Sure, if we build a million rockets it'll be cheaper, but how do we USE those rockets and get funding at "relative peace time". SpaceX's real innovation was starlink in allowing it to "Soak up" excess production. Besides the obvious of reusability, which wasn't that "Obvious" considering the temperatures of reentry.
> Might be referring to top "business plan innovations"
No. 1 and No. 2 are positing a private space company and mass manufacturing. Those are, hands down, SpaceX's transformational business plan innovations.
COTS, No. 3, is a business-engineering hybrid. Using NASA funds as stepping stones, versus treating them as the ends, No. 4. Maybe we can slot Starlink into No. 5, but it wasn’t unpredictable; telecom was always the moneymaker in space. (I’d argue published pricing with online ordering nudges it out.)
Actually, reusability was an obvious idea from the start. For example the Space Shuttle and the McDonnell Douglas DC-X are examples of attempts at reusability in the USA, and other countries had their own experiments.
It just became non-obvious that it was the right approach after a long history of failed attempts at it.
The Shuttle was the only serious attempt. And even then, they dropped the largest structural part and used solids that can't practically be reused anyway. The DC-X is just a research project, that they would ever develop a reusable launch was basically fantasy.
The same in other countries, very little actual large investments.
The Soviet Shuttle was even less reusable then the US one. And that was actually pretty smart of them.
So I don't think that were that many real failed attempts. There was practically speaking one real attempt.
it was always the "Right approach" and everyone knew that there was nothing in the laws of physics that prohibits this. But you are writing that as if it's still be solved.
No one has ever had a fully reusable orbital rocket.. still to this day. Althought starships got a shot.
It should be noted that reusable rockets are fundamentally less cargo per trip than non-reusable ones, since the reusable rockets have to carry extra fuel for re-entry. The sweetspot of having enough mass to orbit so that this reduced capacity is still worth it is not at all easy to reach.
In general, if rocket building costs could really be reduced to almost nothing, reusable rockets would be useless. The only case where reusable rockets have a chance is if building rockets is still very expensive.
or if you can reduce the total cost of the payload.
That's what blue orgin is doing with the blue ring concept. Take avionics, data telemetry, battery's, and solar panels out of the design and let the customer focus on what end goal they are trying to achieve. I think blue ring is a very good business innovation as well.
I would argue there were far too few actual previous attempts at reusability. :P
All the while many early concepts from the dawn of the space age often had some sort of partial or even full reusability as part of the design.
Did it not pan out as other things suggested back then as it was not realistic with the technology of the time ?
Or was it perhaps due to usable space rockets mainly developing from ICBMs, which were single use munitions ? The military was also not that cost sensitive, especially at the top of the Cold War + possibly pushing on putting stuff to space sooner than the other side, instead of experimenting with some newfangled reusability concepts.
Well, in any case good thing this is over & things are finally at the right track. :)
Before Starlink, SpaceX assumed/hoped that a mass of new customers would come out of the woodwork when cheap launches became available (the easyJet strategy!). When they didn't, they came up with Starlink to be that customer.
A skim through the other months suggests that per month, there is usually one US government launch, zero to two commercial or rideshare launches, and a bunch of Starlink launches. There is an amazing range of stuff on the rideshares!
There are lots of new costumers. The thing is just that most of those don't need the huge sats of the past.
And also people lose perspective. What we have to remember is how few launches other large rockets used to have. Ariane 5 the commercial success story peaked at 7 launches.
So yes, new costumers, but not enough to go from 7 to 100+.
Sure, they might have guessed the scale or ramp-up wrong, I would still argue there is quite a few more launches now happening than there would be without Space X jump-starting the whole thing.
Still, not being fully dependent on that certainly helps. :)
The fictional book The Rocket Company, by Patrick J. G. Stiennon and David M. Hoerr, is a basic narrative about creating a space launch services company designed around a two-stage rocket, with both booster and second stage manned by a single pilot each, and able to launch and land fully reusable.
The book has paper-thin characters whose whole purpose is to explain and counter-point a long list of technical explanations for why the company, vehicle, and manufacturing processes were designed the way they were. The book has a copyright date of 2005.
I really enjoyed reading the book.
The book, in the front, has a section called "Blurbs for The Rocket Company", which has some comments left by John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace, Jeff Foust of The Space Review, Gary C Hudson of HMX, Inc, Eric Laursen of International Launch Services, and Elon Musk.
To quote the blurb directly:
"This is an interesting approach to the greatest problem in space exploration: the cost of getting there"
-- Elon Musk CEO, Founder Space-X
According to Ashlee Vance's "When The Heavens Went On Sale" this was the inspiration for Astra (the book links to this same article in the relevant chapter). The company hoped to produce and launch >300 rockets a year without re-use. The goal was to get economy of scale in manufacturing.
Part of the business plan assumed that people would be using the rocket to launch replacement satellites for constellations, and so it wouldn't be such a big deal if a rocket failed every now and then. This would let them use automotive grade parts in some areas as opposed to aerospace grade and reduce costs.
