totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[HebaruSan]

35 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

It’s not uncommon, right now, for my wife to basically have to rent an entire truck for a single unit because it absolutely has to be there right now.

What are the circumstances that bring that about? I was surprised to read that, given:

• A department may take years to secure funding for one of these multi-million dollar machines
• Installing them is a miniature construction project
• If you're expanding your stable of devices, you have to hire and train staff to operate them

Are we talking about urgent replacements for sudden failure of heavily used equipment?

[CatastrophicFailure]

Relevant stuff first: 

 

 

[DerekL1963]

1 hour ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

It’s not uncommon, right now, for my wife to basically have to rent an entire truck for a single unit because it absolutely has to be there right now.

That's your wife as an originator of a shipment, we're talking about SpaceX as the transport mode.   I cannot emphasize this enough - the two are not the same thing.

SpaceX's notional cargo business is going to be built around high volume hub-to-hub, with standardized containers and simplified straightforward handling - because that's where the money is.  Filling the cargo hold day after day, every day, every flight.  Because you can charge a premium for them, there's money to had in outsize and unusual services... but that's gravy rather than bread and butter.

[CatastrophicFailure]

1 hour ago, HebaruSan said:

What are the circumstances that bring that about? I was surprised to read that, given:

• A department may take years to secure funding for one of these multi-million dollar machines
• Installing them is a miniature construction project
• If you're expanding your stable of devices, you have to hire and train staff to operate them

Are we talking about urgent replacements for sudden failure of heavily used equipment?

Well, one reason is dangerous goods that can’t be combined with other shipments, so probably not the best thing to have on a rocket, there. 

But yes, the other would be time-specific transits that necessitate a dedicated truck instead of standard linehall. 

Indeed, it does take years of funding and months of planning and a major construction project to install or replace a complete system. So you really don’t want your system to bog the whole mess down. In a very concrete example of this, a couple years ago the entire Port was shut down for weeks (because politics ), Nothing was getting in or out and freighters were just piling up in the Sound. This caused my wife all sorts of headaches because she simply had no other option. It’s not a simple matter to find space on another ship at a port hundreds of miles away. 

Now, a rocket with a 30 minute flight time to China making dozens of trips a day... even if it’s expensive, that starts looking attractive when your thing is still sitting in line on a truck. 

6 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

That's your wife as an originator of a shipment, we're talking about SpaceX as the transport mode.   I cannot emphasize this enough - the two are not the same thing.

You miss my point. Which is, there is a market for fast-transit like that, even if it’s expensive. 

[DerekL1963]

5 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

You miss my point. Which is, there is a market for fast-transit like that, even if it’s expensive. 

I never said there wasn't.  

What I was point out that you're missing the forest for the trees - your wife's particular situation is an edge case.  Edge cases don't drive business cases.  And irregular shipments of unusual size and weight aren't going to drive SpaceX's notional cargo business.  What will drive that business is the same thing that drives every other cargo service - large volumes of cargo in standardized containers with minimal labor costs.  Volumes sufficient to fill the hold every day, every flight.

Or, to put it another way, there's a reason why your wife has to rent an entire truck for one cargo rather than simply putting it on a scheduled run.  And it's not the size and weight - trucks routinely haul shipping containers and breakbulk loads far larger and far heavier.

[mikegarrison]

12 hours ago, sh1pman said:

Yes.

Though I still don't get the economics of this. Shotwell said it's going to cost the same as a business class ticket, lets say a $1000 per seat. With 100 passengers, it's going to generate a hundred grand per flight. Now, I understand that reusability is a game changer, but surely a BFR launch can't cost less than that. 

Business class costs more like $3000-10000 flying across oceans.

But airplanes are *already* fully reuseable, so reuseability is not a "game changer" if trying to compete against them.

[mikegarrison]

A 747 can take a 10-ft x 10-ft x 10-ft package in through its side door, or a 8-ft x 8-ft x full length of the plane package through the nose door. Just how big are these medical imaging machines you guys are talking about?

[CatastrophicFailure]

14 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

I never said there wasn't. 

You seem to be arguing for the sake of arguing, then.  My comment stream has been directed at this: 

7 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Suborbital cargo flights seems like a very small market...

To which I’ve provided several very concrete examples of how there is a market, it’s not unique to the one part of the industry I happen to be a little familiar with. It’s these unusual, high-priotory shipments that are going to be the driving force behind SpaceX’s early foray into P2P transport, long before people or volume cargo, because it is going to be more expensive than current shipping methods. If it works at all. But this is how I think it will likely begin. 

24 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

Edge cases don't drive business cases.

RocketLab Electron. 

