Elon Musk's SpaceX Offers Low-Cost Rockets

HobbySpacer writes "The cover article of the latest issue of Aviation Week looks at SpaceX and how its Falcon line of rockets threatens to shake up the space launch industry. Founded by Elon Musk, who also started PayPal, SpaceX is developing the Falcon I (first flight this summer) and Falcon V (first flight in 2005) that will cost as little as 20-30% of what competitors like Orbital Sciences and Boeing charge for comparable vehicles."

Comments

Well, it had better be significantly cheaper ...

[hattig]

http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/267 ::
"That competition is caused by an oversupply of launch vehicles in a soft market according to a recent report by Booz-Allen and Hamilton mentioned in Spacelift Washington. That report notes that the "excess capacity" in the launch vehicle market is currently at 35 percent of the market and growing, creating a downward pressure on prices. That excess capacity may not deter new entrants into the launch vehicle market, such as Japan's H-2A and India's GSLV, but it will prevent them from gaining more than a small piece of the overall market."

It will have to go up against a lot of established players, most notably Ariane with their 12,000 tonne payload launch system, Ariane 5. I don't know what a launch on Ariane 5 costs at the moment though.

Re:reliability?

[cmowire]

Actually, it's a bunch of equations in a Linear Programming problem.

Part of the reasons why satellites are so expensive is because the cost per pound is so high. Reduce the cost per pound, you need to spend less time and money making it so lightweight, which means you can spend time and money making it last longer, cheaper, more functional, etc.

Reliability for unmanned launches ends up being such that, currently, 98% launch reliability is "good enough" because going beyond that ends up being far too expensive.

It already has...

[DoorFrame]

It already is cheap enough for tourists... just not cheap enough for tourists like you. Dennis Tito went into space with the Russians in 2001, and Mark Shuttleworth went in 2002. Of course, this cost them tens of millions of dollars, but they were tourists none the less. In addition, there's another tourist, an American, scheduled to fly later this year.

Now, admittedly these have all been based on national programs taking on a "charity" case now and again either for a few bucks, or for the attention that it gives them, but I'd say it's only a matter of time before a private company starts really marketing these trips to the extremely wealthy. If you can bring the price down to a million dollars a trip, you'll have your self a line of people out the door ready and willing to go. This is the ultimate in conspicuous consumption, Thorsten Veblen would be proud.

Elon Musk Lecture notes, Stanford 10/08/03

[amigoro]

Quick overview of his old companies: Zip2, Paypal

Zip2 - print-media-to-web software, clients included KnightRidder, etc, sold for $300,000,000 in cash to Compaq

PayPal - started as idea for one web site for all a person's financial needs. Email-money-to-someone feature was a quicky add-on feature, took one day of initial development, "classic viral marketting", 1 million customers at start of 2nd year of operations, went public in 2002, sold in june to Ebay for 4.5 billion in stocks, now worth 3billion.

Was doing background space research in '01-02, why did we stumble after Apollo? Computing analogy, mainframes filling rooms in 1970s, etc.

The idea he settled into would generate public interest, advance both science and engineering and be privately funded. It was a $10-20million Mars lander. The lander would carry seeds and nutrients, a miniature greenhouse, it would attempt to grow plants, the furthest life would have travelled. Went to Moscow looking for rockets, "We don't buy Russian cars, kitchen appliances or computers. Why can the Russians build such reliable, low cost launch vehicles?"

friends with group of aero-engineers from Mercury onward, put together a feasibility study. This happened at the same time he was selling PayPal, at this point he settled on "doing space" as his next business enterprise.

Space now - US govt. spaceflight in bad shape, quick recap of Shuttle status, losses, expenses, dangerous.

Slide - problems of Shuttle - kind of standard complaints.

Slide - OSP/Orbital Space Plane - "Pretty Darn Expensive" -
$300-400million/flight, Delta-IV Heavy is $200mil alone.

Between NASA and the industrial partners, things have traditionally not been under budget and under time.

Soyuz has a good (safety) record, and only costs about $60mil/flight.

Russian economy is size of Belgian economy.

