on the verge of the max. capacity of a rocket without wasting payload capacity.

And once the constellation is up, replacements are supposed to be done by smallsat LVs like LauncherOne.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

We are not talking about right now; where did you pull this notion out of your head. We are talking about future contracts, pay attention to the logic. Space X only relanded its first rocket in January, it only has three reusable vehicles. Imagine that the 5 year payoff metric is valid now, 2 years from now, 5 years from now, and 10 years into the future. So that any time spaceX says that it can reduce the price to orbit by 30% and thus can double its number of launches then at that point the decision making for company that wants to put something to space but can't afford it and can't start getting the payback soon enough can then start pushing to get a package financed and built. 

When cheap Russian LVs hit the market in the 90s, that didn't cause a shift in the satellite launch curve up.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

Quote

 

Really, most would be far better off giving SpaceX a perk and building a launch Pad on their territory. SpaceX is getting a helping hand from Nasa. Remote country X building a program from scratch is at an extreme disadvantage, only the big ones are doing it, and of the underdeveloped countries they are not doing very well.

Remote nations generally haven't had enough sats to launch to want a dedicated launch facility. Otherwise, you'd wonder why those nations haven't done it already.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

Only the future can tell whether picking a plum in the past was right. In the case of Enron, it was obvious they jumped the gun, but I was one of the few who saw that they had many overstated claims. SpaceX is not really overstating, they are working hard in the public eye, with full scrutiny and demonstrating that hard work is paying off, I wounldn't bet against them.

SpaceX has been proved to overstate in the past by overoptimism on schedules and plans.

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

The old saying, don't pick the plum until it is ripe. Getting information into Africa has a huge developmental potential, and developmental opportunities for the information providers because there is a large abundance of inefficiently and underutilized labor and resources in Africa. The problem has been that information comes at the mercy of the powers that be, generally corrupt and tribalistic in nature. Many areas of the world are like this, to break the privilege of knowledge means that technology and technology use will spread faster. Any village in Africa is potentially one windmill or solar panel away from the entirety of the internet and from their individual empowerment. But that is not the reason for doing it, right now there is a problem that many companies (e.g. ATT) are forcing people into broadband programs (Uverse) before (147 kbyte/sec max) they actually supply effective broadband , at the same time crippling traditional phone services. There are many markets opening up to an alternative to both traditional telephone,internet and cable services, because the traditional models for distribution aren't working. I know many a folk who have cut the lined access and get all information from cellular transmissions, after being forced into one of these contracts. In many areas you have a choice between 1 or 2 providers, and still in other areas no providers. Increased satellite service increases competition on the ground via landline (no moving to CatN) and coaxial cable. Its not fantastic, and neither ideal but when your traditional phone company cannot handle keeping a connection for more than 2 years without an act of nature, some contractor, or just lack of investment giving user downtime, the high end user is opting away. Cell phone services are an option when there are towers, but again its frequently not competitive. There are local communities looking at tradition AM/FM transmission towers as a means of distributing broadband to customers that live too remotely to have access to traditional wired internet and phone access. These customers are frequently being told no, and the next best is an expensive contract from Hughes aerospace for 24 months.

This thread needs to be merged with the spaceX relieability and reusablility thread, I have said this before and look, its basically not talking about Mars, but SpaceX economics, as I predicted.

But how much will they pay? Considering the world's increasing urbanization, it will only become more niche as time goes on.

[John JACK]

1 hour ago, tater said:

We've now upped the total market to what? 15 launches? 18? (and we are assuming 100% of all commercial launches are now SpaceX).

12 launches, that's the market. If you imagine more launches, you need to imagine what cost would be so transformative that it creates a new, unimagined market. 10-20% cheaper is incremental, not transformative. My thought experiment was how cheap such LEO access could possibly become.

Thought experiment is something other than presenting some random numbers and claiming you are right because SCIENCE said so. There are thought experiments proving Moon landing was fake.
12 launches is not a market. It is a market only at today inflated prices. Lower the price and more people would launch more satellites. Even Earth monitoring is nowhere close to full capacity — on Google Earth there are some patches four years old. And next is almost infinite market for science — telescopes, Moon exploration, maybe asteroids and interplanetary probes.

