totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[sevenperforce]

5 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Wait, what? That seems really unlikely. There are a lot of parts of a Falcon9 booster that are only the way they are because of the desire for reuse. I have no doubt that it is significantly more expensive than a disposable booster would be, and all those parts need to get "bought" by cost savings on reuse. I don't think a single reuse would be enough to break even versus a disposable rocket.

Well, I think we have to break out development costs separately. If we are talking about operational reuse, we can’t try to amortize in the costs of developing Falcon 9‘S reusability, especially considering that the process of reaching reuse also involved a lot of upgrades that made even an expendable Falcon 9 a lot better of a vehicle. We can talk about how long it will take for operational reuse to pay back the development investment, but for comparing expendable to reusable it needs to be a head-to-head comparison.

We also need to specify what is meant by a single reuse. Are we are comparing two expendable flights to two reusable flights, or to a single booster that is reused once and then expended? I think an accurate head-to-head comparison requires us to use the latter approach; otherwise we are adding in additional recovery costs that aren’t going to convert into profits until the next launch. 

We also have to factor in profit margins. SpaceX benefits from a world where dial-a-rocket capability exists but is fairly imprecise. Falcon 9 has so much margin that it can deliver most commercial payloads to GTO without needing to go expendable, meaning a commercial reusable launch will usually earn the same gross revenue as a commercial expendable launch would.

[RealKerbal3x]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Those oil rigs seem like a mistake - unless they use them to extract oil /natural gas. 

They're planning to use them as sea launch platforms. Honestly it seems like a pretty good idea to me - if you want to launch your enormous rocket very frequently, then there's a lot less to worry about out at sea - exclusion zones, regulations and the like. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

19 minutes ago, RealKerbal3x said:

They're planning to use them as sea launch platforms. Honestly it seems like a pretty good idea to me - if you want to launch your enormous rocket very frequently, then there's a lot less to worry about out at sea - exclusion zones, regulations and the like. 

It certainly could get them away from 'local population' concerns... but there is a huge cost associated with major retrofits like they are doing, without a real way to recoup those costs.  At least not any time soon; perhaps if they get to launching every two weeks from each of them that might make sense.  I wonder how many launches they'd have to do to reach 'break even'.

 

 

[tater]

People tend to forget that the goal is not to "break even," but to "colonize Mars."

I'm not in the "colonize Mars" camp, myself, mind you, I think it's kooky—but that is their actual goal, something that is important to remember.

[RealKerbal3x]

2 minutes ago, tater said:

People tend to forget that the goal is not to "break even," but to "colonize Mars."

I'm not in the "colonize Mars" camp, myself, mind you, I think it's kooky—but that is their actual goal, something that is important to remember.

There's been tons of discussion about the business model for colonising Mars, but that doesn't seem to be what Musk/SpaceX are going for. They want to colonise Mars not for profit but for the future of the human race, so they may well be planning for the possibility of there never being a 'break even' state. Of course, if they can successfully implement a regular and efficient Mars transport system, Musk could become the richest person in history. 

Also:

 

[tater]

2 minutes ago, RealKerbal3x said:

There's been tons of discussion about the business model for colonising Mars, but that doesn't seem to be what Musk/SpaceX are going for. They want to colonise Mars not for profit but for the future of the human race, so they may well be planning for the possibility of there never being a 'break even' state.

Making money launching stuff is partially incidental for them, and partially to offset cost for colonization.

Again, I'm very much not in the "colonize Mars" camp, and there is no business model at all for doing so. Musk's best argument for Mars seems flippant, but I think it's true—it's a much more interesting world to live in with humans as a spacefaring species.

 

2 minutes ago, RealKerbal3x said:

Of course, if they can successfully implement a regular and efficient Mars transport system, Musk could become the richest person in history. 

Incidentally, maybe. Mars never has a case for making money. Even if NASA and other programs bought missions, still sorta chump change. Some billions.

Using huge lift capability to drag resources to Earth orbit, then mining it... that might be a huge cash cow at some point.

[wumpus]

8 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Yeah. Like I said, I've seen a few of this guy's videos. His whole schtick is being really sarcastic as he slices up claims he disagrees with.

I didn't think what he said was necessarily wrong. His biggest stretch was guessing how much SpaceX's costs are. However, most of the guestimates I've seen are that SpaceX needs to get about 10 uses per booster before they really get payback for their reusability. Is that actually true? I don't know.