[CatastrophicFailure]

16 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

A 747 can take a 10-ft x 10-ft x 10-ft package in through its side door, or a 8-ft x 8-ft x full length of the plane package through the nose door. Just how big are these medical imaging machines you guys are talking about?

She says the “small end” with CT imagers is 1x5m, 2000kg, without packaging.   Its basically a ginormous toroidal magnet that doesn’t really disassemble. 

Edited April 12, 2018 by CatastrophicFailure

[sevenperforce]

1 hour ago, DerekL1963 said:

SpaceX's notional cargo business is going to be built around high volume hub-to-hub, with standardized containers and simplified straightforward handling - because that's where the money is.  Filling the cargo hold day after day, every day, every flight.  Because you can charge a premium for them, there's money to had in outsize and unusual services... but that's gravy rather than bread and butter.

Shipping companies will need to have a compelling reason to pay a premium to have their product's main transit segment be much faster than usual.

1 hour ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

You miss my point. Which is, there is a market for fast-transit like that, even if it’s expensive. 

A market which can only be served by a fully-operational system/network.

 

[ThatGuyWithALongUsername]

Good news on Falcon 9 Block 5: It seems that B1046 (first block 5, Bangabundhu-1, NET May 4) has arrived at Cape Canaveral according to this tweet:

This is good news because it probably means whatever kept it at McGregor so long must have been resolved!

I was worried that it might have hit a snag on some problem during the test firings, and had to be redesigned for the next 6 months again. Or it could have just been extra testing, as this is the human-rated version, and it is supposed to be reused more often...

Can't wait for the launch!

 

Oh and yeah that is Moon Express tweeting this. Huh.

Edited April 12, 2018 by ThatGuyWithALongUsername

[tater]

I didn't hear that Shotwell said a business class seat. That's a huge difference vs Elon saying an economy seat (which he did).

Note that they don't make a claim about it being the cheapest such seat, so assume a seat literally tomorrow, not an advance purchase.

NYC to Sydney is around 9 k minimum on any airline I'd actually fly on, business class. $3000 for economy.

I always thought that they'd charge less towards the middle, and window seats would be first class prices.

[mikegarrison]

2 minutes ago, tater said:

Elon saying an economy seat (which he did)

Yeah, well you have to apply a C_Elon correction factor.

[DerekL1963]

1 hour ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

You seem to be arguing for the sake of arguing, then.

No, I'm trying to explain to you how the shipping industry works - it's built on large volume and standardized handling, because that's where the money is.  Not in edge cases.  For BFR to be economical and competitive, it has to go where the volume and revenue is.
 

24 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Shipping companies will need to have a compelling reason to pay a premium to have their product's main transit segment be much faster than usual.

Yep.  That's the other stumbling block and the other reason that drives the industry to standardization and volume - driving down the other costs makes the premium more palatable.

[mikegarrison]

4 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

No, I'm trying to explain to you how the shipping industry works - it's built on large volume and standardized handling, because that's where the money is.  Not in edge cases.  For BFR to be economical and competitive, it has to go where the volume and revenue is.

It's an oversimplification to say EITHER is *the* way the cargo industry works.

Most of the cargo that is shipped is lumped into standardized containers and pallets and doesn't care whether it goes by truck or rail or plane or ship or (perhaps) spacecraft. But there are also carriers who specialize in non-standard cargo. Cargolux, for instance, ships a lot of oversized things like long pipes or blades for wind turbines because they have 747s with nose door loading that allows them to do that. There are ships that specialize in hauling entire oil rigs. The military has planes and ships that specialize in allowing vehicles to just drive on and off. (For that matter, car ferries specialize in that market too.) FEDEX and UPS specialize in shipping low-density packages, so their airplanes are volume-limited more than weight-limited. There are outfits that specialize in flying into remote airfields. Etc. Etc.

The thing is, I don't know of any mass-produced airplane in the last 50 years that was designed specifically for the civilian freight market. They all were either designed for the military and then sold on the civil market or they were primarily designed as passenger airplanes but a freighter version was also made. Or they were old passenger planes that were retrofitted as freighters.

The closest to this is Boeing and Airbus both building special planes to haul the fuselages of other planes around in, but in either case these large cargo freighters are converted from more normal airplanes.

[DerekL1963]

52 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

But there are also carriers who specialize in non-standard cargo

I have never said otherwise.  What I have pointed out is that niches (such as the CT machines CatastrophicFailure keeps harping on) don't drive industries and that they're a poor match for scheduled hub-to-hub transport. 

Hub-to-hub makes it's money by minimizing per-unit costs, by flying with seats and holds filled as near to capacity as possible on every flight.

