Patience is SpaceX's latest virtue SpaceX has delayed its planned December launch until January 2017. Its brief statement is given as an “anomaly update” – an addendum to the rolling blog about investigations into its impressively-large explosion on September 1. That event has since been attributed to how helium was handled during fuelling. The explosion …
I am still wanting for Landy McLandFace to be turned into Launchy McLaunchFace. Now that, I look forward to. What happened to it being re-launched in June this year? Space-X will have their reasons but I do wish they would keep their adoring fans apprised of what's happening, well as much as they can.
I'm guessing that they're having trouble convincing a customer to go with it. For various reasons re-using one isn't as cheap as all that, and so the financial incentives for a customer aren't that great compared to taking a brand new one. If they've spent a few $100billion on their satellite, risking it all for the sake of a few million extra for a brand new launcher is almost a no-brainer.
SpaceX may have to launch one or two on test flights to show that it can be done.
The reason re-use isn't as cheap as all that is because SpaceX still have to pay the fixed costs (manpower, supply and support contracts, facilities, heating, cooling, lighting, land, etc) of maintaining the ability to manufacturer new ones. That fixed cost is far more than the price of the materials that get thrown away every time they destroy one. Only if they become massively re-usable can SpaceX economise on those fixed costs.
That's just... not true. Categorically, massively, profoundly wrong.
The satellite destroyed in September's RUD was $200M. Several orders out from your "few £100billion" estimate. The cost of the vehicle / launch is normally similar to, or may exceed, the cost of the payload.
SpaceX's entire reason for reuse is that everything you just said is wrong. Why should the fixed costs outweigh the cost of building new vehicles for every use? Would you apply the same argument to aeroplanes? Cars? No?
Let's break down your argument. Manpower. If by that you mean SpaceX engineers, they cost lots for the design of a product, but recurring costs drop after the first few flights. If you mean manufacture, guess what - the less you build, the fewer builders you need.
Supply and support - again, build fewer things, you need to buy fewer components.
Facilities - which takes a larger factory - one which can build a new vehicle every few weeks, or one which can refurbish vehicles in a similar timespan? I'll give you a hint - it's the former.
Cooling, lighting, land etc - see facilities.
@AndyS,
Oops. For 'billion', read 'million'. Hadn't had an early morning cuppa.
Anyway, to return to the point, for any half decent payload (big TV satellite, big comms sat) the owner would have paid anything up to $1billion building it. ENVISAT cost a reputed $2.9billion. Uncle Sam will quite happily spend $1billion on a spy sat. The one SpaceX blew up a few weeks back was a comparative tiddler money-wise, only $200million. There's a good book here, page 99.
In comparison, even an "expensive" launcher like Ariane will be ~$100million ($150million if one's satellite takes up the whole launch payload), Wikipedia's page is quite informative on the matter. And SpaceX are seeking to chop costs like that into tinier pieces.
It's been a long time since launches were more expensive than building big satellites.
Manpower. SpaceX seem to have no ambition to reuse a booster more than 1 or 2 times. That means that for the foreseeable future they will have to retain the skill base, currency, and capacity for something close to full rate production (assuming that a few don't make it to landing as planned). These are not talentless people who can be picked up off the streets at short notice, these are hard-to-find guys and girls who once you've got them you have to retain them, pay them, keep them busy, etc. It's not like they're necessarily jack of all trades either - they're specialist welders, machinists, etc, all highly specialised in their individual fields and not easily transferable to different roles. A lot of that skill base may very well be vested in suppliers' workforces, but it's there same problem all over again and the costs of dealing with it will be passed on to SpaceX and anyone else buying from the same supplier. Same for the factory - whilst there's a single final assembly building, there's a myriad of smaller plants all over the place that have to be kept operational if they're to build just one booster per year.
And on top of that SpaceX would need to have the refurb staff too to recycle the one's that did make it to landing. If, and only if, SpaceX can re-use their first stage many many times (e.g. 50 times) is it worth building a fleet and then standing down the production line.
This problem aflicts every major large engineering production project. Fighter jets - the unit cost goes up as the government's order shrinks for exactly the same reason. To get an empty cardboard box from Lockheed or SpaceX would cost almost as much as putting an F22 or Falcon 9 inside it. The F16 production line is about to close, and once gone it'll be veeery expensive to bring it back should anyone want a new build F16. The overhead of having the means to produce things this complicated yet not making them is almost as expensive as making them regardless.
