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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."
'cause then.. we can have the ultimate motivation for human endeavour.. profit!
Instability in flight, instability in engine power, or instability in structure? All but the last amount to more development. The last often amounts to completely scraping the design and starting over.
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I am not terribly educated on cost and reliability figures for sending payloads into orbit, but it would seem to me that a satellite can't be cheap. When you're looking for options on how to get the bugger into orbit, would you rather choose the status quo for a twice to three times the cost or the upstarts? I guess there will need to be people willing to take the risk and send up a few satellites to show reliability.
But I'm all for it. Competition is a good thing, right?
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More to the point will Insurance Companies be willing to underwrite a launch on a vehicle with no launch history built by a company with no history?
I wish them luck but they have a hellva barrier to entry to overcome.
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We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
With rockets, the craft would be heavily weighed down with the necessary O2 tank. An air-breathing engine would be much lighter, not to mention less expensive.
If a flying car is ever to be practical, it won't be using rockets.
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"The SpaceX Falcon rocket project will specifically target Boeing, by offering the SpaceX Falcon V booster for 60-70% less than Boeing can fly its Delta II and newer Delta IV Medium Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle"
Firstly, does anyone else have a problem with low altitude geosynchronous orbit objects designed by the military being placed in the heavens by the lowest bidder?
Secondly, if they really can do it for 60-70% less why hasn't someone stepped in long before SpaceX? An "Entrenched culture" just isnt a good enough answer for me.
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For the payloads of today, you are right. But first of all, falcon I and especially falcon V is designed to be extremely reliable. Simple technology has a tendency to just work once it is debugged. Just ask the russians.
And second, the main reason satellites are so expensive is that they have to use very exotic materials and low margins to save mass. If you have a cheaper launcher you can build your satellite heavier, cheaper and more rugged.
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Previously mentoned on /. about how some gears were in backwards yet never broke is an example of how tough the specs are.
Mmm... no. That's not about specs, it's an example of how NOT to design mechanical parts.
These gears could be put in two ways, the right way was non-obvious, and when put in the wrong way, the gears more-or-less work (so the problem doesn't show up during testing) until the time of unusual stress.
This really should be a textbook case of how not to do things.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I read the sci.space newsgroups regularly as well as the very good hobbyspace site, and I have heard nothing about this.
Could you elaborate? Or are you just spreading FUD?
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
The key to lowering the cost of launches is mass production and that means emphasizing manufacturing design, rather than rocket design. Yes, you must build something that will fly. But if you don't do a good job building the systems (the factory) that build the systems (the rockets), you will be stuck forever in a high-cost hell of precision, one-off, hand-assembled, hand-tweaked machines. This means using standaridzed parts, designing custom parts that can be mass-produced at low cost, and design easy-to-assemble, easy-to-lauch rockets.
It also means having enough volume that you can afford to invest in factory. This is the real chicken-and-egg problem. Without a high volume of launches, you can't justify the invetsment in a multi-billion dollar rocket factory and streamlined launch process. And without the rocket factory, you can't get the launch price low enough to create the launch volume. I do hope that some of the remaining wealthy internet entrepeneurs invest their collective billions in this endevour.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I've seen the argument that if the launch price went down a lot, the cost of hardware would go down.
If a subsystem didn't cost $10,000/lbs to launch it would be built much, much cheaper.
There would also be a push to standardisation of interfaces and modules.
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When launch costs are lower you don't need satellites that last 15 years and tested to the nines. If I use the shuttle to launch it costs half a billion dollars to get my bird up (although a lot of that is picked up by the taxpayers), so I need something that's guarenteed to work. That means lots of expensive parts, and lots of expensive testing.
If I can launch cheaply I can afford to make cheaper satellites, since the cost of failure is lower. So now I need one less decimal place in my reliability, which means one less decimal place in the price. And I don't need the darned thing to work forever - a five year life might make more sense if I can replace it cheaply.
This makes the number of launches go up. Which makes the cost of the launch go down. Which makes the price of satellites go down. Take this loop a couple of times and you'll get closer to the actual production cost of the rocket, which is very low, in the grand scheme of things.
The only potential clash with Ariane is, as another poster has pointed out, the ASAP ring that Ariane uses to launch small payloads. Falcon is more expensive than an ASAP launch. However, Falcon has a larger payload capacity than an ASAP slot. More importantly, a Falcon payload launches as the primary, rather than as a secondary. That means launching when you want, and to the orbit that you want. For many payloads that makes it worth paying a little more than an ASAP launch.
There are a lot of millionaires who can't afford $20 million but do think that $5 million is a good deal. The former trip is four times as expensive as the latter. You are falling victim to the common fallacy that "the rich" are a nebulous, homogenous group. Some people can afford $20 million for a thrill. Some can afford $5 million. Some can afford $100K. Some can afford $10K. Some can afford $100. There isn't any fixed line between "the rich" and "everybody else".
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Or instead of investing in 4 things that each need to be accomplished in order for cheap space solar power, we could just sink our money into fusion research, and probably accomplish the same thing alot sooner. (and more efficiently). Current fusion technology has reached breakeven in terms of power generation, and has been increasing power generated by fusion reactions by an order of magnitude a decade at least.
Now supposes lunch blows up on the pad. Well, the seagulls are going to have to fight over some hamburger fried in rocket fuel. I am thinking a low-reliable low-cost launcher is OK for humping supplies into orbit. On the other hand, the upper stage needs to be reliable because we don't want those things smashing into the Space Station after what happened with Mir.