[CatastrophicFailure]

38 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

I have never said otherwise.  What I have pointed out is that niches (such as the CT machines CatastrophicFailure keeps harping on) don't drive industries and that they're a poor match for scheduled hub-to-hub transport

Bruh, I was pointing out an example, a very specific reference case to demonstrate my point that you keep avoiding. There are no doubt, like @mikegarrison pointed out, many other examples out there in this niche market, and that there is money to be made. Especially when one is trying to edge into a market dominated by other, much larger, players. 

Like, for example, RocketLabs. They’re not competing with ULA or SpaceX, they’re going after the underserved market of smallsat launches. And by all accounts at this very early time in the game, it looks like it’s paying off.

SpaceX couldn’t compete in the cargo market shipping volume like UPS or FedEx,  but targeting a niche like outsize and high-priority cargo and moving it faster than anyone else can even hope, yeah, that might just work. When they can send CT machines to China in a fraction of the time with demonstrated reliability and safety, then maybe they can consider a serious play for moving people. 

Lots of today’s big players got their start by targeting niche markets. I will continue to remain... optimistic  until there is a concrete reason not to be. 

 

2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

A market which can only be served by a fully-operational system/network.

I don’t disagree. I’m a lot more skeptical of this thing than SpaceX’s other schemes. But if they can make it work, along with all the obligatory minutia, customers will come.

First they have to get past the whole “only exists on paper” part, followed closely by that meddlesome “not exploding” part. 

[tater]

I can't see cargo as being particularly time critical in a way that makes cargo P2P worthwhile as a primary revenue stream. If they were doing passengers, then certain "courier" services could also be added at great price, but then it pretty much requires that the origin and delivery just happen to be one of the few with P2P. Maybe an international database of organs for transport might fit as something appropriately time critical. Take the suggested NYC to Sydney example. How often would anyone imagine they need to send "cargo" between those 2 points that can't wait a day?

 

[HebaruSan]

2 minutes ago, tater said:

Maybe an international database of organs for transport might fit as something appropriately time critical.

Or molybdenum-99, for nuclear medicine.

[CatastrophicFailure]

23 minutes ago, tater said:

I can't see cargo as being particularly time critical in a way that makes cargo P2P worthwhile

Because you’re thinking NYC <—> Sydney.  I’m thinking LA <—> Shenzhen. SpaceX already has a footprint at the port of LA... and China is already cool with rockets falling out of the sky. 

[mikegarrison]

2 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Bruh, I was pointing out an example, a very specific reference case to demonstrate my point that you keep avoiding. There are no doubt, like @mikegarrison pointed out, many other examples out there in this niche market, and that there is money to be made. Especially when one is trying to edge into a market dominated by other, much larger, players.

Ah, but there was another thing I pointed out. That is that no successful airplanes have ever been developed only to fill a niche role like this. You need a main market to pay for the program costs, and then if you are clever you can also build in extra capabilities that niche customers can make use of.

[Bill Phil]

5 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

Ah, but there was another thing I pointed out. That is that no successful airplanes have ever been developed only to fill a niche role like this. You need a main market to pay for the program costs, and then if you are clever you can also build in extra capabilities that niche customers can make use of.

The main market for BFR is spaceflight. 

[CatastrophicFailure]

7 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

The main market for BFR is spaceflight. 

And the entire P2P concept is “extra capability.”  Someone sitting in a meeting probably threw the idea out randomly and it just stuck. 

[mikegarrison]

9 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

The main market for BFR is spaceflight. 

Color me skeptical that a ship designed to launch satellites and take people to a moon hotel will be a serious competitor to air freight.

It's not externally obvious, but passenger airplanes (even when converted to be freighters) do not make great freighters. They are, however, usually so cheap that companies make do. BFR is not going to be cheap.

And before anybody says "reuseable" to me, let me point out that pax->freight conversion airplanes have typically already been used for 20-30 years before they even get converted to be freighters, and that's what makes them so cheap.

Edited April 13, 2018 by mikegarrison

[Bill Phil]

2 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

Color me skeptical that a ship designed to launch satellites and take people to a moon hotel will be a serious competitor to air freight.

It's not externally obvious, but passenger airplanes (even when converted to be freighters) do not make great freighters. They are, however, usually so cheap that companies make do. BFR is not going to be cheap.

And before anybody says "reuseable" to me, let me point out that pax->freight conversion airplanes have typically already been used for 20-30 years before they even get converted to be freighters, and that's what makes them so cheap.

It will never compete with air freight. And I doubt it'll even be used for P2P. But since it can land both stages it's a part of the system's capabilities anyway, at least in terms of performance. 

Any market BFR has that is not it's primary market will be a niche market, such as P2P.