Real World Marketing Concepts Creep Into Rocket Launches
SpaceX Early-adopter SES Ready To Reuse Falcon 9 For the Right Price, SpaceNews
“Satellite fleet operator SES on June 17 said it wants to reuse the first stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the SES-9 satellite by September for a future, discounted SpaceX launch, and is awaiting the response of SpaceX. In a presentation to investors in London, SES Chief Technical Officer Martin Halliwell said he remains convinced that Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX is on the verge of proving its reusability thesis, which is that recovering, refurbishing and reusing a Falcon 9 first stage will dramatically reduce launch costs.”
Keith’s note: Certified pre-owned rockets anyone?
Likely SpaceX sticks this next Dragon flight, if so, most qualify testing will be done on that. SES 9s falcon booster will be the first full throttle falcon 9.
Looks pretty likely to me that this booster is the famous historic SES SpaceX booster that gets reused a few times and heralds the Affordable Reusable Space Age
The ARSA maybe here 🙂
http://www.ibtimes.com/spac…
I AGREE with Musk. So much for the ARSA lol
A little cheap rocket crashes into a couple barges and money starts flying out of their pockets. 🙂
When I took statistics, outliers were not considered to be indications of a trend 🙂
Yeah, that plot is pretty worthless in terms of statistical value, but it does look impressive so long as you don’t think about it.
Ahh Gee-whiz Mr. Squared
🙂
When I took statistics, outliers meant your methodology just might be in trouble 🙂
Can I get factory air?
More prep for the ARSA
http://www.dailybreeze.com/…
This raises an interesting question, namely, who owns the rocket?
If SpaceX presently writes contracts for launch services only, then SpaceX maintains ownership over the vehicle – all the way up and all the way down. This seems most likely to be the current situation, as I’ve not heard a peep about a launch customer wanting to claim ownership over a landed stage.
However, what if SpaceX started selling ownership of the rocket itself, with an additional contract for operating it, recovering the boost stage, refurbishment, storage, etc.? This seems closer to what airlines do today. They buy airplanes and then either hire their own workforce to run and maintain them, or contract that out to third parties.
Interesting idea however I think that is way down the line. An airline owns (actually leases in most cases) their aircraft so that they can control when and where it flies. However keep in mind that an airline can “launch” its own airplanes, it doesn’t need Boeing’s help for example to fly a 737 from Newark to Miami. Whereas SpaceX must be involved in every aspect of launching a Falcon, and it must launch from one of their existing pads. So I’m not sure how much benefit there would be to owning a booster, which would spend most of its time sitting in a hangar. In theory it could mean launching sooner if they don’t have to wait for a booster to become available, but they still would be dependent on SpaceX schedule and availability of launch pads so I don’t know how much it would really help compared to the cost. Maybe in the future when launching rockets becomes much more routine than it is now and more like airline/cargo operations
In terms of making rockets available for third party ownership and operation I would put my money on XCOR. The Lynx seems to be designed for easy turn around from all the presentations I have seen on it. Yes, it is suborbital, but you need to start somewhere.
‘Start somewhere’?
That’s the thing I’ve never understood about suborbital- why even bother? I mean unless it’s for scientific research or for joy-rides- and even those markets will be scooped up by the real deal soon enough.
I’m missing something here.
The number of sub-orbital flights annually exceed the number of orbital launches and have done so throughout the history of spaceflight, so its a substantial market, it just doesn’t get the same level of press coverage so the average person is not aware of it. Moreover its an elastic market so the availability of an easily reusable vehicle like the XCOR Lynx will make an impact.
And its not about joy rides. The majority of current flights are for atmospheric research, and not in danger of orbital flights replacing them. Other uses are for a variety of science, microgravity and educational missions and the majority of these, because of the flexibility and convenience of suborbital flights, are also unlikely to be in danger from “real deal” launch systems as you refer to them.
Also being as single vehicle it makes turn around quicker and easier, until orbital systems that consist of multiple stages that need restacking and integration. This is why its a good place to start to work up to SSTO systems.
There’s been a sub-orbital science market for a long time, and a tourism market might be sustained for the same reason, it is vastly cheaper. But yes, a limited market certainly.
Well, yes. Start something. As in developing technology with applications beyond suborbital flight. Even if suborbital is a limited market, you can roll the dollars you get from rich joy-riders into productive research and development.
Actually, I suggested something similar in 2013. There was a workshop on scientific uses for the new, commercial sub-orbitals. Someone showed a nice design for a UV telescope which could fly on a XCOR Mark III Lynx. Since I’m interested in UV astronomy, and know it will be back down to sounding rockets after HST, that interested me. So I asked the XCOR representative about the cost of a long-term lease and operations. Their numbers weren’t too different from the operating budget for an Earth-based observatory. So the idea of NASA renting a Lynx as their UltraViolet Telescope Facility, isn’t all that wilder than the existence of NASA’s InfraRed Telescope Facility in Hawai’i.
Best of all its also mobile. You could move it from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern as needed.
If spacex agrees, SES will surely lose insurance coverage for their satellites launches, if by any chance they had insurance.
I’m not so sure. Insurance guys are pretty hard-nosed. They will simply assess the risk and then attach a dollar amount. While the initial reuse flights might have big price tags, later ones should see dramatically lower insurance rates.
And I mean hugely lower, as SpaceX starts to show that rockets don’t have to blow up.
I want able to find precise amounts paid by SpaceX or anyone else for insurance, partly because insurance is complex and partly because I didnt look very hard. I did find this discussion from December 2013:
http://www.businessinsuranc…
You’ve thought about this more than I have, obviously.
I think they ought to self-insure in any case. Naively, if the probability of a loss-of-mission failure were 10% with a previously used rocket, just budget a few % more than that of the cost of rocket, launch, and spacecraft. Insurance companies are not charitable institutions, after all.
If Musk ever makes Space travel cheap enough to get to Mars he going to have another problem. I always laughed when Robert Zubrin would say that we can terraform mars to be as warm as it was in its past. Well it never was warm and if they do terraform they will be buried in snow for a few thousand years till the sun blows it bone dry.
http://m.space.com/29693-an…
There’s a very lengthy exploration of Mars terraforming by Kim Stanley Robinson in his three ‘Mars’ novels. In the end he comes to a slightly different conclusion.
But those novels were based on our understanding of Mars in the 1990’s. In the last twenty years science has learned a lot more, and most of it show Mars as a much more hostile world than it was shown to be in those novels.
For example, researchers recently reported that instead of being covered with liquid oceans in the past Mars probably had massive glaciers.
Only read Red Mars. Got bored when it got to civilized
I did too, in parts, but it’s worth staying with it, if for no other reason to learn that the future martian ladies had the ability to purr (yep, like cats), and they found *interesting* ways to use that ability.
We live on a planet with a pre-existing ecosystem perfectly suited for human life, self-regulating, sustainable, and we can’t even figure out how not to screw it up… but we’re going to go to a planet that CAN’T sustain life (at least complex life) and build an ecosystem from scratch?
Science fiction is great stuff, but too many people have lost track of the part where it’s fiction.
If there were 4-6 certified launch vehicles that could launch any standard capsule and the capsules could be reused 20-30 times.. I could see buying a capsule and just schedule with the launch vehicle of your choice.
Lots of work here for the lawyers, no doubt. I don’t know enough about the specifics of th developing airplane industry in the early 20th to draw close parallels but certainly that’s one place to look for ideas on how rockets and rocket ownership could develop.
This rocket was launched by a little old lady only on Sundays.