It's possible. Only this summer did insurance rates on the Falcon 9 come down to those on the Ariane 5. SpaceX will have to provide extensive data (especially from the static fire in McGregor) to bolster reliability claims on a landed booster.
That's partly why they've been doing a bunch of full duration static fires on one of the landed cores. They've done 3 already that are known, they plan on doing around a dozen. That sort of thing should considerably reduce the uncertainty about flying a reused booster.
Depends on the launch. There is no remaining fuel in a second stage for any Delta v to lower its orbit into the atmosphere in most launches. A launch to GTO at 350 x 36,000 km will eventually decay. In some satellite launches there is a third stage (like a fregat, but not the same thing) which performs the final circularization of the orbit. In others the satellite itself does this. In a launch to an MEO orbit like 1500x1500 km the 2nd stage is going to stay up there pretty much forever as dead debris.
SpaceX doesn't do GEO launches as far as I know, only GTO. I don't know whether from a lack of capability or whether they're not allowed/certified for that, though. I guess an expendable F9 should easily be able to get to GEO.
SpaceX doesn't do direct GEO insertion, only boosting to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO) which is the norm for satellites headed to GEO. The satellite itself does the circularization, which isn't hugely costly fuel wise but requires a stage that can restart after coasting all the way to GEO altitude (several days), which SpaceX currently lacks (the 2nd stage runs on batteries).
Yes, exactly this. GEO requires an engine that is low kN thrust but can be restarted many times. The Wikipedia page for the Russian fregat which is commonly used as a 3rd or 4h stage for their launches is a good example of such hardware. If you're patient you can even circularize a GTO with ion engines, which has been done on some partially-failed telecom satellite launches.
Several of the most advanced GEO commsats use that as their main way to get into orbit. By beefing up the ion engine enough to circularize the orbit at GEO you make for cheaper launch costs and a longer lived vehicle.
that's GTO. the payload itself will have to to provide the rest of the thrust to circularize that to GEO. But they can do so cheaply with ion engines since they don't need to fight the atmosphere.
Something like 95% of the commercial for profit launch market is for geostationary telecom satellites. In terms of launches per decade o3b is an aberration.
GTO is the highly elliptical transfer orbit for a hohmann transfer to geostationary. This is of course a drastic oversimplification.
Lack of capability, the 2nd stage doesn't live long enough to do it (yet). They could make the modifications to do direct GEO missions but it's a niche market and not particularly worth it, at least not yet.
Some are deorbited immediately (such as on ISS resupply flights) others are left in orbit but so far they all have fairly low perigees so they re-enter after a few months at most.
They keep re-designing the Falcon 9 and adding new features so it's not really surprising. Those poor engineers working on it, "What do you mean you're increasing the Falcon thrust again. Now we have to reinforce the connectors even more." The capacity of a Falcon 9 has gone from 10 tons to orbit up to 23.
What could SpaceX have learned about landing a rocket on a boat resting on waves?
It seems like the craziest idea. I would have said "No chance. Land it on land, like the word says." but they've managed the risks down to where it's not surprising that they've landed yet another one. Some special magic has gone into that and I can't even imagine what issues they've had to solve.
They mentioned on the live stream that the landing point doesn't really change the difficulty. It doesn't matter whether they land on water or on land, for the most part. What makes the landings difficult is how much propellant is left in the first stage. There's more of it left after a LEO launch, so they can do a longer landing burn and during that have more opportunity to correct, e.g. for winds. With the GTO launches there's only very little left, so the landing burn is shorter, which also stresses the vehicle more. This time they were happy to actually do a one-engine landing burn as opposed to three engines like they did with the drone ship landings so far (I think it has always been three engines at first and then one engine for the very last bit for drone ship landings until now).
They've also noted numerous times that waves don't really matter much to the landing.
So can they add 5% more propellant to the rocket, or perhaps lower the weight of the rocket a bit so for the same propellant - more is left when it lands?
Propellant tanks are full at liftoff, so no, there's no way of adding more. And there's also no room to save weight either, considering that every bit of saved mass is more payload capacity to orbit. Two features of the Falcon 9 Full-Thrust upgrade increased propellant limits, though: One was bigger tanks, but I think they said they're now at a height limit for various reasons (structural integrity of an empty rocket stage is usually abysmal, for example, and you want to land it upright and empty). The other was superchilling the propellants, which made them a bit denser, thereby fitting more.
> SpaceX’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, estimates that reusing these landed Falcon 9 vehicles will lead to a 30 percent reduction in launch costs, according to Space News.
Surely it will be more than a 30% reduction once they make the rocket refactoring process more efficient? I've heard Elon say that the savings would be an order of magnitude given how low the cost of fuel is relative to everything else on the rocket.
I know Elon is famously optimistic and Gwynne is probably dampening expectations on purpose but 30% doesn't seem very impressive. Is Gwynne just playing down the cost savings or is she likely to be accurate, even in the medium term (3-5 years)?
Plus their launch backlog is already pretty full since they are undercutting all the incumbent providers... no sense in decreasing their margins if the current prices are very competitive.
