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SpaceX Falcon 9 Relatively Cheap Compared To NASA's New Pad
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Motherboard.tv:
"As debate over the future of spaceflight rages on — and as the axe all but falls on NASA's mission back to the moon and beyond — the successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 two weeks ago proved at least one of the virtues of the private option: it's a heckuva lot cheaper than government-funded rides to space. In fact, the whole system was built for less than the cost of the service tower that was to be used for NASA's proposed future spaceflight vehicle (yup, the service tower is finished, but the rocket isn't, and the whole program may well be canceled anyway)."
CEO Elon Musk spoke recently about some of the ways SpaceX finds to cut costs in the construction of their rockets.
I have heard, but do not have a reputable source, that the overhead on NASA projects is 500%.
For those who do not know, budgets for academia and government work are calculated roughly as:
Actual Costs * Overhead = Budget
The Overhead goes to things like facilities, accounting, IT, etc.
Actual Costs include salaries (possible benefits), parts and supplies.
The Universities I have worked for have overheads around 50%.
20 characters max for the password? How will I use my favorite poems as passwords?
Actually, the Falcon 9, unlike most reusable boosters, was designed in advance to carry humans. It meets all of NASA's requirements for a human-rated vehicle except for an escape system. SpaceX has stated their intention to dot that final i within a couple of years. The Dragon spacecraft they're designing for the Falcon 9 will support a crew of 7.
I read that the Falcon cost about 700 million to develop, the government was having to put out one billion just to cancel the Constellation program.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/science/space/11nasa.html?hpw
The shuttle was a series of mistakes. First there were the design compromises necessary for accommodating the defense department's wanting to launch bulkier payloads at high angles to the elliptic, for a large reduction in capacity. Then there was the whole fiasco with costs and turn-around times for each launch because it has to practically be re-built each time. So much for 25 to 60 flight a year.
Evem early in the game, the solid booster system was known to result in a cost increase of 60% per pound into orbit.
Actually, the Falcon 9, unlike most reusable boosters, was designed in advance to carry humans. It meets all of NASA's requirements for a human-rated vehicle except for an escape system. SpaceX has stated their intention to dot that final i within a couple of years. The Dragon spacecraft they're designing for the Falcon 9 will support a crew of 7.
A few additional points:
* As you allude to, Falcon 9 is designed and built to NASA's human-rating standards. With Ares I on the other hand, NASA had to lower the human-rating standards when it turned out Ares was unable to adequately meet them.
* Falcon 9 is an all-liquid rocket, meaning it isn't prone to catastrophic solid propellant explosions like the Ares I is. The Ares I design uses a gigantic solid rocket as its first stage, and a USAF analysis showed that an explosion of that stage would create a giant cloud of solid propellant debris which would melt parachutes on the escaping capsule, with 100% chance of killing the crew.
* The sort of PRA analysis used to show that Ares I was the "safest rocket ever" with a supposedly "1 in 3145" chance of losing crew tend to have a fairly loose correlation with how safe a rocket actually ends up being, as the types of failures accounted for in a PRA (probabilistic risk assessment) end up being only a fairly small fraction of all launch failures. Most launch failures are caused by unexpected failure modes in a design, which are completely unaccounted for in a PRA.
* The best way to determine rocket reliability is through its track record. By the time humans are first launched on the Falcon 9, it will have had at least a dozen or so unmanned flights to prove itself. The Ares I, on the other hand, plans on carrying crew on its -second- flight ever.
They have a fair track record, They also have failures. With a competitive fully commercial program, we can actually begin to answer these questions. Mainly, the current safety record is more dominated by the fact that the Delta and Atlas are mature technologies as far as launch vehicles are concerned and have had time to fix errors in the design. Advances in model design were based off upgrading the previous model rather than new designs from scratch. The major telling difference between SpaceX and the Ares rocket is that SpaceX, as a company, was founded in 2002 and has, to date, developed 2 working launch vehicles. NASA selected the Ares design in 2005-2006, awarded contracts in 2007 and estimates first launch in 2014 (although the Augustine Commission thinks 2017 is more likely). Will it be cheaper and more efficient? Barring systemic flaws, which are unlikely, they should have several design generations to apply engineering fixes for problems prior to Ares ever launching.SpaceX is designed for lower operating costs and is fairly conservative in most of its design selection. Theoretically, that should be more efficient in the long run. The specific engineering choices will determine the real answer and only by flying hardware do you get to actually see. For the design path SpaceX has chosen, higher launch failures at the leading edge of the life of the vehicle is not really a bad thing.
Orbital Sciences has the Pegasus lunch vehicle, which they built on their own funding. It has 40 launches. 3 of those were failures and 2 were partial successes. The failures were all at the beginning of their development line, where you would expect them. To date, they have had over 500 launch missions of various types. Their Taurus rocket is still in its initial development path and has the expected launch failures for that.
The thing most people have to realize now is that NASA does not really own or control most aspects of the launches now. They contract out to private companies. Those expenditures come from locked in contracts. It is hard to get competitive bidding if your only provider is ULA.