However, it turned out that customers were actually using their rocket to launch prototype satellites and other one-off satellites where failure was actually a big deal. Long story short Astra did manage to make it to orbit, but is unlikely to survive into the future.
What would another James Webb Telescope would have cost? Far far less then the first. Sure it is costly to destroy a prototype, but not as much as you think.
It would have cost less sure, but it would have delayed the program years. And such a delay could easily shutter the program if political support faltered.
It was a huge publicity boost for NASA, but not actually an efficient use of resources in terms of % shuttle missions * total cost of the shuttle program. That’s arguably unfair because of the sunk cost issue and how the budget was setup, but manned missions are inherently expensive and even more so if you’re trying to match arbitrary orbits.
The companies launch prototypes because they want to test out technology and build methods that will go into the production satellite. Hence losing the prototype is a huge loss in time and/or increase in risk (if they decide to go ahead with certain technologies despite lacking on-orbit validation).
That only works when you're doing something like Starlink or Starship's development, where losing some prototypes is fine. However, that's not how JWST was designed, so losing many prototypes of it would be very costly. If JWST were designed with the consideration that it'd be mass produced, it would not be the JWST we know today and instead would be a completely different design (a rough comparison can be between OneWeb's more standard delicate satellite design and deployment procedure vs SpaceX's heavily optimized stack of less delicate satellites just drifted into orbit).
Most space companies are still doing their prototyping in the JWST style, so losing those prototypes is costly.
They're running out of money and can't really get the kind of money needed to continue on the rocket R&D, so they're trying to stick to their satellite components business to stay alive until they can attract funding.
Plus, they're kind of at a bad point and time in the market as small launch is not as lucrative as they hoped but moving up to medium lift is a big hurdle. So far, SpaceX is the only 'new space' launch company to have managed it, with all other competitors in development hell.
Rocket Lab are in development hell at the moment and while their financials are decent, Electron has had a failure every few launches and Neutron is due NET 2024, but with no news of an Archimedes hot fire, it seems unlikely that we'll see anything before mid 2025.
By saying development hell I'm saying that other new space companies other than SpaceX are in that difficult in between point where they're burning cash on developing the rocket without yet being able to sell significant rides and without the leverage of knowing that the government will give you a blank check if you run out of money.
The important factor being that small launch doesn't make enough money to fully fund medium launch, there just isn't enough demand for small launch with rideshares being cheaper. However, medium launch can fund more medium launch or even heavy launch, as there is much more demand in the medium weight range.
> Part of the business plan assumed that people would be using the rocket to launch replacement satellites for constellations, and so it wouldn't be such a big deal if a rocket failed every now and then. This would let them use automotive grade parts in some areas as opposed to aerospace grade and reduce costs.
Lets be real here. The business plan 'assumed' a whole lot of nonsense just so they could claim absurd totally unrealistic growth potential. The story shifted to whatever was 'hip' at the time.
It very much started with 'cube-sats' are the future. And when it was clear this was wrong, they started to make up other stuff.
While perhaps a bit outdated by modern standards, general principles are sound and it's still a very fun read in itself since he includes some general reflections in the text.
The man is also one of the authors of AutoCAD, a mechanical and civil engineering drafting software, which is globally popular (or hated, depending on who you ask!). I personally love the keyboard/commandline integration of AutoCAD, makes for an efficient and 'tactile' workflow (compared to the heavy dependence on mouse for other CAD software out there).
we know transitioning to pv/wind is going to lead to some months where we've got megawatt-hours coming out of our ears. If the only problem is energy cost, that won't be a problem long.
The concentration of CO2 is measured in parts per million. Just that simple fact make me believe it is very unlikely there ever is going to be economical to extract CO2 from the atmosphere at any significant scale.
There are thousands of long-haul flights—and something like 100k flights overall—per day. If we're doing 10k+ rocket launches per day, then that's a huge problem. If we're doing 1 per day, it's a rounding error. This is premature optimization.
(Either way, the solution, of course, is a carbon tax to price in the emissions.)
one upside is many modern rockets use methane, synthesizing methane with pv/wind power would be much lower impact, depending on how much of the exhaust is actually at escape velocity it could be very slightly carbon negative, like new forged steel with ore prepped with clean hydrogen.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I am under the impression that Starship does not use that, the least expensive fuels for rockets are highly CO2 emitting, and the least expensive fuels are what will get rolled out in mass numbers if SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others succeed in building a rocket transportation industry.
Starship, Blue Origin's upcoming heavy-lift rocket New Glenn, and United Launch Alliance's upcoming heavy-lift rocket Vulcan, are all powered by methane and oxygen.
That's generally where methane comes from today, but in time it may come from captured CO₂, e.g. see https://terraformindustries.com/ (disclaimer: I am a minor investor).
That's not realistic simply because of the carbon requirements. Long haul aviation only burns a couple hundred kg of jet fuel per passenger. (I don't know how the top-level comment is calculating 1-3 tonnes of CO2 per passenger, Contrail effects? Construction of the plane? Altitude? Incomplete combustion? but a 250-passenger 787 doesn't carry 750,000 kg of fuel, it only fits 100,000 kg at most, plus plenty of reserve capacity). The flight only costs $100-$200 per person in fuel.
