Elon Musk Now Flies Used Rockets
Interesting economic potential ahead for @Spacex But since they now block access to certain media reps its hard to ask what their plans are
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) March 31, 2017
FYI @SpaceX can't afford to fly new rockets any more so they re-fly used ones & land them on barges operated by minimum wage droids #SES10 pic.twitter.com/bWcnsbYYbB
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) March 30, 2017
Man I would sure like to hear the talk around the ole’ water coolers tomorrow at ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and several foreign state space program offices…
The future is coming and the dinosaurs will either become birds or go extinct.
I’ve got a feeling that Boeing and Lockheed-Martin are happy for ULA to go extinct. Being anything other than a heavily government-subsidised monopoly isn’t to their tastes.
If that is true, they should just sell ULA to private investors right now.
Becoming a bird (partial reusability of a stage: like parachuting engines only) won’t be enough. They need to evolve straight from a dinosaur to a mammal (full reusability of stages) in order to compete.
Blue Origin’s reaction will also be interesting (or entertaining.)
I’m not sure they’ll have much of a reaction given that their approach has been completely different. One reuse of a stage that took four months to tear down and refurbish is not likely to be “reusability” in their minds.
Blue has designed their engines (and their one reusable suborbital stage) from the start to be fully reusable without tearing them down. Incorporating features like fluid bearings in the turbopumps should reduce wear and tear to a bare minimum. Blue has been working on reuse from the bottom up.
SpaceX has tried to add reuse to an essentially expendable stage with top down bolt-ons and due to early failures has had to evolve their approach over time. So, the two approaches have been fundamentally different from the beginning.
The four month delta hardly predicts the future. I’d expect a similar tear down of any rocket designed for reuse after initial flight. Lots to learn about wear patterns; hard to write a manual showing techs where to look or service until then.
In fact I wouldn’t expect the reuse cadence to pick up dramatically until half a dozen have flown and been inspected in detail.
Agreed. Luckily Falcon 9 first stages aren’t terribly expensive to make. The current stages reportedly will only be reused once because of issues they’ve found and how long it takes the current versions to be refurbished. But, they reportedly have an upgraded version of the first stage in the works (V5) that should make reuse quicker and cheaper and allow them to hopefully reuse the stage as many as ten times without tearing them apart for inspection and refurbishment like they did this first stage.
You’re making some assumptions that I don’t feel are valid. Keep in mind, as much progress as BO has made, it still (as of today) hasn’t even conducted a single, full-up ground test of its main BE-4 engine; much less build a real orbital launch vehicle, flown them dozens of times, returned them, reused them, etc.
In short: SpaceX is working off of hard-won experience; BO has great goals, and it’s fantastic that the US now has several active rocket companies working on future rockets, not to mention human-rated spacecraft, etc. But BO is still at the point SpaceX essentially was approximately 8 years ago or so. And SpaceX has had to change a lot in the 8 years of hard-won experience; experience that BO does not- yet- have.
Blue Origin is definitely taking a high risk approach by jumping from their tiny little suborbital stage straight to a two stage to orbit launch vehicle that looks to be quite large. And yes, they have yet to fire a full BE-4, but they are getting close. We’ll see how that goes.
As long as BE-4 is successful, they can make some money selling engines to ULA for Vulcan. Blue Origin’s approach is surely unique.
It took several months for Blue Origin to re-fly New Shepard 2 the first time.
It’s relatively easy to send a man to Mars with a blank check. The real challenge is to reduce the cost enough to make human spaceflight self-sustaining.
Oh really?
Well, I’d say so. Keeping the cost of human spaceflight to Mars down to a sustainable level is a major challenge. I don’t think anyone would disagree. Relative to _that_, doing so with a blank check is easy. Not easy is an absolute sense, but relatively easy.
First, no one has a blank check. Second, nothing easy about going to Mars. Many gloss over the facts, but it’s not easy. It takes smart people and experience.
“Relatively easy” means one thing is easier than another, not that either of them is easy in an absolute sense. Going to Mars for $100 billion is easier than going to Mars for $1 billion.
I get your point, but would say that the blank-check has essentially been NASA’s approach since Apollo. Keith’s recent post about 72% overhead comes to mind.
In fact it appears that NASA simply takes the position that it’s gonna take a bazillion dollars, period, and until we have it there won’t be much progress.
So? NASA launched used space shuttles for decades before donating them to museums 🙂
at costs of about a billion dollars per flight despite the reusability. Don’t get me wrong, the shuttles were a great leap forward, but so is this.