Perhaps I misunderstood what Gwynne was saying. I thought that "launch costs" would be the cost of launching a rocket for SpaceX, rather than the price that they set for customers.
Perhaps your correct though, the quote is a bit ambiguous.
Remember in the current Falcon 9 design, they are only reusing the first stage -- reported to account for 70% of the cost of the rocket (which is of course different to the retail price of launch service), and attempting to recover and reuse the fairing, an aluminum honeycomb core + carbon fibre sheet enclosure the size of a city bus, which is thought to add a couple million dollars per rocket including capital costs (SpaceX is thought to have limited capacity to produce fairings at a high rate, which is why they're chasing reuse).
They still need to rebuild the entire second stage each launch, and continue to pay the salaries of 4,000+ employees.
If the end-to-end launch service is priced at $60 million, 70% is $42 million, with the other 30% ($18 million) that needs to be paid each launch. Assuming the cost of all re-use is 100% free (gas and go), a full passing on of the savings would mean the second launch (which has a free first stage) could be priced at $18m + ($42m/2) = $39 million.
That's a 35% discount off $60 million. SpaceX haven't proven that reflying a returned booster is safe and reliable. It will take many relaunches to gain statistical knowledge of safety of the fleet they're building.
If SpaceX can reliably relaunch the first stage 5-10 times with minimal refurbishment costs, the amortized costs drop dramatically. During the development of the Merlin 1, testing aimed for 10 full duration (3 minute) test fires. I can see SpaceX aiming for 5-10 flights per booster with the current iteration of Falcon 9 over the longer term.
I encourage anybody interested to play around with this spreadsheet [1]. If the current design can be proven to have say 5 launches per Falcon 9 booster, that's a 65% saving to SpaceX. Falcon 9 is already the cheapest vehicle in its class (though some providers are cost competitive if doing dual launches on say, an Ariane V). The Russia's Proton rockets were reasonably cost competitive, but their reliability has proven to be very low in recent times.
As Amdahl's Law notes, as the number of reliable relaunches per rocket with minimal refurbishment costs increases towards infinity, the total cost will asymptotically approach the currently non-reusable portion of the costs (so in the current design it's the second stage, launch operations, fuel, fairings etc)
In a few decades, SpaceX wants to get airplane like re-use (fully re-usable with thousands of flights per vehicle lifetime), where each passenger pays a marginal cost of roughly the jet fuel cost and inspections and refurbishments don't happen every single flight but at set intervals. That's a probably several design generations away though (human Mars landing will certainly happen first)
> If the end-to-end launch service is priced at $60 million, 70% is $42 million, with the other 30% ($18 million) that needs to be paid each launch. Assuming the cost of all re-use is 100% free (gas and go), a full passing on of the savings would mean the second launch (which has a free first stage) could be priced at $18m + ($42m/2) = $39 million.
Oops, I mixed up two seperate points and can no longer edit the comment: I should clarify this math is for selling re-usable launches from scratch. Assuming two (and only two) launches per first stage with zero dollar refurbishment, SpaceX can sell two launches at $39 million and achieve the same profit, a 35% discount to customer. This is what will happen in the longer term: there may not be any full priced $60 million flights, so even the first flight of a booster will be re-usable pricing.
That said, currently we're in a weird place where existing customers are paying the full price ($60 million) for a freshly manufactured rocket, but subsequent re-use customers technically need only pay $18 million. While SpaceX could give a giant discount to all secondary customers this is not a long term pricing strategy because it requires a prior customer to "pay off" the first stage with a fully priced launch, which won't happen in the future. (SpaceX likely eventually needs to price closer to the amortized value for all customers -- even the first, if they want to achieve their goals of reducing prices, gaining more of the existing launch market and increasing demand).
Except when their launch manifest is so full that they struggle to fit every customer in there. And I guess for some customers getting your satellite operational a few months earlier is worth more than 20 million.
Costs per launch include fuel (trivial at < $0.5m), rocket (say $30-40m of which first stage is 3/4) and recurring costs like employee time, refurbishment, test fires, barge rental, range costs etc (significant maybe 5-10m?). Musk is prone to talking about the far future as if it were tomorrow and within our grasp today. If you count medium term as 3-5 years (I'd call that short term), there is no way they're getting an order of magnitude saving.
They charge $60m, so it's unlikely ever to come down below 20m without 2nd stage reuse, and say around 5-10m even with full re-use in a few decades. Best case they could probably get it down to 10% of current costs (90% saving) if they manage full re-use and cut down on recurring costs a lot, but for now 30% is pretty impressive.
My daughter and I saw a couple of strange flashes in the sky while out looking for Perseids last night. We're in the UK and the flashes were in Cassiopeia in the North Eastern sky at about 10pm BST, is possible they could have been from this rocket?
I did wonder about that but there were two or three flashes in quick succession. It was spookily close to matching up with that 22:29 flare prediction in Cassiopeia, but it was at least half and hour before that.