Rocketry is far less efficient than a modern high-bypass turbofan.
NASA can afford to buy 75,000 kg of methane per astronaut. Even if the rocket was amortized to zero over infinite flights, and had zero maintenance costs, even if crew cost nothing and airport/spaceport leases cost nothing, thermodynamics insists that you still have to buy $100,000 worth of RP-1 rocket fuel. A business class ticket cannot buy enough carbon to support 75,000 kg of emissions.
Starship has the size to carry about 400 passengers. Both stages together carry about 5,000t of propellant. But over 3/4 of that is liquid oxygen, and most of that is the first stage. The second stage alone with 1200t of propellant can't put humans into orbit, but it does have a range comparable to that of a 787. So 300t of liquid methane will get 400 passengers about as far as a 787 can get 250 passengers with 100t of kerosene.
A starship ticket could theoretically cost <3x the price of an airline ticket.
A rocket may be less efficient than a turbofan but it gains it back by coasting through space for all but 3 minutes rather than pushing through air for the entire flight.
It doesn't gain anything back, what are you on. Before landing it has to shed all the speed it gained that was needed for the ballistic trajectory. That energy is lost. Orbital or suborbital flights will never, ever be competitive to flying with regards to required energy expended.
No it does not, because thanks to atmosphere wings on an airplane generate lift. And they do it more efficient than any kind of engine known to the mankind
Yes, an airplane can climb much more efficiently than a rocket. So on a 300km flight where all it is doing is climbing and descending it's way more efficient than a rocket.
But for a 10,000km flight the airplane expends almost all of its fuel coasting rather than climbing.
Luckily we don't have to rely on assertions. If I'm wrong, there should be an obvious error in my math (which is trivial) or facts (which is on Wikipedia). Please point it out.
You think an airplane doesn't need lift when in a level flight? :)
Thanks to the atmosphere an airplane doesn't need to carry its own oxidizer, either. I'll leave to you to check how much oxidizer a Falcon rocket needs to carry for every ton of fuel.
We don't have to wait long to prove you wrong. Starship using just ~1200t of Methane and 150t of payload capacity will fly East (the long way) from Texas to Hawaii in 90 minutes. That's 8x as much payload 3x as far as a 787 can do with its 100t of fuel.
There are also other benefits - avoiding weather along the route, taking a straight road where an airplane needs to take a longer route for political or safety reasons, etc.
That's more efficient if most of your trips require you to go 90% of the way around the planet (maybe?). Or for sure if you coast twenty times around the planet.
But half the circumference of earth is not that far.
Airliners with extended range tanks are much less efficient than normal airliners, since they both decrease capacity and increase consumption. That's the range where Starship becomes competitive, basically trans-Pacific or further.
I estimate to hit the 2028 in active passenger service timeframe they would have probably have needed at least thousands of flights by now demonstrating safety with a perfect track record.
Starship has nowhere near the capacity to carry 400 passengers - people are not sardines you can just stuff into the rocket like you can satellites. You need plenty of equipment per person for manned spaceflight. Much more so if you want to compete with business class flying.
Also, the total travel time would be horrible, since you can't have a rocket launch/landing facility anywhere near a city, and loading and unloading a rocket is an immensely time consuming process. Plus, you never ever load people into a an already fuelled rocket.
It's not as if 40,000 feet is survivable without a flight suit and parachute, yet airliners don't provide those. And 400 people per starship is much more spacious than the area you get in economy class.
Travel time is the main reason to use Starship. It might add 30 minutes extra on either end, but if it saves 10 hours of flight tine...
Loading people into an already fueled rocket is standard operating procedure for every rocket except Falcon.
I think most people familiar with space stuff, even ardent Musk supporters, don't really see that panning out. Even putting aside the pollution, there are too many logistical issues when it comes to spreading out all those launch sites and resupplying them.
The rocket transport service they're working on with the DoD is the only thing that we might see demonstrated by then but not really used since there aren't many things so valuable as to need it. That too only because the DoD will probably be willing to pay for the Starship to be scrapped after landing, as unless they build up the infrastructure to fuel and launch the rocket, it's stuck there.
When did he say that? That might be when they’re planning a demonstration, but it ain’t gonna be regular airline service then, purely for regulatory reasons if not the fact you’d need like 100,000 Starship launches to prove it’ll be safe enough.
Elon says many things, but this is one of the silliest ideas.
The experience of such a flight would be horrible. It all starts some weeks or months before with an extremely thorough physical check-up to make sure you are still able to withstand a rocket launch. On the day, you drive/sail to the middle of nowhere, at least an houror two out from any major city. Then, you get dressed into a used space suit - this takes experienced astronauts a good 10 minutes. You then board the rocket. Once everyone else is boarded and some pre-flight checks are successful, the fuelling starts. It will take a few hours, so hopefully they have good on-board entertainment.
Then, finally the rocket is ready to launch, and you get shot up into the atmosphere at an acceleration that is likely to make you pass out. Of course, this all happens with extremely tight noise canceling headphones to prevent your eardrums from bursting. But it's OK, you'll only wear them for an hour or so, and they may even allow you to take them off for a few minutes while you're coasting in the upper atmosphere. Then the deceleration will be just as enjoyable on the way down, of course. After you disembark and off the suit, you're now just a few short hours away from your actual destination.
