[New] Space Launch System / Orion Discussion Thread

[Cheif Operations Director]

3 hours ago, Dale Christopher said:

But I don’t believe it necessarily follows that NASA would receive a funding cut if SpaceX strides ahead in launch and transport capability. NASA still do have a hugely important part to play in exploration and expansion. 

Imagine for a sec that SpaceX is able to do everything Starship promises, cheap high volume logistics from Earth to practically any other body in the solar system. Do you really think that the US government will decide to reduce funding for their premier space organisation? Just as the gates of the solar system are thrown open to humanity? 

I think they will cut funding for their space launching systems. They will let them manufacture and launch satellites but that is it. Perhaps ASSIST in Private Astronaut programs as well, there astronaut programs may get cut by 2030 though because the ISS will be gone by then and the private industry will have their own astronaut program. 

 

Again this is all dependent on SpaceX or someone else being able to give...

3 hours ago, Dale Christopher said:

cheap high volume logistics from Earth to practically any other body in the solar system.

NASA Would be turned into an advisory and support administration mainly.

 

One other thing

3 hours ago, Dale Christopher said:

hugely

Should have said tremendously bigly, like the world has never seen before. Then you would have the trump aesthetic

(No that is not a political statement mods)

[ZooNamedGames]

Issue is SpaceX, the primary developer of large reusable technology hasn’t shown enough of a financial return on their developments to prove useful. Launch costs remains fixed and unwavering. Not even spacex can find it reasonable to spend money developing a vehicle that would be assembled and launched- at best they see launching a core vehicle that’s refueled in orbit. It’s simply not feasible to use F9 sized vehicles to go anywhere but LEO. You end up needing Super Heavy sized vehicles to get anywhere while being reusable- and we don’t even know if that works at that scale. So it’s entirely unproven. Expendable is, and isn’t trying to save money and fail like reusable technology is.

[Barzon]

49 minutes ago, ZooNamedGames said:

Launch costs remains fixed and unwavering.

Well F9 costs have dropped 10mln since reuse was introduced.

[ZooNamedGames]

1 hour ago, Barzon Kerman said:

Well F9 costs have dropped 10mln since reuse was introduced.

I’ve read a report that said otherwise and no intent on that changing.

[tater]

27 minutes ago, ZooNamedGames said:

Issue is SpaceX, the primary developer of large reusable technology hasn’t shown enough of a financial return on their developments to prove useful. Launch costs remains fixed and unwavering.

They have substantially reduced the cost to orbit globally, in fact. Even before reuse they were priced lower than competitors. They've since dropped it further. They just offered smallsat rideshare @ $15,000/kg, and they are selling launches for ~50M, a fraction of the price available in the US before they existed. FH is half the cost (expendable) as DIVH. They have no reason to massively undercut prices right now when there is no competition. BO will change that, then I fully expect prices to start dropping more than they have already.

There is no reason to leave money on the table until there is competition.

 

27 minutes ago, ZooNamedGames said:

Not even spacex can find it reasonable to spend money developing a vehicle that would be assembled and launched- at best they see launching a core vehicle that’s refueled in orbit.

I'm having trouble parsing this. What do you mean? SpaceX is spending money to assemble and launch a new vehicle... maybe you edited something and an entire sentence disappeared, as the above doesn't make any sense.

27 minutes ago, ZooNamedGames said:

It’s simply not feasible to use F9 sized vehicles to go anywhere but LEO. You end up needing Super Heavy sized vehicles to get anywhere while being reusable- and we don’t even know if that works at that scale. So it’s entirely unproven.

Expendable LVs are already dead, they just don't all know it. This has been true for anyone seriously thinking about the issue since the 1960s, but the project to reuse rockets just didn't move forward. Arguing for expendable rockets is like arguing for expendable airliners.

