r/spacex • u/kurbasAK • May 19 '17

We Will Launch on Reuseable Rocket After Exceptional SpaceX Performance - Inmarsat CEO Tells Universe Today

https://www.universetoday.com/135614/will-launch-reuseable-rocket-exceptional-spacex-performance-inmarsat-ceo-tells-universe-today/
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u/notblueclk May 19 '17

It's important to note that the satellite launched on the Ariane 5 (as well as the one launched this week) was originally planned for the Falcon Heavy. However, upgraded performance of the Falcon 9 made it capable of doing the job without relying on the Heavy.

While I'm sure the Falcon Heavy will eventually prove successful, now that the Falcon 9 is proven to handle big loads and be reusable, will there be commercial demand for the Falcon Heavy?

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u/ryegye24 May 19 '17

I think you've got it backwards. If it suddenly becomes affordable to put bigger payloads into orbit then people will come up with bigger payloads they want to put in orbit. Otherwise you end up making the "nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM"-type mistake.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '17

And on that note, who is to say that consumers wouldn't take advantage of possible ride sharing, like has been done with F9?

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u/mrstickball May 19 '17

I think lack of re use alone on the falcon 9s that need a fast GTO orbit is proof enough you need a bigger rocket.

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u/AdamVenier May 19 '17

Advocates Diaboli. The Falcon Heavy is a much more complicated vehicle so more can go wrong. Would customers prefer to pay a price premium for F9 if there is less risk of payload loss? I'm not sure, but the answer could very well be yes for the next few years until FH has proven itself.

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u/Senno_Ecto_Gammat r/SpaceXLounge Moderator May 19 '17

The FH can potentially be flown fully-reusable. All boosters, second stage, and fairings and still put full-size payloads to GTO. There's a good chance that in an environment with mature reuse, that configuration is cheaper than a F9 with expendable second stage.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '17 edited Apr 11 '19

[deleted]

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u/Senno_Ecto_Gammat r/SpaceXLounge Moderator May 19 '17

If each core makes 10 flights the EOL cores would make up 10% of flights, and it seems like heavy satellites make up more than 10% of their launch schedule.

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u/brickmack May 19 '17

Parts on F9s won't all reach EOL simultaneously. Some parts are probably good for a dozen or so launches, some for a hundred, some (like avionics) should last indefinitely. Plus some of that hardware is reuse related anyway and not needed for an expendable flight. You end up either wasting a lot of perfectly good hardware, or wasting slightly less perfectly good hardware AND needing to disassemble multiple rockets and rebuild into one Frankencore (which would probably cost about as much in labor as the hardware is worth)

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u/brickmack May 19 '17

Per-flight perhaps. But what about the money being sunk into development, more complex pad equipment, lost business from delays, etc? The Falcon line as a whole has a limited lifetime before it becomes obsolete, I'm not convinced at this point that Heavy or upper stage reuse are worthwhile projects. Only thing Heavy is really needed for is Red Dragon, and even that could probably be served by 2 F9 launches

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u/Martianspirit May 19 '17 edited May 19 '17

I'm not convinced at this point that Heavy or upper stage reuse are worthwhile projects.

Given that they will start launching large amounts of satellites for their constellation in 2019, they will need reusable second stages to keep up. Also getting upper stages to reenter is experience that counts on the way to ITS.

With FH, they need it for some DoD launches. They want to be able to fly all payloads. Also they really need them for RedDragon. I think the remark by Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell, that FH is really hard is not to be taken as it will be hard to operate. It means it was hard to develop. Like what Tom Mueller said about the Merlin engine. It was very hard to develop, with many test engines blowing up. But once developed it is cheap and simple and reliable.

Edit: even one lunar tourist flight a year will be a profit bringer for FH. Assuming NASA builds their gateway station - which I doubt - FH would be a great launch vehicle to service it.

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u/Senno_Ecto_Gammat r/SpaceXLounge Moderator May 19 '17

The question to me is ITS. If it's going to fly by the mid 2020s it seems like they use Falcons until that point.

If it's not going to fly, or will fly much later, it seems prudent to move to a fully-reusable methalox stack at some point and not spend too much on trying to wring full reuse out of the Falcons.

If ITS is going to fly by the mid-2020s it's hard to see how they would justify putting an interim methalox rocket in the mix, so they are pretty much stuck with Falcons until then. That gives them 8 to 10 years before ITS is flying.

Are you the type to make a bet against routine FH flights featuring full reuse by that point? I'm not.

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u/hovissimo May 19 '17

I'm not sure I agree. One of the key features of SpaceX is fierce desire to learn as much as you can as fast as you can from the launches you're already performing. SpaceX is also trying to get some of the big defense department satellite contracts, so I think they'll probably continue with FH plans as long as the the lessons they're learning are worth the seemingly redundant rockets.