There is 0 chance this will ever be allowed as a service for consumers, or that it would ever compete with business flights. It might make a cool tourism experience, but probably just up and down at the same place, no point in actually moving around.
Just as 100k jet airplane flights per day would have been unimaginable in the ~50s when the jet airliner industry started, I actually can imagine a near future where many more than 10k rockets per day are launched, if the industry has it's way and succeeds in reducing costs dramatically.
At such scale it would be a different (and in some cases potentially much more dangerous :D) technology - huge hydrolox SSTOs, launch loops, rotovators, nuclear lightbulb SSTOs, maybe even orbital elevators.
These are not great comparison numbers. When rockets fly passengers it's ~4 people as compared to ~200 for a plane.
A modern 737 has a max fuel load of almost 30000L of jet fuel [1].
The density of jet fuel is 775-840 g/L [2]. Let's take 800g/L so that we can just multiply the lead numbers - that gives 24,000 kg of fuel.
According to spaceflight101 [3], the Falcon 9 uses 123,570 kg of RP-1 (similar to jet fuel) in the first stage and 32,300 kg of RP-1 in the second stage for a total of 155,870 kg, which is about 6.5x the total fuel load on the 737.
Falcon 9 launched 98 times last year (which includes some Falcon Heavy flights which have more fuel, but I don't think it changes the big picture here).
There are 5000 737's in active service [4]. Most of them are probably flying several times per day, but if we just assume once per day that's 1,825,000 flights. That's almost 3000x the amount of CO2 as produced by all those F9 flights. And that's just 737s.
Right, I think people are misunderstanding a key point here, which is that SpaceX, Blue Origin, etc would really like to see rockets be an alternative to airplanes, in which case we are talking about a dramatically increased number of launches.
> SpaceX, Blue Origin, etc would really like to see rockets be an alternative to airplanes
Why? Rockets are intrinsically less efficient and less safe than airplanes. Why would they try to compete for use cases where they are at such a disadvantage, and where they have to-date shown no interest in competing with fixed-wing aircraft?
The closest those companies have done to showing interest in pitching rockets against aircraft is Elon Musk saying that his company will offer ultra-high-speed flights via rocket, which is more like a Concorde-killer 25 years after the Concorde got killed by its own costs.
It would just be for very long flights. 45 minutes from New York to New Zealand instead of 17hr. That is a big difference. Plus you get to go into orbit (or close to it) for an amazing view/ride. You would have a huge number of people per year at $5-10k per ticket.
The article proposes using hydrogen to be carbon-free fuel-wise:
> Environmental Issues. One reason for insisting on LH2/LOX rather than
Kerosene/LOX, hypergolics, or solids/hybrids is that it's clean. We
could launch one every minute and contribute less to global warming,
ozone layer depletion, and other varieties of atmospheric pollution
than 747s crossing the Atlantic every day. Also, exhaust and/or
fluffy white clouds resulting from the occasional really bad day
aren't harmful to anybody who happens to be downwind.
“then the frontier would open as the
great railway to orbit supplanted the first generation wagon trains“
Except the frontier had fertile lands and vast potential. It was not a cold barren emptiness. You could also make access to Antarctica cheap and affordable at scale. It wouldn't suddenly make it economically sensible to go there
I'm skeptical there is a huge amount of pent up demand that is just itching for lower launch costs. It's just a bunch of telescopes looking up and look down at every possible wavelength and then a bunch of telecommunications equipment.. There are some serious diminishing returns at play here
Tourism.. more telecommunications (ex: starlink).. what else is there to do up there? I don't see it being a huge market. Definitely not enough to fund a colony on Mars or anything like that
The issue you're point out is real, but keep in mind the global tourism industry is ~$8 trillion, out of a total world GDP of $100 trillion. $1T per year on space tourism is possible.
If you were to limit tourism to those fit enough to be allowed anywhere near a space launch, do you still think you'd reach that number?
Not to mention, space tourism being an eighth of the total tourism market is obviously insane. The total tourism market is gigantic, space tourism would do wonderfully if it it were 0.01% of it (so, 8 billion or so? Probably not enough to warrant an assembly-line approach).
> If you were to limit tourism to those fit enough to be allowed anywhere near a space launch, do you still think you'd reach that number?
Yes. The majority of the population can handle 3Gs. John Glenn was 77.
> Not to mention, space tourism being an eighth of the total tourism market is obviously insane.
I don't think space tourism becoming an eighth of total tourism is insane. I'd guess the fraction of tourism dollars that are spent on travel reached by plane is a lot higher, maybe about a third or half.
> I don't think space tourism becoming an eighth of total tourism is insane. I'd guess the fraction of tourism dollars that are spent on travel reached by plane is a lot higher, maybe about a third or half.
The cost of a plane ticket is typically less than, say, a quarter of the total spending on a holiday (including hotel, food, attractions, souvenirs). Also, people go to certain destinations to spend time there, they don't go for the plane ride - which is all space tourism can be.