For manifests low enough to allow for recovery, 1 landing is likely sufficient.  Also it took 10 landings, expendable launches would have to cost >$200M.  They might be able to charge the government that much (but I wouldn't count on it being profitable, there are a lot of hidden expenses taking Uncle Sam's bucks), but I suspect they've sold expendable launches elsewhere for less.

Of course, that ignores any R&D costs for recovery.  I'd assume that they were mostly low outside of the changes from Falcon9 to Falcon9 block V (in other word, nearly a whole rocket redesign).  But those changes also got them plenty of other business, so might have paid for themselves without recovery.

[paul_c]

16 minutes ago, tater said:

 

Incidentally, maybe. Mars never has a case for making money. Even if NASA and other programs bought missions, still sorta chump change. Some billions.

Not so fast.......I think its possibly a brilliant idea. Why? Because the long term future people who might want to go to Mars, are similarly visionary and ultra-wealthy too. Normal people don't "get" this, how can they? What makes you dream? Why can't you achieve the dream? Is is money holding you back? What if you have money, and all that you dreamed of when you were young, you have now achieved? Do you retire? Or dream bigger?

 

16 minutes ago, tater said:

Using huge lift capability to drag resources to Earth orbit, then mining it... that might be a huge cash cow at some point.

Ultimately, that route is a "commodity" provision, like wheat; or milk. There's people making millions off of that, because they are good at it and have invested millions, but at the end of the day commodities are always somewhat marginal operations.

[tater]

1 minute ago, paul_c said:

Not so fast.......I think its possibly a brilliant idea. Why? Because the long term future people who might want to go to Mars, are similarly visionary and ultra-wealthy too. Normal people don't "get" this, how can they? What makes you dream? Why can't you achieve the dream? Is is money holding you back? What if you have money, and all that you dreamed of when you were young, you have now achieved? Do you retire? Or dream bigger?

The ultra-wealthy will not move to Mars.

Heck, the merely wealthy will not move to Mars.

I'm tolerably well-off, and I love spaceflight, and colonizing Mars would not ever be on the table for me.

Exploring Mars seems pretty interesting, but not staying there forever.

[paul_c]

1% of the population are bat-&*!% crazy. 0.1% of the population are in the top 0.1% of weath. 

He has ~80,000 customers.

[sh1pman]

It'd be nice to become a multiplanetary species, but before planning any kind of Mars colonization, let's at least have a crewed landing first. Not sure if colonization is feasable with our current technological level.

Edited February 23, 2021 by sh1pman

[tater]

 

[sevenperforce]

7 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

There are a lot of parts of a Falcon9 booster that are only the way they are because of the desire for reuse. I have no doubt that it is significantly more expensive than a disposable booster would be, and all those parts need to get "bought" by cost savings on reuse. I don't think a single reuse would be enough to break even versus a disposable rocket.

More on this...

Cost Breakdown	Two-launch campaign A (single_reuse)	Two-launch campaign B (expendable)
Costs	One F9 booster F9 booster recovery hardware Two F9 upper stages Prop for two launches Two launch operations Booster recovery operation Booster refurb operation	Two F9 boosters Two F9 upper stages Prop for two launches Two launch operations
Revenue	1x price for 5.5 tonne payload to GTO 1x price for 8.3 tonne payload to GTO	2x price for 8.3 tonne payload to GTO

That's a lot of numbers. Fortunately for us, we don't have to know most of these numbers directly because all we have to look at is the arithmetic difference in the profits between the two types of operations; lots of things can just cancel out.

First, let's talk about revenue. SpaceX prices its reusable GTO launch at $62M but doesn't say what its expendable launch price is. Elon has thrown numbers around but I don't find them particularly reliable, especially because SpaceX can price in significantly lower than the competition, which muddies the water a little. It's very rare that the entire expendable payload to GTO is actually needed. However, ULA has dial-a-rocket options on their Rocket Builder, so we can take a look at that. Remember, we only need to look at the difference in revenue, not the gross revenue. RocketBuilder removed its actual pricing values a couple of years ago, but when it launched (no pun intended) it priced an Atlas V 401 at $109M and an Atlas V 551 at $155M. The site says that you'll need one SRB for a 5.5-tonne payload to GTO and five (plus the 5-meter fairing) for an 8.3-tonne payload to GTO.  Setting aside the cost of the different fairing, we can estimate that the market price charged to customers for those five SRBs is $46M or $9.2M each. A little bit of math, and we can estimate that SpaceX could conceivably charge $36.8M more for an 8.3-tonne launch than for a 5.5-tonne launch. So that's going to be the difference in revenue between Campaign A and Campaign B.