We already had a mass produced, succesfull, and very cheap launcher. Suborbital, sure - but while orbit requires from rocket an order or magnitude more work, the logistics & manufacturing aren't that dissimilar...
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html
Sadly, the lesson was forgotten. Until now?
One that hath name thou can not otter
The transcript in the third link mis-quotes Musk as saying "The tanks are friction steel welding". He actually said "friction stir welding". The articles fail to mention that this technology is used in aerospace " including welding the seams of the aluminum main Space Shuttle external tank, Orion Crew Vehicle test article, Boeing Delta II and Delta IV Expendable Launch Vehicles." Very Light Jet (VLJ) maker Eclipse Aviation uses the technology to produce a passenger-certified fuselage with far fewer labor-intensive rivets.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
Records of launch vehicles w/ over 50 launches:
Small:
Atlas-Centaur (Lockheed) = 51/61
Kosmos-3M (Russia) = 422/442
Medium:
Tsyklon-2 (Soviet/Ukraine)= 105/106
Delta II (Boeing) = 65/67
Soyuz-U2 (Soviet) = 90/92
Voskhod (Soviet) = 277/300
Vostok-2M (Soviet) = 92/94
Heavy:
Proton (Soviet/Russia) = 294/335
Shuttle(NASA)= 126/128
Also, looking at a company's record Space-X is doing really well. 3/6 might sound bad but every group starting out has had failures.
Lockheed Martin was a missile company for decades. Was building ICBMs and their first launch vehicle was a modified one of these missiles. That is a pretty unfair comparison. They got to launch the things to test tons of times before they put a launch vehicle sticker on it. They also built spacecraft for many years before their 1st launch vehicle. And they still had failures (17% on their most popular vehicle).
Boeing as well aka 'Boeing Defense, Space & Security' is built up from ICBMs and military history. The Delta I is built up from a PGM-17 Thor missile.
Doing so much from scratch is hard but paybacks could be high. Space-X is doing everything right. In the Falcon-9 they have tons of redundancy, hoping for a repeat of the Saturn-V's 12/12 record, they basically have copied what made them successful. They have copied from the recent Delta heavy-lift vehicles for their own (Take a medium lift vehicle and replicate the first stage on the sides, it is cheaper and simpler (therefore safer)). And they've taken things further hope to recover more of the craft. They've added redundancy by making the stages even more similar reusing as many parts as they can. And they have used the same engine in both stages just more of them in the 1st stage.
They might not have a track record yet but they are a good bet. Why do you think everyone has their eyes on them. Why are they getting juicy contracts?
The whole concept of a startup space company going nothing -> Launch in 6 years is crazy, they only had 160~ employees until 2005. And they have been profitable and they only needed 120Million initial investments.
Unless things go horribly wrong Space-X is a BIG TIME game changer.
Check the specs... the Falcon 9 Heavy can only loft 71,000lbs to LEO, the Ares V can loft 350,000lbs, the Saturn V can loft 262,000lbs. So, it's not even close to the same class.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
Note that Shuttle had two loss-of-crew failures. Shuttle flew more times than all other manned systems combined.
Soyuz also had two loss-of-crew accidents. Soyuz flew more than all other manned systems combined (other than Shuttle).
Apollo had one loss-of-crew accident. On the ground. And 16 successful manned flights. As opposed to the 100+ for each of Soyuz and Shuttle.
In other words, Shuttle's safety record isn't mediocre. It's better than Apollo, better than Soyuz.
I won't go into "abysmal performance" beyond noting that 30 ton cargo capacity. When you find another manned space vehicle that can carry as much as five tons of cargo, let me know....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"Falcon 9 is an all-liquid rocket, meaning it isn't prone to catastrophic solid propellant explosions like the Ares I is."
Right, it's "prone" to catastrophic liquid propellant explosions instead.
Historically, solid rockets are more reliable when it comes to them not exploding. They're much simpler designs, and much more robust. Heck, parts of the SRBs on STS-51-L (the one that killed Challenger) survived the initial explosion and kept flying. They had to detonate the range safety charges to stop them. If it hadn't been for the giant liquid fuel tank next to the SRBs, the O-ring leak wouldn't have been a problem. (Obviously, since there was a giant liquid fuel tank, that's a huge problem, but the point of discussion is the reliability and robustness of solid rockets, not the STS as a whole.)
Solid rockets are cheaper, simpler, more robust, and have a higher thrust-to-weight ratio. But control options are limited. You can't vary thrust from plan, and once lit they will consume their entire fuel supply. No stop-and-restart.
Liquid rockets are more controllable, restartable, and have better propellant efficiency. But they are more costly, more complex, and more fragile. To quote a rocket scientist I was conversing with, "There are plenty of examples of liquid rockets going BOOM and everyone being surprised."
Now, I believe the mechanics of launch to orbit dictate that you pretty much need at least one liquid fuel stage. SpaceX reasons that you're better off using the same technology everywhere, to reduce overall design, manufacturing, and support costs. I suspect they are correct. If you have to build a good liquid rocket engine, you might as well use it everywhere. Using two different technologies means twice as many problems.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
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