Just think about the number of civilian airports in the world, and compare to the number of locations where rockets can be launched from. There'll be more money to make in taking people to see the rocket launches than in actually putting tourists on rockets, I can guarantee that.
The only way space tourism might catch a break is if a space plane is ever actually successfully designed. That gets rid of many of the problems of rockets. But even then, it's a once in a lifetime experience, not something people would do every year like actual tourism.
Yes, but he was nevertheless more fragile than the majority of the overall population (all ages), which was the original concern you raised.
> The cost of a plane ticket is typically less than, say, a quarter of the total spending on a holiday (including hotel, food, attractions, souvenirs).
Agreed for LEO flights, but (1) I don't see why that difference matters much and (2) the cost breakdown of Mars tourism will similar to international travel now, i.e., 5-30% spent on transportation, and the rest spent on location.
> The only way space tourism might catch a break is if a space plane is ever actually successfully designed.
I don't really see why a space plane would be make a big difference here. Are you thinking of cost or the physical rigors? Space planes still require ~3 gees on launch (unless you're talking about something really exotic like JP Aerospace's Airship to Orbit").
Mars tourism makes no sense, as there will be nothing whatsoever on Mars that you could even see for the next hundred years or more. An actual colony on Mars is way beyond our current technology, despite what some "futurologists" claim.
And even IF a colony on Mars is ever created, the amount of tourism it could ever imaginably sustain would be tiny compared to, say, New York or Tokyo or Paris - and neither of those, nor even all three together, are 1/8 of global tourism. Not to mention, a colony on Mars would just be tunnels in a desert (except it's a very very cold and highly radioactive dessert). Only a tiny handful of people would even be conceivably interested in spending months on a cramped rocket to visit it.
I hope there might be some manufacturing process that will greatly benefit from microgravity. Maybe 3d printing of artificial organs for transplantation? Something that needs undisturbed crystallization?
The risks of space flight are just so much actuarial work until real humans become involved. At that point three nine's is no longer acceptable and everything takes way longer and is way more expensive.
Unfortunately this was published a few revisions too early IMHO. And a couple of peer reviews but the exploration itself is a nice try.
Due to nonlinearity of the rocket equation some assumptions are really really really off [a] [b]. V2 only has 2500m/s deltaV [5] and the launch vehicle's delta-v needed to achieve low Earth orbit starts around 9.4 km/s [6]
(the actual delta-v is typically 1.5–2.0 km/s more for atmospheric drag and gravity drag). [7] Therefore V2 only deliveres (2500/9400)^2 (7% or 1/14 of the needed kinetic energy)
Trouble is we only get to convert 1-4% of the launch mass into payload in LEO with chemical engines. And that's for large rockets with economies of scale.
Sputnik (rocket) Mass: 267,000 kg Payload to LEO 500kg [3]
The smallest orbital rocket is the Japanese SS-520 with the following characteristics: It can launch 3 kg to orbit in 4.4 minutes. It's a modified sounding rocket with three solid-propellant steps. It's only 9.54 m long, 0.52 m dia., and has a mass of 2.6T @ liftoff [google]. The SS-520 rocket cost less than $5 million [google]
Bolting a 2nd stage on top of V2 was tried in [2] programme and with both stages at ~0.7 reliability things only work half the time. Not commercially viable.
Is there a market for small & cheap rockets? [8] What about dual purpose ?
W54 "Davy Crockett" Atomic Projectile was the smallest nuke designed to maintain fission and could be carried around in a backpack! The final weapon was 10.862 inches (275.9 mm) in diameter, 15.716 inches (399.2 mm) in length and 50.9 pounds (23.1 kg). I guess this could be worked with. With the current risk of global war everyone should be mass producing a small launcher. However this way we still only get 1cubesat into orbit per $1m, not what the autor aimed at.
To get below $1000/kg into orbit we will need a bigger boat. And that's what SpaceX is doing.
[a] assume that our bigger, more complicated (two-stage), and
higher tech (LH2/LOX instead of Ethanol/LOX), launcher costs ten times
as much as the V2
[b] If our mass produced LH2/LOX launcher equals the
performance of the Delta 6925 by placing 3900 kg in LEO, the cost to
LEO is US$333/kg; if we achieve better throw-weight, this figure goes
down accordingly. If we build the thing so cheap, dumb, and heavy
that its payload is only 1000 kg--one metric ton--the cost rises to
US$1300/kg, which is still a factor of ten lower than the comparable
cost to LEO for Ariane, Atlas, Delta, and Titan.
[1] So yes, a stripped-down stretch-tank engine-augmented two-stage V2-derived rocket, massing 351 tons as opposed to the 12.5 tons in the original, would be able to reach orbit*. :)
98 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadSure, if we build a million rockets it'll be cheaper, but how do we USE those rockets and get funding at "relative peace time". SpaceX's real innovation was starlink in allowing it to "Soak up" excess production. Besides the obvious of reusability, which wasn't that "Obvious" considering the temperatures of reentry.
SpaceX had a lot of real innovations. Starlink is one of them, but it’s not in the top five.