Now, on to costs. Most of the things cancel out: upper stages, propellants, launch operations. You can also cancel the price of the booster for Campaign A. So you're left with the following simplification:

Cost Breakdown	Two-launch campaign A (single_reuse)	Two-launch campaign B (expendable)
Costs	Recovery hardware Booster recovery Booster refurb	One F9 booster
Revenue	$0	$36.8M

For the costs, I don't think it's at all conceivable that recovery hardware, recovery operations, and refurb costs MORE than a single booster. It's just not reasonable. There's no way that landing legs, grid fins, boat operations, and additional work-hours can actually exceed the cost of a brand new booster.

However, the added revenue from sending a heavier payload to GTO certainly makes up the difference...IF that revenue is guaranteed. But it isn't. There's simply not a market for that many gigantic comsats. So without the added revenue, I think they break even after a single reuse.

 

 

14 minutes ago, paul_c said:

1% of the population are bat-&*!% crazy. 0.1% of the population are in the top 0.1% of weath. 

He has ~80,000 customers.

These aren't independent variables though.

[paul_c]

15 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

These aren't independent variables though.

Higher or lower?

[sevenperforce]

2 minutes ago, paul_c said:

Higher or lower?

That's anyone's guess.

[tater]

Just now, paul_c said:

Higher or lower?

I would imagine being fully "bat $&^% crazy" is largely inconsistent with acquiring truly large sums of money.

I don't know anyone of that wealth level, though I know many people in the "1%" of the US, indeed a large % of the people I tend to interact with fall in that range (cutoff is what, 470k/yr?). Some are goofy, maybe, but not really nuts.

4 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

That's anyone's guess.

The only really loony rich guy that springs to mind in the space arena is Bigelow. He's not really all that rich, though, and I'm not sure if he's loony enough to want to move to Mars...

Actually, the desire to move to Mars might be the proof of insanity, lol. Hiking alone in some remote middle eastern places would have a Mars like feel, and be substantially less dangerous (even those places that are currently unsafe due to humans harming each other).

[mikegarrison]

3 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Well, I think we have to break out development costs separately.

If we do, then SLS hasn't cost a penny yet, and the Shuttle (which was confusingly also "SLS") was also a lot cheaper than most people claim it to be. I'm just saying you need to be consistent with this.

Including development costs is a big deal. It makes a difference between whether you consider a new airplane type to be profitable if it sells 10 airplanes or if it's not profitable until it sells 500+.

Edited February 23, 2021 by mikegarrison

[NFUN]

35 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

That's anyone's guess.

so the only reasonable approximation he could make would be the one he already did

[Spaceception]

Something like 100,000 people signed up for MarsOne. I know that's not the best metric by a long shot, and most probably can't afford a ticket, but it might be a benchmark of sorts.

But I feel we're talking about moving to Mars as is, and assuming the justification and motivation remains the same over time. But if there's a moderately decent population (in the thousands at least?), and a lot of infrastructure and living quarters in place, the idea of moving to Mars will become much more tolerable than today. By that point, there very well could be hundreds of thousands to a million people or so willing to take the plunge.

[mikegarrison]

I'm sure there are a lot of people who would be willing to move to Mars, even if they knew it was a one-way trip. All of life is a one-way trip.

However, a Mars colony doesn't need just anyone.

[StrandedonEarth]

Musk said on a recent Joe Rogan  podcast that reuse roughly breaks even after two flights of the same booster, and is definitely profitable after flying a booster three times. 

[mikegarrison]

1 minute ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Musk said on a recent Joe Rogan  podcast that reuse roughly breaks even after two flights of the same booster, and is definitely profitable after flying a booster three times. 

I'm not 100% sure I trust Musk, but this is probably the most reliable datapoint we have.

[sevenperforce]

2 hours ago, tater said:

I would imagine being fully "bat $&^% crazy" is largely inconsistent with acquiring truly large sums of money.