China's program is only current effort that could spur any new government space programs, be it NASA, ESA, etc

Slide - dawn of a new era of space exploration like DARPA, NASA could support entrepreneurs. Burt Rutan, Scaled, Jeff Bezos, SpaceX could all benefit from NASA as enabling customer.

Slide - Armadillo Aerospace

Slide - Bezos' Blue Origin

Slide - SpaceX -

Falcon is a 2-stage orbital rocket, initial target is satelite launch business small commsats- revenue base long-term aim is human spaceflight super-heavy lift, Apollo-class rocket for Moon, Mars, SpaceX "Holy Grail"

Video - Merlin main engine test
Video - Upper stage engine test

First flight will be from SpaceX's pad at Vandenburg AFB, aiming for March 2004, a Navy satelite


QA -
comparison of Zip2, PayPal

PP had 30 fulltime engineers, both were made of small teams, software-based products flat hierarchy, best idea wins, everyone in each company was an equity stakeholder on development, pick a path, do it instead of vacilating on design decisions both companies were very product focused.

q- biggest stumbling blocks for space entrepreneurs?

a - stifling regulation, jumping through regulator's hoops. Rockets are still munitions, lack of regulations on software encouraged development, Silicon Valley as "Libertarian Paradise"

Falcon has been the fastest development time ever for an orbital vehicle.

(basic rocket/space questions)

Rocket development, "What makes space expensive?" - Low launch rates, 2/% of rocket's mass to orbit low cost launch suffers from chicken-and-egg problem, need cheaper flights to get a bigger volume of flights, need volume for cheaper flights. (he doesn't say this, but Internet entrepreneurs like him
have the resources to solve the chicken-egg problem)

Compares Falcon to Pegasus, costs of $6 vs $25 million/flight

Q - XPrize - will it succeed in brining CATS, How did SpaceX get Navy contract?

A- likes the XPrize, compares Carmac, etc, a very good thing. Mentions that

Pressure fed systems

[amightywind]

The most interesting thing about the Falcon X second stage is that it is pressure fed. This simplifies the rocket design at the expense of increasing its size. Check out this old but interesting article which discusses many ideas which the folks at FalconX seemed to have taken to heart.

Re:Pressure fed systems

[mrright]

The second stage is quite cool in other aspects too:

-It does not use liquid hydrogen, so the propellants can be stored for a few weeks.

-It uses heated helium for propellant settling and gimballing and dual redundant torch igniters for ignition, so it can be restarted basically indefinitely as long as there is some propellant left.

-As a pressure fed stage it is extremely rugged, so the empty stage could be reused as the hull of a space station. That would make most sense for the falcon V, since the falcon I upper stage is not big enough.

Re:What they don't mention

[bughunter]

The top-level comment was an attempt at humor by misinterpretation of the reference to 'Falcon,' in this case, the F-16 Falcon and its [unintentional?] inherent longitudinal aerodynamic instability in flight. More information can be found here.

Unfortnately, such attempts at misinterpreted humor often fail because of the obscurity of the alternate interpretation, as in this case.

Overall funny rating: 2.5 out of a possible 5.0 (Weak). [Not to be confused with slashdot moderation scores, of course. Everyone knows those are a joke.]

Attribution! Re:Elon Musk Lecture notes, Stanford

[J05H]

Dude! How about some attribution on that file? You copied my notes!! Obviously, putting them on sci.space.policy puts them in the public domain, but how about a shout-out for a couple hour's worth of transcription and editting?

Jon Goff pointed me toward the lecture video a couple months ago. I saw your notes and gosh do they look familiar:

My sci.space.policy lecture notes, posted 14.12.2003 titled Elon Musk Lecture notes, Stanford 10/08/03

That said, Elon rocks! Falcon will be cheap enough that new businesses beyond comm sats may become viable. Entrpreneurs have postulated a "sweet spot" in pricing where widely available tourism, water mining, maybe Space Solar Power become viable. Russian Dnepr rockets almost hit that spot (offered @ $700/lb in late 90s), but we Americans have to pay significantly more for them, a rule to keep home-grown rocket companies "competitive". Yeah, free market and all. Anyway, the Falcon looks to be about to completely shake up the launch market. Imagine Falcon flying from the SeaLaunch platform?

Now, can you please give me a little credit, Amigoro? And you forgot to include my intro paragraph.

Josh