No. 1 and No. 2 are positing a private space company and mass manufacturing. Those are, hands down, SpaceX's transformational business plan innovations.
COTS, No. 3, is a business-engineering hybrid. Using NASA funds as stepping stones, versus treating them as the ends, No. 4. Maybe we can slot Starlink into No. 5, but it wasn’t unpredictable; telecom was always the moneymaker in space. (I’d argue published pricing with online ordering nudges it out.)
As always, ideas are cheap. SpaceX is doing well because it's actually managing to successfully implement lots of old fantastical ideas.
It just became non-obvious that it was the right approach after a long history of failed attempts at it.
The same in other countries, very little actual large investments.
The Soviet Shuttle was even less reusable then the US one. And that was actually pretty smart of them.
So I don't think that were that many real failed attempts. There was practically speaking one real attempt.
No one has ever had a fully reusable orbital rocket.. still to this day. Althought starships got a shot.
In general, if rocket building costs could really be reduced to almost nothing, reusable rockets would be useless. The only case where reusable rockets have a chance is if building rockets is still very expensive.
That's what blue orgin is doing with the blue ring concept. Take avionics, data telemetry, battery's, and solar panels out of the design and let the customer focus on what end goal they are trying to achieve. I think blue ring is a very good business innovation as well.
All the while many early concepts from the dawn of the space age often had some sort of partial or even full reusability as part of the design.
Did it not pan out as other things suggested back then as it was not realistic with the technology of the time ?
Or was it perhaps due to usable space rockets mainly developing from ICBMs, which were single use munitions ? The military was also not that cost sensitive, especially at the top of the Cold War + possibly pushing on putting stuff to space sooner than the other side, instead of experimenting with some newfangled reusability concepts.
Well, in any case good thing this is over & things are finally at the right track. :)
It was fortuitous but unplanned, not a factor in the original vision of the company when it was founded.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_launches_i...
And also people lose perspective. What we have to remember is how few launches other large rockets used to have. Ariane 5 the commercial success story peaked at 7 launches.
So yes, new costumers, but not enough to go from 7 to 100+.
Still, not being fully dependent on that certainly helps. :)
The book has paper-thin characters whose whole purpose is to explain and counter-point a long list of technical explanations for why the company, vehicle, and manufacturing processes were designed the way they were. The book has a copyright date of 2005.
I really enjoyed reading the book.
The book, in the front, has a section called "Blurbs for The Rocket Company", which has some comments left by John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace, Jeff Foust of The Space Review, Gary C Hudson of HMX, Inc, Eric Laursen of International Launch Services, and Elon Musk.
To quote the blurb directly: "This is an interesting approach to the greatest problem in space exploration: the cost of getting there" -- Elon Musk CEO, Founder Space-X
Part of the business plan assumed that people would be using the rocket to launch replacement satellites for constellations, and so it wouldn't be such a big deal if a rocket failed every now and then. This would let them use automotive grade parts in some areas as opposed to aerospace grade and reduce costs.
However, it turned out that customers were actually using their rocket to launch prototype satellites and other one-off satellites where failure was actually a big deal. Long story short Astra did manage to make it to orbit, but is unlikely to survive into the future.
It was a huge publicity boost for NASA, but not actually an efficient use of resources in terms of % shuttle missions * total cost of the shuttle program. That’s arguably unfair because of the sunk cost issue and how the budget was setup, but manned missions are inherently expensive and even more so if you’re trying to match arbitrary orbits.
Also no reason why it can't be an ISS, and no reason you couldn't link multiple together.
Pretty useful to have a reusable grain silo you can launch and land.
Most space companies are still doing their prototyping in the JWST style, so losing those prototypes is costly.
Plus, they're kind of at a bad point and time in the market as small launch is not as lucrative as they hoped but moving up to medium lift is a big hurdle. So far, SpaceX is the only 'new space' launch company to have managed it, with all other competitors in development hell.
By saying development hell I'm saying that other new space companies other than SpaceX are in that difficult in between point where they're burning cash on developing the rocket without yet being able to sell significant rides and without the leverage of knowing that the government will give you a blank check if you run out of money.
The important factor being that small launch doesn't make enough money to fully fund medium launch, there just isn't enough demand for small launch with rideshares being cheaper. However, medium launch can fund more medium launch or even heavy launch, as there is much more demand in the medium weight range.
Lets be real here. The business plan 'assumed' a whole lot of nonsense just so they could claim absurd totally unrealistic growth potential. The story shifted to whatever was 'hip' at the time.
It very much started with 'cube-sats' are the future. And when it was clear this was wrong, they started to make up other stuff.
While perhaps a bit outdated by modern standards, general principles are sound and it's still a very fun read in itself since he includes some general reflections in the text.
(Either way, the solution, of course, is a carbon tax to price in the emissions.)
Rocketry is far less efficient than a modern high-bypass turbofan.
NASA can afford to buy 75,000 kg of methane per astronaut. Even if the rocket was amortized to zero over infinite flights, and had zero maintenance costs, even if crew cost nothing and airport/spaceport leases cost nothing, thermodynamics insists that you still have to buy $100,000 worth of RP-1 rocket fuel. A business class ticket cannot buy enough carbon to support 75,000 kg of emissions.