Booster reuse is proven. The fact that we see SpaceX dump expensive CFC tooling on SS/SH tells you a lot. It tells you that if reuse was not working financially, they'd scrap it and move on. They'd not bother trying to catch fairings. They are doing both, so it must make sense, they're a business, not a charity. BO is doing at least 1 of the things (and I have no doubt they plan on other reuse in the long term), RocketLab is now aiming for reuse as well.

Scale? Not really a problem. SH is easy, SS is going to be hard—precisely because it hasn't been done before, and the way to learn how to do it, is to start trying. Expendable stage 2 for SS is effectively a free side project, release (huge) payload, they try and recover S2. If you fail, and the launch cost covers part of the S2 cost, you've reduced dev cost. Win-win.

 

27 minutes ago, ZooNamedGames said:

Expendable is, and isn’t trying to save money and fail like reusable technology is.

LOL.

It's certainly not trying to save money at over $100,000/kg to TLI (vs ~ 8X less for FH).

Given it was supposed to fly in late 2016, I'd sort of already call it a fail, but we'll see.

Just now, ZooNamedGames said:

I’ve read a report that said otherwise and no intent on that changing.

"NASA said that it selected SpaceX to launch the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission in April 2021 for $50.3 million, which includes the launch itself and other "mission-related" costs."

That's about 12 M under their last price sheet (62M$ expendable), which doesn't even include mission related costs, which can add some 10s of millions, so this price is substantially lower as it is all inclusive.

[KSK]

1 hour ago, ZooNamedGames said:

Issue is SpaceX, the primary developer of large reusable technology hasn’t shown enough of a financial return on their developments to prove useful. Launch costs remains fixed and unwavering. Not even spacex can find it reasonable to spend money developing a vehicle that would be assembled and launched- at best they see launching a core vehicle that’s refueled in orbit. It’s simply not feasible to use F9 sized vehicles to go anywhere but LEO. You end up needing Super Heavy sized vehicles to get anywhere while being reusable- and we don’t even know if that works at that scale. So it’s entirely unproven. Expendable is, and isn’t trying to save money and fail like reusable technology is.

With respect, unless you have some information that you're not sharing, speculation about the cost effectiveness of reuse is just that - speculation. By way of counter-speculation (since I don't have any solid numbers either), I'm inclined to think that reusable technology is saving SpaceX money for two reasons. Firstly, the 40 odd boosters that they've recovered, many of which have flown twice, some of which have flown three times. This is long past being a stunt - if it wasn't benefitting them, they wouldn't be doing it. Secondly, as I believe you've pointed out in the past, SpaceX are not shy about ditching plans that seemed like a good idea but turned out not to be for whatever reason. If they're still bothering to recover boosters - it's probably turned out to be a good idea that did work.

You're a smart guy, so I'm probably not telling you anything new here, but I imagine that SpaceX will be charging as much as the market will bear for a Falcon launch. I expect that most of the savings from reusability will be going straight onto their bottom line rather than being passed along to their customers and unless they have a pressing reason to go cheaper, they won't. Not with a constellation of satellites to build out and a bleeding edge, unproven, next generation reusable spacecraft and booster to develop.

As for travel beyond LEO - well you need a damn big rocket for that either way. The biggest rocket ever flown operationally was only barely capable of getting a crew to the lunar surface and back. That rocket remains the only one to have sent crews beyond LEO and it had its fair share of near misses along the way. So personally, I'd be a bit less dismissive about the potential of reusability for BLEO flights, given that we only have a handful of data points from one vehicle to work with.

 I would also point out that the current iteration of disposable BLEO capable vehicles has not yet been proven either. Lets wait until the Green Run is done before nailing our colours to that particular mast, yes?

[jadebenn]

I think it is entirely logical to suspect that reusability hasn't actually brought SpaceX costs down. Shuttle was reusable. Wasn't cheaper.

As for accusations towards profit, there is such a thing called "price dumping" and "increasing market share." Just because SpaceX charges lower rates than anyone else doesn't mean they're making profit on those rates. If anything, I suspect those are break-even/slight-loss prices. ULA suspects as much. The Russians suspect as much. We don't know enough financially to say whether or not that's true, but we do know enough financially to say they're currently not cash-flow positive.