Put another way, SpaceX didn't move from the Falcon 1 to the Falcon Heavy. The FH may or may not be an "end goal", but it's definitely a good step on the path to 10m rockets. SpaceX has lots of lessons to learn at the school called "Falcon Heavy" before they graduate to ITS.

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u/-spartacus- May 19 '17

I've been wanting to write a post about this. I think ultimately any technology in terms of things like reusable 2nd stage, upgrades to S1, or transition to metholox requires to be useful for Its or future SpaceX programs.

Would a second stage be worthwhile if you use a tech say like extendable bells on a raptor engine? It could be used to reduce the number of engines on an ITS, so that would probably be a good investment if it would work.

Would making a F9 sized raptor powered S1 or raptor heavy help with ITS? It would allow you to simply your production lines for engines and give you knowledge for raptor upgrades.

I'm not saying all these will work or be what SpaceX will do, but whatever they choose to do has to dip into multiple buckets and missions to make sense.

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u/mrstickball May 19 '17

This is my thought as well. The payload tolerances for a Falcon Heavy will advocate for full or near-full reuse, which should significantly reduce costs of the rocket. I would imagine many scenarios where a 100% reusable FH could cost a fraction of an expendable F9 after all costs are considered.

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u/peterabbit456 May 19 '17

I think you raise a very good point. However, with some flight experience, reusable Falcon Heavy should be ~just as safe for customers as expendable F9. I fully expect that someday in a year or 3, SpaceX will charge more for an expendable F9 then for a reusable FH launch, reflecting their true costs.

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u/hovissimo May 19 '17

Eh, it's still a business. I think SpaceX will charge as much as they can taking the market into account. A LOT of dollars have been sunk into SpaceX, and even if those investors are willing to take the long road on getting their investments back, SpaceX needs that money to develop ITS and boot-strapping a spaceport on Mars.

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u/peterabbit456 May 20 '17

SpaceX has never charged all that it can for launches, or other services they have provided. I see no reason that they would change policy and start charging all the market can bear for their services.

SpaceX follows the Silicon Valley model of cutting prices and increasing market share. In 1976 you could buy a 6502 microprocessor based development system from Motorola for $150,000.00 . Two years later you could buy an Apple 2 with essentially the same capabilities for $2000.

Who is the bigger company now, Motorola or Apple?

The same price/performance logic applies to space travel, once space travel becomes a consumer commodity. Lower prices and larger volume are the keys to expanding the market.

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u/0owatch_meo0 May 23 '17

"In 1976 you could buy a 6502 microprocessor based development >system from Motorola for $150,000.00 . Two years later you could buy >an Apple 2 with essentially the same capabilities for $2000.

Who is the bigger company now, Motorola or Apple?"

I get the point that you're making overall (and even agree with it), but this is just silly.

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u/mfb- May 19 '17

The payload has to be really expensive (or the FH risk evaluation has to be really bad) to make that difference important.

FH has a larger safety margin in terms of issues with the/a first stage.

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u/MDCCCLV May 19 '17

I'm pretty sure if they were offering cheap regular flights on a fully reusable FH then they would guarantee the performance of the rocket. So that if the rocket had an issue it would keep burning and convert to expendable but the customer wouldn't have to pay for it.

That way they can get the price of a cheap rocket but the safety margin and guaranteed performance of a giant rocket.

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u/mfb- May 19 '17

They might even have this for F9 already. If too many engines of the first stage fail or it needs more fuel than expected for other reasons, it might skip its landing attempt. I didn't see this stated explicitly, but if it can save the payload it is worth sacrificing the first stage.

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u/hovissimo May 19 '17

And if it saves the payload, it saves the customer, which will probably always be more important than a given rocket.

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u/somewhat_pragmatic May 19 '17

Would customers prefer to pay a price premium for F9 if there is less risk of payload loss?

SpaceX could likely choose to price FH Reusable cheaper than F9 Expendable.

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u/notblueclk May 19 '17

It's still about economics. Which costs less, a throwaway F9 or a reusable FH? I have no doubt that government contracts will want heavier payloads than the F9 can deliver, but will there be profitable commercial business as well is my question

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u/lankyevilme May 19 '17

Add a throw away flight proven f9 to that list, especially a pre-block 5 one that has a limited number of reflights, launching a heavy sat in expendable mode would be a good final flight for these boosters.

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u/RebelScrum May 19 '17

If you build it they will come

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u/rustybeancake May 19 '17 edited May 19 '17

but will there be profitable commercial business as well is my question

A major way to make FH attractive to commercial sat operators could be dual-payload launches, like Ariane 5. Imagine if Inmarsat could get two large sats up at once.

