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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."
Ive always wanted to rocket into space at an affordable price and parachute down.
I cant see any problems with this plan.
If I max out my credit I will be 3/5900ths of the way to my own launch...woo hoo! Yay for the people who need this stuff though.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
Now the real question is: Where the hell are you going to go?
You can send two up and still probably get it done with the 50% failure rate.
Is the instability that a lot of people found when testing the falcon. I am surprised how positive this article is.
'cause then.. we can have the ultimate motivation for human endeavour.. profit!
Considering the high cost of most payloads, do you think most companies will jump on board with them having no proven launch record in the hopes of saving some cash? Even with insurance, the considerable delays caused by losing a payload would likely outweigh any savings made by using one of their launch vehicles. That's not to say that they won't produce some great hardware, but it may be an awfully slow start for them.
With Boeing in its sights, SpaceX ironically wanted to validate its own Falcon I calculations against high-quality Boeing Delta hardware and found a Boeing-discarded Delta II interstage section in a Hollywood, Calif., junkyard on which to make those calculations.
Nice to know they leave this stuff lying around...
*BAM!*
Damn! That dense block of unbroken text just jumped out right in front of me. Thank goodness my browser has airbags.
Everyone else OK?
--- Ban humanity.
It makes me smell sweet and alluring.
--- Ban humanity.
The falcon first stage, which represents the bulk of the mass of the vehicle, is designed to be reusable. It will deploy a parachute, land in the ocean and be recovered. The only expendable part in the first stage is the nozzle.
They have also developed their own turbopump and reusable engine with quite impressive performance.
And all that for less than 100 million $. For that kind of money, NASA could probably produce a really nice paper study, but nothing that gets off the ground.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
From the article:
Starting with the first flight this summer, the vehicle's first stage will be reusable.
After propelling the second stage and payload to 56 mi. and Mach 9, a 75-ft. parachute will be blasted out of the first stage nose by a 10,000-lb.-thrust mortar. The chute will lower the vehicle to a splashdown 500 mi. off Baja California, where it will be recovered for $50,000 by the crew of the salvage tug Aahu.
So, they're not just copycats, they introduce innovative technologies to keep the costs down.
So, there'll probably be some fierce competition in the space delivery business before the scramjet tech becomes viable. After that point it's anybody's guess which companies will come on top.
Sigged!
it's going to be just like the Jetsons...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
There are already flying cars. Just google for it. You'll find things like the Skycar which look quite promising!
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.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
Will these hold up to the intense specs NASA has? That is one reason things are so expensive. Previously mentoned on /. about how some gears were in backwards yet never broke is an example of how tough the specs are. Then there is all the testing that needs to be done which is expensive. Will these meet all the NASA and other space agence requirements to use??? Will they meet Military specs to be used by the miliraty?? They may only be able to be used by comercial industry if they aren't up to spec.
Evolution or ID?
That explains a lot.
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Nothing to see here
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.
"You see, it's our patented water compressor unit over there...well, that, and of course the 10,000 kids used to push the plunger."
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I always thougth that most of the space treaty are so worded that only governement or governement allowed company can launch anything in space, and that if you really want to launch anything you have got to ask 10000's of autorisation to all kind of agency everywhere.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
At least all those other technical areas have had even less money invested in them than space launch - so there's good reason to hope all the needed breakthroughs can be made soon - with some R&D money.
Energy: time to change the picture.
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.
--
RumorsDaily
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.
Well, first, it's a huge business risk. People *have* tried to step in, but nobody has managed to do so successfully. Check out astronautix.com and browse their database for a whole load of things that were promised to be cheaper but weren't. Garry Hudson has tried several times, in fact.
Second, because NASA has done much to discourage competition. Like the point in the 80s where they were trying to shut down Atlas, Delta, and Titan so that everything would launch on the shuttle.
Gentoo Sucks
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
Nothing to see here
"The SpaceX Falcon rocket project will specifically target Boeing..." BAD Idea Boeing is actually well armed.
Hmm, if you have a small device to launch, an Ariane-4 ASAP looks to be the best option. If I am reading http://centaur.sstl.co.uk/SSHP/launcher/launch_asa p.html correctly, you can put a 50kg object into orbit for $1.2m (actually up to 4 50kg objects into orbit). Looks like excess capacity in scheduled launches is utilised.
... they have to recoup $8b in development costs, although the rocket is powerful enough to launch space planes (The Hermes, cancelled). I don't see a launch under $100m for this launcher, of course they would be for massive devices anyway, 1000kg - 10000kg, or dual-launch of smaller devices. http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/lvs /ariane5.htm ah, $180m a launch ... or $120m a launch http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/project/launchers/ariane/ ariane.html
l vf am/ariane.htm
... that must be a mistype, the other Ariane 4 launches are around $80m a flight.
An Ariane 5 launch will be expensive though
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/
Ariane 44P apparently can launch at a cost of $10m and do 3000kg devices
I'd bet the insurance on an untested launch vehicle with so-far 50% failure rate would be a fair portion of the cost of the launch+device! Insurance appears to take up a large portion of space-launch costs.
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.
I can totally see this working. Start a company from scratch, instead of using the contracting behemoths. Contracting costs are largely sheer bloat and bureaucracy (hmm...70-80% of the total cost?) A new company (SpaceX) could be lean mean rocket-making machine.
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.
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.
an ill wind that blows no good
The Vandenberg AFB launch schedule currently shows the launch as 'indefinite'. Until it's got a scheduled launch date it'll stay down at the bottom of the page.
Yeah, I know there aren't any exact dates listed for the launches. Hopefully Public Affairs will let me change that soon... it's been that way since 9/11. Until then, Google is your friend.
That still doesn't change the fact that ASAP launches are constrained to go when and where the primary payload wants to go, while Falcon launches are not.
Can you make a fully functional useful satellite in 300kg? Imagine launching 4 at the same time and then being able to offer a few hundred digital TV channels off your own satellite network ... heh!
Yes. Globalstar satellites were ~300 kg. They were launched multiply-manifested (up to 8 at a time IIRC) on a variety of launch vehicles. However Globalstar was a LEO constellation. GEO sats tend to be much bigger, because they either need a lot more power, or a much larger antenna aperture, than a LEO sat in order to be able to offset the greater RF propagation loss that results from their greater distance from the Earth. That's why there was so much excitement about LEO constellations a few years back - the sats could be much smaller and cheaper. You need a lot more of them of course, but if you build enough (ala Iridium or Globalstar) you can realize economies of scale not available to one-off GEO comm birds.
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".
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
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
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
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.
Can i pay my satelite launch trhu PayPal?