Regardless, this discussion is off-topic for this thread.

Edited August 9, 2019 by jadebenn

[Guest]

 

9 hours ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

there astronaut programs

*their

41 minutes ago, jadebenn said:

I think it is entirely logical to suspect that reusability hasn't actually brought SpaceX costs down. Shuttle was reusable. Wasn't cheaper.

I don’t know what it costs them to turn around one of these boosters but I feel like they would be saving a ton of money by doing so. 

I’d be open to seeing some numbers though, what info are you referring to when you say ULA and Russia suspect SpaceX is operating at a loss?

Edited August 9, 2019 by Guest

[ZooNamedGames]

5 minutes ago, Dale Christopher said:

 

*their

I don’t know what it costs them to turn around one of these boosters but I feel like they would be saving a ton of money by doing so. 

I’d be open to seeing some numbers though, what info are you referring to when you say ULA and Russia suspect SpaceX is operating at a loss?

To recover their boosters and fairings they must maintain and operate- autonomous drone ships, ferries, maintain landing sites- build landing legs, pay to repair and replace reusable parts, recoat heat sensitive parts with thermal sealants, etc etc etc. These are all things expendable rockets don’t have to pay for. Not to mention SpaceX doesn’t have a chance to maximize very long on each booster as they get a max of like 5 flights before they’re thrown away. So they’re likely spending their financial returns from reusing boosters- on making new ones with a resulting net profit of ~0. 

53 minutes ago, jadebenn said:

Regardless, this discussion is off-topic for this thread.

Very true. About SLS not every other agency in existence.

[jadebenn]

26 minutes ago, Dale Christopher said:

I don’t know what it costs them to turn around one of these boosters but I feel like they would be saving a ton of money by doing so. 

Not necessarily. The main issue I see with rocket reusability without extremely high flight rates is that you're pitting two economic forces against each other. On one hand, you have mass production and economies of scale of manufacturing: i.e. the more you make something, the more cheaply and efficiently you can make each unit. On the other, you have reuse, which promises to maximize usage of manufactured equipment.

If you make something highly reusable that doesn't fly very often, you're losing the advantages of mass manufacturing (by reusing equipment), while still paying the engineering and refurbishment costs reusability imposes. And then you have experience effects: If you have 15 flights per year and can reuse a booster 10 times (much better than demonstrated), you'll have really high fixed costs in manufacturing since you can't just lay off and re-hire your entire manufacturing workforce every 1.5 years when you need a new booster. However, at low rates of reuse, your "refurbishment line" suffers the exact same problem, and believe me, unless your rocket is ridiculously overbuilt, it will need refurbishment after a mission. You can try and minimize the amount, but you can't ever get rid of it.

Then there's the matter of specific types of reusability. SpaceX's chosen method of booster RTLS imposes significant engineering overhead to their vehicles: they are much larger than comparable vehicles of their size, and the rocket equation dictates that such size effects scale exponentially. ULA investigated their method and found (according to them), that it would take 10 booster re-uses for them to just break-even, which is why ULA decided to go with the much simpler and less performance-sapping "engine pod" method with SMART (which they estimated breaks-even after 2 uses).

All in all, the only way to economically justify reusability is by having an extremely high flight rate (i.e: weekly) so that you get the benefits of both effects. Otherwise you're pitting the two against each other. Expendable vehicles lose any potential benefits of reusability, sure, but they gain all the benefits of mass production and economies of scale: same reason that SLS gets cheaper per-unit the more you fly it.

Edited August 9, 2019 by jadebenn
link to ULA study

[Guest]

39 minutes ago, jadebenn said:

All in all, the only way to economically justify reusability is by having an extremely high flight rate so that you get the benefits of both effects. Otherwise you're pitting the two together. Expendable vehicles lose any potential benefits of reusability, sure, but they gain all the benefits of mass production and economies of scale: same reason that SLS gets cheaper per-unit the more you fly it.

