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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!
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)
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.
Nasa has a habit of having so much paperwork and specification stuff that only the big launch companies (boeing and lockmart) need apply. They also have a habit of being heavily biased against new companies.
The DOD on the other hand seems to be really interested in cheap, reliable and fast launch. They want to be able to put up a sattelite on short notice, and none of the incumbent companies are able to provide this.
That is why the DOD has bought the first launch of the Falcon I and will buy many launches on Falcon V. Of course the high value payloads will go up on Atlas V for the forseeable future, but there will be a lot of pressure on boeing and lockmart if falcon is successful.
Isn't competition great?
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
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.
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.