A starship ticket could theoretically cost <3x the price of an airline ticket.
A rocket may be less efficient than a turbofan but it gains it back by coasting through space for all but 3 minutes rather than pushing through air for the entire flight.
But for a 10,000km flight the airplane expends almost all of its fuel coasting rather than climbing.
Luckily we don't have to rely on assertions. If I'm wrong, there should be an obvious error in my math (which is trivial) or facts (which is on Wikipedia). Please point it out.
But half the circumference of earth is not that far.
Also, the total travel time would be horrible, since you can't have a rocket launch/landing facility anywhere near a city, and loading and unloading a rocket is an immensely time consuming process. Plus, you never ever load people into a an already fuelled rocket.
Travel time is the main reason to use Starship. It might add 30 minutes extra on either end, but if it saves 10 hours of flight tine...
Loading people into an already fueled rocket is standard operating procedure for every rocket except Falcon.
The rocket transport service they're working on with the DoD is the only thing that we might see demonstrated by then but not really used since there aren't many things so valuable as to need it. That too only because the DoD will probably be willing to pay for the Starship to be scrapped after landing, as unless they build up the infrastructure to fuel and launch the rocket, it's stuck there.
The experience of such a flight would be horrible. It all starts some weeks or months before with an extremely thorough physical check-up to make sure you are still able to withstand a rocket launch. On the day, you drive/sail to the middle of nowhere, at least an houror two out from any major city. Then, you get dressed into a used space suit - this takes experienced astronauts a good 10 minutes. You then board the rocket. Once everyone else is boarded and some pre-flight checks are successful, the fuelling starts. It will take a few hours, so hopefully they have good on-board entertainment.
Then, finally the rocket is ready to launch, and you get shot up into the atmosphere at an acceleration that is likely to make you pass out. Of course, this all happens with extremely tight noise canceling headphones to prevent your eardrums from bursting. But it's OK, you'll only wear them for an hour or so, and they may even allow you to take them off for a few minutes while you're coasting in the upper atmosphere. Then the deceleration will be just as enjoyable on the way down, of course. After you disembark and off the suit, you're now just a few short hours away from your actual destination.
There is 0 chance this will ever be allowed as a service for consumers, or that it would ever compete with business flights. It might make a cool tourism experience, but probably just up and down at the same place, no point in actually moving around.
A modern 737 has a max fuel load of almost 30000L of jet fuel [1].
The density of jet fuel is 775-840 g/L [2]. Let's take 800g/L so that we can just multiply the lead numbers - that gives 24,000 kg of fuel.
According to spaceflight101 [3], the Falcon 9 uses 123,570 kg of RP-1 (similar to jet fuel) in the first stage and 32,300 kg of RP-1 in the second stage for a total of 155,870 kg, which is about 6.5x the total fuel load on the 737.
Falcon 9 launched 98 times last year (which includes some Falcon Heavy flights which have more fuel, but I don't think it changes the big picture here).
There are 5000 737's in active service [4]. Most of them are probably flying several times per day, but if we just assume once per day that's 1,825,000 flights. That's almost 3000x the amount of CO2 as produced by all those F9 flights. And that's just 737s.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737#Specifications
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel
3. https://spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/falcon-9-ft/
4. https://simpleflying.com/boeing-737-in-service-stored/
Why? Rockets are intrinsically less efficient and less safe than airplanes. Why would they try to compete for use cases where they are at such a disadvantage, and where they have to-date shown no interest in competing with fixed-wing aircraft?
The closest those companies have done to showing interest in pitching rockets against aircraft is Elon Musk saying that his company will offer ultra-high-speed flights via rocket, which is more like a Concorde-killer 25 years after the Concorde got killed by its own costs.
> Environmental Issues. One reason for insisting on LH2/LOX rather than Kerosene/LOX, hypergolics, or solids/hybrids is that it's clean. We could launch one every minute and contribute less to global warming, ozone layer depletion, and other varieties of atmospheric pollution than 747s crossing the Atlantic every day. Also, exhaust and/or fluffy white clouds resulting from the occasional really bad day aren't harmful to anybody who happens to be downwind.
Except the frontier had fertile lands and vast potential. It was not a cold barren emptiness. You could also make access to Antarctica cheap and affordable at scale. It wouldn't suddenly make it economically sensible to go there
I'm skeptical there is a huge amount of pent up demand that is just itching for lower launch costs. It's just a bunch of telescopes looking up and look down at every possible wavelength and then a bunch of telecommunications equipment.. There are some serious diminishing returns at play here
Tourism.. more telecommunications (ex: starlink).. what else is there to do up there? I don't see it being a huge market. Definitely not enough to fund a colony on Mars or anything like that
Not to mention, space tourism being an eighth of the total tourism market is obviously insane. The total tourism market is gigantic, space tourism would do wonderfully if it it were 0.01% of it (so, 8 billion or so? Probably not enough to warrant an assembly-line approach).
Yes. The majority of the population can handle 3Gs. John Glenn was 77.