Yes I saw the wink so I realize that it was tongue in cheek. But it is worth explaining to people who might not know it that the SRB’s were reused but they eventually found that it cost just as much to reuse them as it would have to just let them sink into the Atlantic. Part of the booster was recovered, i.e. the SSME’s and the electronics in the Orbiter which controlled the launch. But the fuel tanks were expended every time. And the SSME’s required huge amounts of maintenance between flights.
In fairness they were working with 1970’s technology, as well as a lot of unrealistic demands in terms of capability. An amazing machine for sure, but the cost is probably why nearly four decades after the Shuttle first launched, reusability has until now been largely ignored as being impractical.
Then a guy came along who decided that it was the right idea, just the wrong implementation. I don’t remember a lot of people cheering Musk on a few years ago when he first starting talking about it, except for this site and maybe a few other pockets of optimism. Many of us just felt it in our bones that this company was going to lead a revolution in space travel.
For those of us, today is a very, very big day.
Musk’s most important innovation was not reusability per se, it was the recognition that launch cost had to be radically reduced to create a commercial market. When the Falcon appeared no commercial satellite had been launched from US soil in years. We simply weren’t competitive. Musk captured a massive share of the commercial satellite market even without reusability. He is adopting reusability to lower cost and win even more market share.
The Shuttle, in contrast, embraced reusability as a Nixon administration requirement without controlling or even accurately measuring cost. It’s not suprising that we ended up with a reusable system that was as expensive as any expendable. Estimates of shuttle operating cost early in its development were in error by a factor of roughly 100. Why was the Shuttle so expensive to operate? Almost every hands-on tech I spoke to had ideas, but these observations and experience were not collected at the end of the program and I would venture to say that today it would be impossible to do so.
how many times do you think he will plan to reuse each first stage? shuttle had 100 flight airframe rating but obviously we never got anywhere close to that plus all the upgrades/replacements but I wonder what his plan is for how much life each first stage. does launch price he charges go down if you use a three time flown versus only once flown? what about launch insurance does that go up with each reuse due to risk of failure due to wear/tear?
In comments today they said “at least 10.”
I don’t remember the exact number, but the SpaceX plan is for about ten flights per first stage before either replacement or major maintenance. That’s an important difference from the Shuttle. All Shuttle reuse involved major maintenance between flights. For the Falcon 9, SpaceX is shooting for just retesting and refueling, and possibly some minor maintenance, between flights.
As for the price, I’ve seen a press report that SES got a discount for today’s launch, but the number wasn’t mentioned. Nor have I seen any numbers on insurance costs for launches with a “flight proven” first stage.
SES had been looking for a 50% discount. They’ve kept the agree discount close to their respective vests. SpaceX has said they plan to offer a 10% discount for going with “flight-proven” hardware going forward. The word on insurance for this flight was that it was less than 1% different than for a standard launch.
I guess that 10% discount is surprising. Thought it would be much larger.
As I understand it (read it in the Planetary Society blogs), you get 10% for “flight-proven,” and another 30% if your flight doesn’t require expendable mode.
Thanks. Apparently I missed that.
My gut feeling is that I don’t think insurance costs will go up much compared to the cost of insuring a brand-new rocket. Keep in mind that, despite the hoopla, only about half of the rocket was used. The whole 2nd stage, including the payload fairing, was brand new. An insurance company would know this full well.
Your gut is correct. Insurance costs didn’t change.
8 engines re-used is 8/9ths the engines on the rocket, so far more than half.
Nine of 10.
Do we know what was reworked or replaced between the two launches. I am sure it’s not like it was for the SRBs, from what I have heard, they were basically gutted between each launch and can hardly be considered truly reusable. Particularly then engines, how many launches can they get out of one?
If Musk intends to follow his ‘airline’ example, then the answer ‘as many times as the engineers are satisfied is safe’. There is probably a projected life-span of the parts but some of those can doubtless be changed but I’m sure they’ll be keeping an eye on hull metal fatigue to ensure there isn’t any structural failures waiting to happen under launch dynamic loads.
Musk said a few times with this version. He said he will stop recovery. He will recover mark 5. Did not say how many times. From a few months back.
What remains to be seen is if NASA, now a big future user of Falcon 9’s ,pays for ”new’ 1st stages,,,or takes a cheaper price for the used ones.
They’ve already said that they want expendable F9 and expendable Dragon 2 for commercial crew.
I remember NASA saying they were looking at it. They will reuse a Dragon next flight.
New or expendable? Are you saying SpaceX wouldn’t be allowed to recover and reuse the core from a commercial crew launch? NASA never objected to recovery of a Falcon 9 first state on a commercial resupply launch.
