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.

Comments

Cut costs, sure.

[JorDan Clock]

It's great that they cut costs and all, but what about those pesky corners? I'm all for a private space industry, but NASA has a pretty darn good track record of performance to back up their expenditures. Will these cheaper options be more efficient, or just cheaper?

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[InsertWittyNameHere]

I think the fact that other countries (like India) can launch into space for a fraction of what it costs NASA shows that a private American company can as well.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Always this cheap? No.
But cheaper than NASA's next set of rockets, yes.
India is doing it today, why can't NASA do it that cheap?

And again, we're talking about now, not always or 60 years ago.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[ColdWetDog]

Citation needed....

I'll give you my own anecdotal experience for what it's worth. My father started at a Thiokol (when it was Thiokol) and worked for various contractors as well as NASA. He was involved in the Apollo program from it's inception.

I started out Junior High School in Pennsylvania, and essentially commuted (every nine months or so) from Manned Spaceflight Center to Cape Canaveral to the Johnson Space Flight Center (the MSC renamed for it's principal benefactor) to Cape Kennedy (the original named for it's principal benefactor and back again. The government paid for dual facilities, essentially paid for dual school systems, paid our moving costs and a bunch load of other things essentially so other congresscritters could get a piece of the pie.

And I'm even purposefully forgetting a four month stay in the swamps outside of Huntsville....

If you read TFA, that's really what Musk is saying. Everybody is outsourced seven ways from Sunday. That leads to delays and expenses that really don't help you engineering wise. It's all a political decision. And we know how well those work....

Even Yo-Yo Dyne^HBoeing, who had the lead engineering contract for Apollo and whose managers bitched and moaned about the geographic and political separation (it seemed mostly in our back yard) forgot about all of that with the 787 and outsourced it to pretty much every ZIP code on the planet leading to years of delay.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[sunspot42]

The space shuttle had 25 launches before its first launch failure. That's a record that has never been equalled by any other venture.

The Shuttle got off to a solid start, but given the billions dumped into its development and construction that was hardly some great achievement. The US taxpayer shelled out a fortune for the Shuttle, ultimately to enjoy a mediocre safety record and abysmal performance. Virtually every booster can hoist payloads into orbit for a fraction of what it costs per-pound to launch payloads with the Shuttle, and the other man-rated booster in operation (Soyuz) has proven far safer.

You're citing an "achievement" that's not only proved ultimately useless, but that was also a far less-efficient way of designing, producing and launching safe vehicles. Who cares if boosters fail during their initial test stages, especially if humans aren't onboard? If the boosters are cheap, you just learn from your failures, perfect the technology and then, when it's safe enough, start launching humans. The way the Shuttles were developed was ass-backwards, which is one of the reasons why they've been such a money pit. Lots of boosters developed the way SpaceX is developing Falcon 9 have had way more than 25 launches in a row without a failure. There hasn't been a failure of a manned Soyuz booster in decades, and the last big incident they had (in the early '80s IIRC) didn't result in any casualities.

The Shuttle is probably the best example of how NOT to design a booster, and another demonstration of why NASA should be kept far, far away from the design and construction of launch vehicles. SpaceX proves that the commercial sector is more than capable of doing it better, faster and cheaper than NASA ever could.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[Sir_Lewk]

Bad comparison. The shuttles were not the first set of rockets NASA had launched. You are comparing one generation of rockets (a generation pretty late in the game for that matter) with the entirety of SpaceX's run. NASA had quite as few failures back when it was still learning the ropes, as SpaceX did their first launches.

For more fun unfair comparisons, check out the progress NASA made on Ares, then check out the progress SpaceX made on Falcon 9. Pick your "track records" correctly and you can make anybody look better than anyone else, and it's not particularly hard to pick them to make SpaceX look pretty damned good.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[Sir_Lewk]

So what happened, did you sleep through the 90s?

You know what really grinds my gears? People who take something as awesome as space exploration, and try to spoil it by injecting partisan politics into it.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[ConfusedVorlon]

too much safety can be a bad thing

e.g. payload worth 100mil
you can pick:
a) rocket for 50 mil with 5% chance of failure
b) rocket for 60 mil with 1% chance of failure

cost for option A, plus 5% chance of having to rebuild and relaunch: $157.5 mil
cost for option B, plus 1% chance of having to rebuild and relaunch: $161.6 mil

this ignores double failure - but the point is that your cheaper 'riskier' launch makes more sense.

or with people:

imagine, for 10 billion, we can get 10 astronauts to mars with a probable 2 deaths, or for the same amount of cash we can get two astronauts to the moon with only a 2% chance of any deaths.

perhaps less obvious which is better, but I'm certain we would have no problem getting volunteers for the mars mission.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[DavidShor]

Another reason why NASA has blown through so much money over the years

.

People tend to massively over-estimate how much money the government spends on NASA. It's about 15 billion a year, or about .05% of the federal budget, or about $50 per person per year. That's roughly equal to the amount of money we spend on over-priced coffee machines or on skateboards. We literally spend about 50 times as much on our military...

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[HereIAmJH]

BP executives may be responsible for many bad decisions, but I doubt the disaster at Deepwater Horizon is the result of short term thinking. They have been getting away with so many things that they simply discounted the risks as being over-inflated. BP has been fined 760 times for OHSA violations compared to Exxon's 1 time. If those violations didn't result in employee lawsuits then the fines were trivial and not really a risk factor. And if you went back a few months and discussed oil spills and natural disasters, Exxon Valdez would be top of the list and BP might not have even been mentioned.

Even now, oil company executives don't believe the US government will shut down off shore drilling, even though Congress has mentioned it as an option until all the rigs can be properly inspected. They assume that the economic damage it would cause makes the risk of a shutdown minimal. I personally thought we should have shut down every rig until the blowout preventers were tested as soon as we knew that Deepwater Horizon's failed it's sole task.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[sunspot42]

Shuttle flew more times than all other manned systems combined.