And since you mention cars, it costs Ford / GM / Merc / etc. around about $1-6billion to develop a new car. Which is why there's so much platform sharing going on these days. Once they have developed it and set up the line they can churn out millions of cars for a couple of thousand dollars each (if that), but that first one is $1-6billion. Take a look at this.
Anyway, I'm only reinforcing SpaceX's own pronouncements on the matter, covered previously here on El Reg and elsewhere in the press. Take a look at this: SpaceX were talking about a 30% discount, tops. Even that seems ambitious to me.
So lets see... Say SpaceX charge $50million for a fresh launcher, 30% discount for a second hander = $15million saving. $15million/$200million = 7.5% of the price of the satellite that got blown up. That's pretty small beer. In the grand scheme of things, if one could ensure the success of an investment in a $200million satellite by spending an extra $15million on a fresh launcher as opposed to "taking a chance" (no-one really knows yet what reliability SpaceX can achieved for re-used first stages), one (or more likely one's insurer) probably would spend that extra. If it's Uncle Sam who's just spent $1billion make a new military satellite, $15million is really small beer indeed.
They will get to re-use one of their first stages one of these days, but the money saving isn't as attractive as all that to launch customers (or their insurers). If SpaceX can show that it works "as good as new", which I'm sure they'll manage to do one way or other, then it would become a no-brainer. But just at the moment it'd be a brave customer to bet their own enterprise on a small saving.
The difference between a near "production line" comms satellite and something like ENVISAT is like night and day in terms of cost.
The actual bird cost for ENVISAT is "only" about $50-100 million, which is why you build a couple of flight spares (these are the testboxes if launch is sucessful and your backup plan if it isn't). All the rest of the cost is the _hundreds_ of prototypes and millions of manhours invested in developing the instruments and new bits needed to get that bird to the pad. If you ran a few tests using cubesats then that's part of the flyaway price too.
Because space is expensive, governments insist on getting every last cent of value out of what's launched. This in turn makes it even more expensive, which makes them even more determined not to take risks and makes it even more expensive (never mind that most space exploration, like most polar efforts is a flag waving exercise and the science is incidental)
Cheap reusable launchers aren't going to make comms sats much cheaper, because the production line nature and modular bus structure of their chassis has already made the cost pretty competitive. The part where it could have major impact is making one-offs much cheaper by encouraging greater risk-taking with more experimental designs, which in turn means massive reductions in cost before the bird is even bolted to the top of the stack.
June was always an optimistic date. All SpaceX dates are NET, meaning "no earlier than", and are the soonest possible if everything goes well. Delays are likely.
In this case they seem to have spent a lot more time testing the recovered first stage. They test-fired it 10 times. Additional delays are due to the whole fleet being grounded because of the explosion of 3 months ago. They are now expected to launch a pre-loved first stage in the first quarter of 2017.
They don't seem to be having problems finding a client for it.
I'm not sure a regulator telling them "no, but we'll let you tell the world if you want" officially counts as patience. I'm looking forward to watching the webcasts again, but this is one of those occasions where it is good we have regulators despite how much they can slow us down sometimes... "We're finalising the investigation and aim to fly next week" is not what regulators are used to hearing.
I work in aerospace, where an incident of this size would normally lead to grounding of all similar aircraft, and very likely a large loss of life.
I suspect this is where the regulators' usual approach conflicts with SpaceX's approach. Any accident of this size that a regulator would previously have seen would have killed lots of people (or at very least, endangered lots of lives), and the companies responsible would see it as a massive incident, unforeseen, and a threat to their company's future.
They're simply not used to dealing with a company like SpaceX which can shrug off a loss like this, and in fact pretty much expects the occasional one. To SpaceX, "we'll fly again next week" may seem like a reasonable approach, but to any regulators, it is very, very far from their usual comfort zone.
Other articles state the explosion was caused by solid oxygen reacting with carbon (fiber) under pressure.
The carbon fiber is wrapped around liquid helium tanks, which are placed inside the liquid oxygen tank.
Like I said when I first saw this explosion, the cause would be similar to early rocket planes (X-1 and X-2) which blew up because Ulmer leather gaskets used in their LOX plumbing would react under pressure. I guess none of the young SpaceX designers ever heard of the Ulmer leather problems.
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