Could someone clarify the “minimum wage droids” part? I saw a story from a dubious source about some sort of robot being sighted on the landing barge, but that’s all I know about it.
Musk talked about the robots tonight.
Did anyone else catch the post-flight press conference? Musk said with the BFR portion of the ITS it is possible to have a flight rate of once per *hour*. I imagine launching a tanker five times to refuel the BFS in orbit can be done all in one day according to that, even if it takes say an additional hour to transfer the fuel. Little boil-off with that rate!
I read that they recovered the fairing. A steerable parachute was used. It has been found washed up on a beach before. So it must reenter no problem. It cost 6 million $. So that will nearly double the cost savings of this flight of 10%. Musk also said they will try to recover the 2nd stage someday.
I read somewhere they were possibly looking at a 2nd stage recovery attempt on the Falcon Heavy demo flight later this year, although only a small likelihood of success I imagine any data gathered would be invaluable for future attempts and just as with the initial spectacular first stage RUD’s practice makes perfect.
I don’t think they have enough fuel and lox reserves on site to support that. The storage facilities and plumbing at the pad would have to be massive.
Now do it again… and again… and again. Work the bugs out and try to deliver on those alleged cost savings!
This reminds me of scene in The Wizard of Oz movie when Dorothy’s house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East and killed her. Watch out Dorothy, the Wicked Witch of the West is coming after ya. Just splash a little water on her, and take her broom to the Wizard of Oz, so you can go to Mars!
Why push for 24-hour turnaround? Better to use other available used first stages and reach an optimum maintenance vs quickness ratio?
If you watch the BFR video (the one with the teeny peeps up on a gangway), the boosters would land at the launch site and are refueled. I suppose that’s what he’s looking for- just like commercial airliners, which are kept in the sky flying as much as humanly possible. This would require very short ( one hour?) turn arounds.
Now that you mention it, I don’t think that a one hour or even a one day turnaround makes much sense. One hour, or typically less, for aircraft makes sense because it takes 15 to 30 minutes to get the passengers on board. The turnaround work is done in parallel.
Mating a payload with a launch vehicle takes quite a bit longer than that, and the customers aren’t going to be eager to skip things like pre-launch checkouts. For something like their planned Interplanetary Transport System, the passengers are going to be spending three to five months on board. Getting them and their luggage on and settled is going to take more than an hour, and potentially more than a day. I just don’t see rushing the maintenance crews for a one day turnaround when the launch would have to wait on the payload to be ready.
More likely they’re thinking of one-hour turn around for the tankers, not the passenger ships. Still, I agree it’ll probably take more than an hour for check-out.
Yea good points. I’ve been lulled into the airliner analogy – listening to Mr. Musk, no doubt.
Still and even allowing for the usual hyperbole, maybe not an hour, given the details you’ve listed. Even a week, though, would be monumental.
If you watched the house videos closely during the broadcast, you see that SpaceX took apart the entire engine cluster during the 4-month refurbishment . Each engine was visible on the shop floor. I’m sure they got a thorough look-see with a gang of engineers and their borescopes to determine how much wear had occurred. Especially that center engine that does the most work in all three firings – ascent , boostback, landing . So when SpaceX says they could fly in a 24 hour turnaround in (maybe) two years’ time , it will be because they have a lot of real world data on Merlin performance. They are even tweaking the core booster and engines as we speak . The so-called Block 5 version of the F9 booster will be in the firing order later this summer or fall… more robust engines optimized for withstanding reentry and turnaround; more fuel and better landing legs. It doesn’t look like they plan to swap out many if any engines for reflights , eventually. Or maybe just the center Merlin(s).
It’s worth mentioning that the first Falcon Heavy triple will be flown later this year using two used Falcon cores outboard of a virgin center core. That shows SpaceX has some serious confidence in their little wizard engines. I’d kill to be a fly on the wall at Boeing and Lockheed and Arianespace…
One more thing— did they get the fairing shells back in one piece ? They do sorta remind me of a canoe. A $ 1 million canoe.
$6 million canoe:
http://fortune.com/2017/04/…
This is arguable the most important flight for our future in 2017. Falcon Heavy will be wildly exciting with the possible recovery of three first stages, but if something goes wrong then Space X will methodically fix it as they have always done in the past. I do not see an improved Dragon designed for manned flight failing to dock with the ISS this November since so many earlier Dragons have docked with the ISS in the past. I am glad Space X is looking towards the future and not just redoing the past with legacy systems.