There's more of a difference between "crazy" and "so crazy it just might work" than people think.

[Jacke]

To me Elon Musk will always have one thing on his side: he's not Jeff Bezos, the Modern Day Sweatshop Operator.

Otherwise, I think Musk is full of flaws.  He's said very stupid things that he should have know better not to say.  He lacks the immediate near-instinctive sense good engineers (also good scientists, especially experimental) have of what's possible and the costs and limitations and where things can be improved.  He's more like a lot of tech CEO's, a part-showman who gets far too close to snake-oil salesman.

One example where showmanship won out over engineering: the launchpad crew.  They should not be dressed all in black.   They should be dressed in proper anti-flash gear, which is white, not black.  Someday when there's a incident, that could make the difference between degree of injury or even life and death.  (See images in the spoiler below.)

Another thing that's just wrong is Starlink.  A system that will not be better than surface fibre links supplemented by current satellite service.  But will slowly and thoroughly destroy ground-based visual astronomy.  Just another case of tech-giant collateral damage that gets at most crocodile tears.

Spoiler

What Elon Musk really did was bring a good supply-chain to launch vehicles, push engine development, and push re-useability.

However, re-useability is not a panacea.  Condoms were original hard-shelled and re-useable before ones more like what are made now were produced.

Re-useability does reduce performance to about 70% of an equivalent disposable booster due to having to carry the landing equipment and hold back propellants for deceleration and landing.  Refit is on top of that.

Thunderf00t's videos, for all they ridicule Elon Musk (alas YouTube video makers need to be part-showman as well to survive and thrive), give legitimate analysis and criticism of SpaceX and Musk's other companies and projects.  Like any engineer, Thunderf00t did a rough calculation of the costs to find the break-even point for re-useability and thought it likely to be approaching 10 flights rather 2 or 3.  Without more reliable data, no one is going to be able to say what it is with greater confidence.

What is true is that SpaceX is charging roughly the same as other launch providers.

I find Starship fascinating.  As a cargo vessel, because with all launch vehicles still having a minimum failure rate of 1-2%, having no launch escape system and crewing it would means condemning some future crews to die.  I also think using it to go to the Moon is marginal and to Mars is even less so, being it is designed and optimized to get to LEO.

You want a real program to get to Mars?  The only one I've read that gives me any confidence is Robert Zurbin's The Case for Mars.  You need to read all the chapters.  Saturn-5-class-sized rockets with ground checkout (for quality, thoroughness, and cost reduction), 2 of them per mission, an uncrewed return vessel with ISRU to make fuel, followed once the return vessel is ready by the crewed stay vessel to get to Mars.  Or change it as NASA suggested.  Either way, there's minimal cost, reliability, and proper abort modes throughout the mission.  Then run them in succession to build up a Mars colony.

Edited February 23, 2021 by Jacke

[Flavio hc16]

[snip]

Quote

What Elon Musk really did was bring a good supply-chain to launch vehicles, push engine development, and push re-useability.

However, re-useability is not a panacea.  Condoms were original hard-shelled and re-useable before ones more like what are made now were produced.

Re-useability does reduce performance to about 70% of an equivalent disposable booster due to having to carry the landing equipment and hold back propellants for deceleration and landing.  Refit is on top of that.

and this is not true, the difference in payload between reusable and non reusable  is  around 30 % for falcon 9 ( 15.600 vs 22.800 kgs to leo), in case of starship is more because you are reusing both stages.

Quote

Thunderf00t's videos, for all they ridicule Elon Musk (alas YouTube video makers need to be part-showman as well to survive and thrive), give legitimate analysis and criticism of SpaceX and Musk's other companies and projects.  Like any engineer, Thunderf00t did a rough calculation of the costs to find the break-even point for re-useability and thought it likely to be approaching 10 flights rather 2 or 3.  Without more reliable data, no one is going to be able to say what it is with greater confidence.

Yeah, why not listening to Elon or Shotwell when there is this great unbiased youtuber who gives away numbers from is a**.

Quote

What is true is that SpaceX is charging roughly the same as other launch providers.

Not really true as spacex is charging less than other operators, less  enought to not leave money on the table, as it is free margin for them.

 

Edited February 24, 2021 by Vanamonde