Interesting, but you wouldn’t seem to see the benefits of mass production unless you had a high number of flights either. SLS will only do a couple per year won’t it? Falcon will be a total of between 80-100 by the end of 2019 if wiki serves me well >_<.

Edited August 9, 2019 by Guest

[jadebenn]

9 minutes ago, Dale Christopher said:

Interesting, but you wouldn’t seem to see the benefits of mass production unless you had a high number of flights either. SLS will only do a couple per year won’t it? Falcon will be close to a total of 100 by the end of 2019 if wiki serves me well >_<.

Right, which is one of the reasons an SHLV is more expensive than commercial rockets. Not only can commercial rockets cost-share with other customers, they can utilize those economies of scale that come from launching fairly frequently to bring down costs. NASA, on the other hand, must bear all costs of SLS as the sole customer. SHLVs aren't a winner in pure economic terms - too big to ever be commercially viable. Where an SHLV shines is in its capabilities. The whole debate over SLS centers over whether those capabilities are worth the costs. NASA thinks so.

On a side note: The cost-savings would be immense if we could pool the entire world's annual launch demand onto one system, but there are a lot of reasons, both practical and political, that make that not realistic.

Edited August 9, 2019 by jadebenn

[tater]

ULA flies so infrequently they get the benefit of neither. They've flown 3 times this year, and 3 different LVs (though DIVM and DIVH share production). If all goes well, they'll fly maybe 5 Atlas V this year. Hardly mass production.

On topic, SLS has ridiculously huge fixed program costs, so that SLS launches will literally cost multiple billions each, without even amortizing dev costs.

If the marginal cost of 1 SLS launch was as low as 750 M$ (it's got 600 M$ worth of engines on it not counting the SRBs, after all, lol), and it flies 1 time per year, starting 2021 that 3.25 B$/flight, and if we amortize the dev over 25 flights, that pulls it up to 5 billion per launch.

7 minutes ago, jadebenn said:

NASA thinks so.

Marshall thinks so.

Many at NASA don't like SLS.

Literally the only thing that SLS brings to the table, and only once it gets a full diameter upper stage, is fairing VOLUME.

Human spaceflight missions are volume limited. Habitable space is fluffy. All missions BLEO are propellant limited as well, but farther afield for longer duration means more volume.

 

Edited August 9, 2019 by tater

[jadebenn]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

ULA flies so infrequently they get the benefit of neither. They've flown 3 times this year, and 3 different LVs (though DIVM and DIVH share production). If all goes well, they'll fly maybe 5 Atlas V this year. Hardly mass production.

Because this is a down year and they're focussing on bringing Vulcan offline and seeting up the ground support and manufacturing infrastructure for that.

Oh and the launch market is down globally. SpaceX has a lot of "banked" orders they're fulfilling. Their customers are willing to put up with the long delays it's taken to launch their payloads in return for low prices.

3 minutes ago, tater said:

Many at NASA don't like SLS.

Sure. Are they the majority? Don't think so.

5 minutes ago, tater said:

Literally the only thing that SLS brings to the table, and only once it gets a full diameter upper stage, is fairing VOLUME.

Absolutely not true. You can dislike it, but bighuge payload capacity is an asset in of itself. 

Edited August 9, 2019 by jadebenn

[ZooNamedGames]

Honestly every American launch provider is down this year. Likely because ULA, Boeing, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, NASA, & Blue Origin are all spending their funds on RnD, assembly and production of their next generation vehicles- with Boeing and SpaceX focused on their manned vehicles at the forefront. 

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, jadebenn said:

Absolutely not true. You can dislike it, but bighuge payload capacity is an asset in of itself. 

If it’s a race to volume, SLS might win, but there are 2 high volume, reusable super heavies coming soon too don’t forget.

Its not a title that will be very sustainable imo.