> Not to mention, space tourism being an eighth of the total tourism market is obviously insane.
I don't think space tourism becoming an eighth of total tourism is insane. I'd guess the fraction of tourism dollars that are spent on travel reached by plane is a lot higher, maybe about a third or half.
He was in exceptionally good health.
> I don't think space tourism becoming an eighth of total tourism is insane. I'd guess the fraction of tourism dollars that are spent on travel reached by plane is a lot higher, maybe about a third or half.
The cost of a plane ticket is typically less than, say, a quarter of the total spending on a holiday (including hotel, food, attractions, souvenirs). Also, people go to certain destinations to spend time there, they don't go for the plane ride - which is all space tourism can be.
Just think about the number of civilian airports in the world, and compare to the number of locations where rockets can be launched from. There'll be more money to make in taking people to see the rocket launches than in actually putting tourists on rockets, I can guarantee that.
The only way space tourism might catch a break is if a space plane is ever actually successfully designed. That gets rid of many of the problems of rockets. But even then, it's a once in a lifetime experience, not something people would do every year like actual tourism.
Yes, but he was nevertheless more fragile than the majority of the overall population (all ages), which was the original concern you raised.
> The cost of a plane ticket is typically less than, say, a quarter of the total spending on a holiday (including hotel, food, attractions, souvenirs).
Agreed for LEO flights, but (1) I don't see why that difference matters much and (2) the cost breakdown of Mars tourism will similar to international travel now, i.e., 5-30% spent on transportation, and the rest spent on location.
> The only way space tourism might catch a break is if a space plane is ever actually successfully designed.
I don't really see why a space plane would be make a big difference here. Are you thinking of cost or the physical rigors? Space planes still require ~3 gees on launch (unless you're talking about something really exotic like JP Aerospace's Airship to Orbit").
And even IF a colony on Mars is ever created, the amount of tourism it could ever imaginably sustain would be tiny compared to, say, New York or Tokyo or Paris - and neither of those, nor even all three together, are 1/8 of global tourism. Not to mention, a colony on Mars would just be tunnels in a desert (except it's a very very cold and highly radioactive dessert). Only a tiny handful of people would even be conceivably interested in spending months on a cramped rocket to visit it.
Then we spent the next 150 years conveniently writing them out of history.
Due to nonlinearity of the rocket equation some assumptions are really really really off [a] [b]. V2 only has 2500m/s deltaV [5] and the launch vehicle's delta-v needed to achieve low Earth orbit starts around 9.4 km/s [6] (the actual delta-v is typically 1.5–2.0 km/s more for atmospheric drag and gravity drag). [7] Therefore V2 only deliveres (2500/9400)^2 (7% or 1/14 of the needed kinetic energy)
Trouble is we only get to convert 1-4% of the launch mass into payload in LEO with chemical engines. And that's for large rockets with economies of scale.
Sputnik (rocket) Mass: 267,000 kg Payload to LEO 500kg [3]
The smallest orbital rocket is the Japanese SS-520 with the following characteristics: It can launch 3 kg to orbit in 4.4 minutes. It's a modified sounding rocket with three solid-propellant steps. It's only 9.54 m long, 0.52 m dia., and has a mass of 2.6T @ liftoff [google]. The SS-520 rocket cost less than $5 million [google]
Bolting a 2nd stage on top of V2 was tried in [2] programme and with both stages at ~0.7 reliability things only work half the time. Not commercially viable.
Is there a market for small & cheap rockets? [8] What about dual purpose ? W54 "Davy Crockett" Atomic Projectile was the smallest nuke designed to maintain fission and could be carried around in a backpack! The final weapon was 10.862 inches (275.9 mm) in diameter, 15.716 inches (399.2 mm) in length and 50.9 pounds (23.1 kg). I guess this could be worked with. With the current risk of global war everyone should be mass producing a small launcher. However this way we still only get 1cubesat into orbit per $1m, not what the autor aimed at.
To get below $1000/kg into orbit we will need a bigger boat. And that's what SpaceX is doing.
(sorry to not have these in the nice order)
[8] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/36261/why-isnt-the...
[a] assume that our bigger, more complicated (two-stage), and higher tech (LH2/LOX instead of Ethanol/LOX), launcher costs ten times as much as the V2
[b] If our mass produced LH2/LOX launcher equals the performance of the Delta 6925 by placing 3900 kg in LEO, the cost to LEO is US$333/kg; if we achieve better throw-weight, this figure goes down accordingly. If we build the thing so cheap, dumb, and heavy that its payload is only 1000 kg--one metric ton--the cost rises to US$1300/kg, which is still a factor of ten lower than the comparable cost to LEO for Ariane, Atlas, Delta, and Titan.
[1] So yes, a stripped-down stretch-tank engine-augmented two-stage V2-derived rocket, massing 351 tons as opposed to the 12.5 tons in the original, would be able to reach orbit*. :)
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTV-G-4_Bumper
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_(rocket)
[1] https://www.quora.com/If-boosters-were-strapped-on-the-V2-ro...
[5] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/59879/how-much-del... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit [7]
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