The flashes would have been Perseids. We saw a few as well, including one that flared brightly and left a short persistent trail that took about 10 seconds to disperse. If one comes directly down, or at an angle but towards you, it will just look like a flash in the sky.
56 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadCan't wait to see what they launch with the refurbed boosters.
http://www.spacex.com/press/2013/12/03/spacex-successfully-c...
http://www.boeing.com/features/2015/01/bds-702sp-01-26-15.pa...
GTO is the highly elliptical transfer orbit for a hohmann transfer to geostationary. This is of course a drastic oversimplification.
There are still a couple upper stages from 2014/2015 up there.
It seems like the craziest idea. I would have said "No chance. Land it on land, like the word says." but they've managed the risks down to where it's not surprising that they've landed yet another one. Some special magic has gone into that and I can't even imagine what issues they've had to solve.
They've also noted numerous times that waves don't really matter much to the landing.
You get diminishing returns adding size/fuel to a rocket. Play Kerbal for a while and you'll see this in action.
Surely it will be more than a 30% reduction once they make the rocket refactoring process more efficient? I've heard Elon say that the savings would be an order of magnitude given how low the cost of fuel is relative to everything else on the rocket.
I know Elon is famously optimistic and Gwynne is probably dampening expectations on purpose but 30% doesn't seem very impressive. Is Gwynne just playing down the cost savings or is she likely to be accurate, even in the medium term (3-5 years)?
30% reduction in launch costs will be hugely welcomed and SpaceX will be able to do lots with the additional revenue.
Perhaps your correct though, the quote is a bit ambiguous.
They still need to rebuild the entire second stage each launch, and continue to pay the salaries of 4,000+ employees.
If the end-to-end launch service is priced at $60 million, 70% is $42 million, with the other 30% ($18 million) that needs to be paid each launch. Assuming the cost of all re-use is 100% free (gas and go), a full passing on of the savings would mean the second launch (which has a free first stage) could be priced at $18m + ($42m/2) = $39 million.
That's a 35% discount off $60 million. SpaceX haven't proven that reflying a returned booster is safe and reliable. It will take many relaunches to gain statistical knowledge of safety of the fleet they're building.
If SpaceX can reliably relaunch the first stage 5-10 times with minimal refurbishment costs, the amortized costs drop dramatically. During the development of the Merlin 1, testing aimed for 10 full duration (3 minute) test fires. I can see SpaceX aiming for 5-10 flights per booster with the current iteration of Falcon 9 over the longer term.
I encourage anybody interested to play around with this spreadsheet [1]. If the current design can be proven to have say 5 launches per Falcon 9 booster, that's a 65% saving to SpaceX. Falcon 9 is already the cheapest vehicle in its class (though some providers are cost competitive if doing dual launches on say, an Ariane V). The Russia's Proton rockets were reasonably cost competitive, but their reliability has proven to be very low in recent times.
As Amdahl's Law notes, as the number of reliable relaunches per rocket with minimal refurbishment costs increases towards infinity, the total cost will asymptotically approach the currently non-reusable portion of the costs (so in the current design it's the second stage, launch operations, fuel, fairings etc)
In a few decades, SpaceX wants to get airplane like re-use (fully re-usable with thousands of flights per vehicle lifetime), where each passenger pays a marginal cost of roughly the jet fuel cost and inspections and refurbishments don't happen every single flight but at set intervals. That's a probably several design generations away though (human Mars landing will certainly happen first)
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/144Y_OVmFFYTh_zTiV-FH...
Is there an easy explanation for why fairings are so hard to make? In comparison to rocket engines, their function seems dead simple.
Oops, I mixed up two seperate points and can no longer edit the comment: I should clarify this math is for selling re-usable launches from scratch. Assuming two (and only two) launches per first stage with zero dollar refurbishment, SpaceX can sell two launches at $39 million and achieve the same profit, a 35% discount to customer. This is what will happen in the longer term: there may not be any full priced $60 million flights, so even the first flight of a booster will be re-usable pricing.
That said, currently we're in a weird place where existing customers are paying the full price ($60 million) for a freshly manufactured rocket, but subsequent re-use customers technically need only pay $18 million. While SpaceX could give a giant discount to all secondary customers this is not a long term pricing strategy because it requires a prior customer to "pay off" the first stage with a fully priced launch, which won't happen in the future. (SpaceX likely eventually needs to price closer to the amortized value for all customers -- even the first, if they want to achieve their goals of reducing prices, gaining more of the existing launch market and increasing demand).
Charge the sustainable rate for all launches, except those who demand new rockets.
Eventually customers will stop demanding new rockets.
If one launch provider can send you up for $40M instead of $60M for the others, would you ever go with the others?
Suddenly SpaceX owns the launch business.
They charge $60m, so it's unlikely ever to come down below 20m without 2nd stage reuse, and say around 5-10m even with full re-use in a few decades. Best case they could probably get it down to 10% of current costs (90% saving) if they manage full re-use and cut down on recurring costs a lot, but for now 30% is pretty impressive.
http://www.heavens-above.com/IridiumFlares.aspx?lat=53.1204&...