4 minutes ago, ZooNamedGames said:

Honestly every American launch provider is down this year. Likely because ULA, Boeing, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, NASA, & Blue Origin are all spending their funds on RnD, assembly and production of their next generation vehicles- with Boeing and SpaceX focused on their manned vehicles at the forefront. 

This is a thread for SLS not every other provider! XD

Edited August 9, 2019 by Guest

[Cheif Operations Director]

1 hour ago, jadebenn said:

The main issue I see with rocket reusability without extremely high flight rates is that you're pitting two economic forces against each other. On one hand, you have mass production and economies of scale of manufacturing: i.e. the more you make something, the more cheaply and efficiently you can make each unit. On the other, you have reuse, which promises to maximize usage of manufactured equipmen

recycling economies of scale

[jadebenn]

10 minutes ago, Dale Christopher said:

Its not a title that will be very sustainable imo.

I guess we'll see.

[Cheif Operations Director]

1 hour ago, jadebenn said:

10 times (much better than demonstrated), you'll have really high fixed costs in manufacturing since you can't just lay off and re-hire your entire manufacturing workforce every 1.5 years when you need a new booster. 

You can just make more boosters thus driving down cost and allowing to take more customers. The reduction in cost will increase demand since more people can buy the product. This allows for you to gain brand recongintion and to consumerize your company

[jadebenn]

3 minutes ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

recycling economies of scale

Which, again, come at the expense of manufacturing economies of scale unless you're flying crazily often.

1 minute ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

You can just make more boosters thus driving down cost and allowing to take more customers. The reduction in cost will increase demand since more people can buy the product. This allows for you to gain brand recongintion and to consumerize your company

The launch market is fairly inelastic. Even if a bunch of new capacity were to come online today, the market would take several years to react to it. And there's no guarantee it would ever grow to the point to support such high flight rates, even with the existence of cheap lift.

Edited August 9, 2019 by jadebenn

[Cheif Operations Director]

36 minutes ago, Dale Christopher said:

LS will only do a couple per year won’t it?

More like once every few years

1 minute ago, jadebenn said:

Which, again, come at the expense of manufacturing economies of scale unless you're flying crazily often.

If you have a main plant for manufacturing parts and then a second plant for making rockets and a third for repairing them everything will be fine.

[jadebenn]

2 minutes ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

More like once every few years

Nope! The current flight schedule has at least one SLS launch every year after it starts flying.

Edited August 9, 2019 by jadebenn

[Cheif Operations Director]

2 minutes ago, jadebenn said:

The launch market is fairly inelastic. Even if a bunch of new capacity were to come online today, the market would take several years to react to it. 

Sure but ask the question WHY is it like that? If you could launch a satellite for $100 would you? The only thing keeping you down is cost.

[jadebenn]

3 minutes ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

Sure but ask the question WHY is it like that? If you could launch a satellite for $100 would you? The only thing keeping you down is cost.

Again: it's not just a demand problem. Let's say I'm wrong and that the market would explode to take advantage of such prices. Even then, you'd still need to wait for everything else to "catch up," so to speak. There aren't a whole lot of businesses capable of building useful payloads - it'd take them quite a bit of time to expand to meet the new demand.

Edited August 9, 2019 by jadebenn

[Cheif Operations Director]

1 hour ago, jadebenn said:

SpaceX's chosen method of booster RTLS imposes significant engineering overhead to their vehicles: they are much larger than comparable vehicles of their size, and the rocket equation dictates that such size effects scale exponentially. ULA investigated their method and found (according to them), that it would take 10 booster re-uses for them to just break-even, which is why ULA decided to go with the much simpler and less performance-sapping "engine pod" method with SMART (which they estimated breaks-even after 2 uses).

I will look at the study but RTLS is already a ridiculous idea. If SpaceX used their brains they would land the rockets in Bermuda (or Cape Verde or Azores) and then do a second launch from the azores onto a droneship. (Im being slightly sarcastic) either way my point is that RTLS is not the only way to recover a rocket. If SpaceX made a large droneship and brought 10 rockets in at a time Sea landings would be more economical.