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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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
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.