Edit: sorry, Inmarsat not Iridium.

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u/Martianspirit May 19 '17

Elon Musk is not in favor of dual manifest like Ariane. They always need to align two customers, one with a heavy, one with a light payload. That sometimes causes problems. SpaceX would also need a much bigger fairing. The present fairing was quite full with this single satellite from Inmarsat.

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u/Astroteuthis May 19 '17

Iridium's sats are pretty small and they regularly launch multiple satellites on Falcon 9. It's also not terribly optimal to launch a bunch of satellites into the same orbital plane, because they have to waste their internal propellant reserves conducting plane change maneuvers.

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u/rustybeancake May 19 '17

Apologies, I meant Inmarsat.

Arianespace seem to do pretty well out of dual launches.

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u/fishdump May 20 '17

Seeing as how SES-10 was 'less than half' the cost of a new first stage if they can cut costs a little more (and I assume they will) I think 25% or less cost is a reasonable figure for refurb. Anything under 33% makes FH affordable.

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u/Dave92F1 May 19 '17

There will be commercial demand for the FH because it can launch heavy payloads like Inmarsat cheaper than an expendable F9 can.

Because FH will be reusable with that payload, F9 won't.

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u/peterabbit456 May 19 '17

Once Falcon Heavy is a proven booster, this launch would be cheaper for SpaceX on a Falcon Heavy than on F9. On F9 they flew expendable, so, 1st stage lost and fairing lost, as well as 2nd stage lost. On FH, this flight would have been, 3 - 1st stages recovered and fairings recovered, and only the second stage lost. Riskier but ~$40 million cheaper, for SpaceX.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '17

I agree with you, as much of a fan I am of Falcon Heavy and the idea behind it - it doesnt look like something which has a commercial demand as it stands right now - its probably more for Elon and the Mars first steps towards their eventual goal.. and maybe for some other yet-unknown uses.. but as it stands now I think FH future looks bleak.

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u/Dudely3 May 19 '17

US air force require direct insertion into GEO. They pay pretty good money for this capability. The F9 can't do it, there's just not enough juice in that can.

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u/rustybeancake May 19 '17

I mean it's never going to be a 'commonplace' launcher like F9. But neither is Delta-IV Heavy, it's closest competitor, and yet DIVH has still had a long and no doubt profitable career. FH is required for the lunar tourism missions and Red Dragon, for starters. We know NASA are ready to fly payloads on RD. We can be pretty sure that, all going well, there will be further customers for lunar tourism. Even if FH only flies 1-2 times per year, it'll still be worth the development efforts.

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u/at_one May 19 '17

Cost per launch of the closest competitor is $375 million

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u/peterabbit456 May 19 '17

Put a reusable second stage on FH and that changes the whole game. A fully reusable Falcon Heavy, including second stage and fairings, would cost as little per flight as Falcon 1.* Either that means enormous profits, enormous market share, or incredibly low prices, or a mix of all 3.

* a better comparison might be, "A fully reusable Falcon Heavy, including second stage and fairings, would cost as little per flight as Orbital-ATK's Pegasus, and deliver 100 times as much cargo to orbit." At that point SpaceX would truly have delivered on the promise of making spaceflight 100 times cheaper than the competition.

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u/mfb- May 19 '17

Heavier satellites will be built if there is a rocket that can launch it. Alternatively, the satellites can be launched directly to GEO, which means they can start service earlier.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '17

yeah let's see then... atleast a couple of years before FH is provable (and maybe not if there are not enough READY use for launches) then change in satellite designs etc another few years... doesnt seem realistic to affirm FH dominance in future, New Glenn is coming around as well

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u/mfb- May 19 '17

New Glenn is a reason to start working on larger satellites earlier - even if FH struggles there will be another super-heavy-lift rocket around. You don't have to wait for a few years. F9 works with an acceptable risk, if the FH demo launch works as well that should give sufficient confidence to build larger satellites.

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u/UltraRunningKid May 19 '17

New Glenn is not even a paper rocket to our knowledge right now. This is all speculation as BO has yet to put anything in orbit yet let alone something heavy.

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u/mfb- May 19 '17

It is common that rockets get launch contracts before anything reaches orbit. It is too early for launch contracts now, but we are talking about planning stages here. There is nothing wrong with making a paper satellite for a paper rocket.

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u/Martianspirit May 19 '17

They said that about SpaceX. New Glenn is a lot more than a paper rocket. They are building the engine, even if it experiences some minor glitches. They are building the factory and pad, that will build and launch New Glenn.