And Red Dragon (yay for on-topic again!) is an example of just that, expanding markets further than LEO.

15 minutes ago, fredinno said:

In any case, how do you make a satellite cheaper and keep it at the same size?

By not spending 400K$/kg to shave off several last kilos of mass. Lower reliability, right. No need for triple redundancy and shielded electronics everywhere — if it fails, we'll just launch next. But mostly, by lowering materials and construction cost. Use thicker plates instead of isogrid, dural and titanium instead of carbon, monoprop RSC instead of ion. Satellite will be bigger, but launch per kg is affordable, no need to jam it into smallest booster possible.
And what standardisation could be there with 12 launches market?

 

45 minutes ago, fredinno said:

it was done 200+ times on the Atlas.

It was done the wrong way. We are talking about reusing rocket parts, not assembling new at factory.

[sevenperforce]

28 minutes ago, fredinno said:

Considering the world's increasing urbanization, it will only become more niche as time goes on.

You underestimate the desire for faux autonomy in individualists.

[tater]

8 minutes ago, John JACK said:

Thought experiment is something other than presenting some random numbers and claiming you are right because SCIENCE said so. There are thought experiments proving Moon landing was fake.
12 launches is not a market. It is a market only at today inflated prices. Lower the price and more people would launch more satellites. Even Earth monitoring is nowhere close to full capacity — on Google Earth there are some patches four years old. And next is almost infinite market for science — telescopes, Moon exploration, maybe asteroids and interplanetary probes.

You keep saying this, and all I have asked for is what, imaginary payload exists to support vastly more launches. Assume that SpaceX need not grow at all from its current size. It needs to make at least as much as it does now, and more if it needs to also build MCT, etc (take them at face value as goals). You are simply making up the notion of more payloads. I'm saying there are 12 launches per year available. This is based on, you know, the history of actual launches over the last few years. If you claim more launches due to lower costs, show your work.

I'm not even saying it's not possible, I'm saying that a 10-20% price drop is not transformative---you are making a positive claim that is is, I think, so show us].

 

8 minutes ago, John JACK said:

And Red Dragon (yay for on-topic again!) is an example of just that, expanding markets further than LEO.

Markets? Past LEO? It's Elon playing with his rocket. It is not a market, there is no market at Mars. Never will be, either, there is no possible movement of value from Mars back to Earth unless transportation costs are nearly the same per trip (not per km travel) as on earth. 

 

 

[Kryten]

12 minutes ago, John JACK said:

Even Earth monitoring is nowhere close to full capacity — on Google Earth there are some patches four years old.

There are multiple satellite operators that currently have better than daily coverage of any point on the planet; Google is set to be one of them in the near future. Google Maps/Earth being outdated means Google don't update them very frequently, and nothing more.

[PB666]

46 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

For anyone paying attention, S1 from JCSAT-14 is now visible on OCISLY via binoculars off Port Canaveral.

I'll just pull out my 1500 mile long fiberoptic binoculars and take a look. 

Fredinno, take a hint, break up your responses your quoting is corrupted because you are putting to many responses into one quote.

Quote

When cheap Russian LVs hit the market in the 90s, that didn't cause a shift in the satellite launch curve up.

I think that answered itself. Sure the Russian program is credible, but not suitable for all payloads. The eyes of Putin are upon you . . . . .

Quote

Remote nations generally haven't had enough sats to launch to want a dedicated launch facility. Otherwise, you'd wonder why those nations haven't done it already.

Actually no I wouldn't, doesn't seem very wise that Iceland or Ireland would have a launch site unless they contracted for polar orbits, same with Canada.

Quote

Concerning proximity or Brownsville to the equator

Brownsville is 24 degrees from the equator. Ecuador is on the equator.

Quote

But how much will they pay? Considering the world's increasing urbanization, it will only become more niche as time goes on.

And so does the infidelity of large monopolistic local corporations.

Mars. I just throught I would throw that in their to show you how much this thread is on-topic, Merge please.