Yes, at a tremendous cost in money and lives.

In other words, Shuttle's safety record isn't mediocre. It's better than Apollo, better than Soyuz.

The Shuttle's safety record is abysmal given its cost. Worse, there's little indication the craft is any safer now than it was the day it first launched - if anything, age seems to be making the Shuttle less reliable (or at least, increasingly expensive to maintain at a safe level). Whereas Soyuz has clearly improved over the decades, both in terms of performance as well as reliability, and hasn't suffered a fatality since the earliest missions of the 1970's. In no way is the Shuttle's safety record "better" than that of today's 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....

Shuttle defenders always cite some useless capability the Shuttle possesses in their attempts to justify this enormous white elephant. "But it can haul 30 tons of cargo!" "But it has more tiles than the average public restroom!" "But it can cook 7 astronauts at once!". The Saturn V could boost 120 tons into orbit. We gave that up in order to build a launcher that could only lob 30 tons into orbit, yet ended up costing around as much per-launch. Some deal!

As if humans need to ride along with cargo, anyhow. You can boost a bunch of humans into orbit cheaper and safer with smaller boosters, and save the heavy lifters for cargo runs. The Soviets figured this out early on, which is why their program was able to accomplish a lot without spending a lot of money, and why their rockets continue to dominate any price/performance comparisons you'd care to make with the stuff NASA built post 1970.

The Falcon 9, by the way, is capable of launching 28,000kg into LEO, compared to the Shuttle's 24,400kg. Falcon 9 is slated to cost around $94 million a launch. The Shuttles are running somewhere between $200 - $500 million a launch (depending on how you handle the accounting). Ouch.

The Shuttle has been a 30 year disaster for the US space program, and the Ares "replacement" rockets looked to be equally disastrous cash sinkholes. Fortunately, it now looks as though the private sector will prove more than capable of producing safe, reliable, inexpensive alternatives.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[dbIII]

Remember that inquiry a few years ago where the engineers had to sneak around the layers of management to get the real story to Feynman? That's a very good starting point. Those o-rings that failed were only there so that the designed part could be made in two pieces instead of one. As two parts they were made in different states for a bit of pork barrelling. Dead astronauts traded for votes.
Another thing to consider from recent events is the extra bit tacked onto the Afganistan supply bill to get funding for a cancelled aerospace project through the back door and make anyone that opposed it look as if they wanted the troops to die. Not a major bit of evil but still most definitely an evil and corrupt abuse of the system that nobody worth an inch of trust would ever contemplate.

Re:Have you seen the rocket?

[fredmosby]

It's simpler and cheeper than the shuttle, but it replaces all of it's important roles. That makes it a better solution overall. It's also cheeper than all the other rockets NASA has available.

Re:Not a valid comparison

[sznupi]

As has already been pointed out, Ares I and Falcon 9 are very similar in capabilities.

But furthermore - if Falcon 9 (or some other launcher for that matter) can launch a comparable mass to LEO, in several launches (we're good at rendezvous by now...), as one launch of the heavy Ares V (that's the rocket you're thinking of), and if it can do it still much cheaper (despite needing several launches) - then why wish for Ares V? A rocket which would be launched very rarely, hence driving the costs even more up btw.

In contrast, a launcher in the league of Falcon 9 is quite universal.

Re:Not a valid comparison

[sznupi]

... except the defunct Saturn V and the Russian N-1

Also Energia (and too bad its heaviest variant, Energia Vulcan, never had a chance; that would be some sight). Not so old, and part of it still flies (Zenit). Though even if it would be possible to ressurect it, there's no funds to do it and no reason to direct them (Ares V has the same problem - what's wrong with rendezvous in orbit using few cheap launches?). Plus politics: Russia wouldn't want to depend on Ukraine, so they're building new heavy launcher - Angara; heaviest variants of which aren't quite in the league of Saturn V, N-1 or Energia, but are halfway there. Might be useful for Mir 3, I guess.

Re:Have you seen the rocket?

[sznupi]

Was recovering satellites (hence also building a vehicle that can do that by wasting most of its mass that's put to LEO on airframe) ever shown to be economically justified? Why no commercial launch companies and satellite operators seem to interested in it now?

Plus, we already have launchers that can put the same amount as Shuttle into LEO. And they are cheaper, they rule the commercial launch market. SpaceX is likely to push the market into even lower prices.

What about the Russians and Soyuz?

[fantomas]

"What Elon Musk is doing is similar to the assembly line process Henry Ford brought to the automotive industry."

What about the Russians and the Soyuz ships? They've built over 1700 launchers so far, from the 60s to present... surely that's got to count as "assembly line process"?

Solid rocket costs

[DragonHawk]

"Evem early in the game, the solid booster system was known to result in a cost increase of 60% per pound into orbit."

Can you provide a reference for that? I've been told by an actual rocket scientist that solid fuel rockets are significantly cheaper than liquid fuel rockets, especially for the boost phase, where thrust-to-weight matters more than propellant efficiency.

I've also seen inflation-adjusted figures for Saturn V vs STS, and the Saturn V was vastly more expensive. Now, they only flew about two dozen Saturn V's, so they never had a chance to develop economies of scale, but it's not like the STS is a huge win in that department either. The Saturn V also had a much greater total lift capacity, so this may be apples-to-oranges in the first place.

Certainly, liquid fuel rockets have a number of advantages, but I haven't seen anything to suggest cost is one of them.

(Note that I'm not saying the STS SRBs were an overall win. Good design theory won't save a badly run program. I just question the idea that's it's *because* they were solid rockets that costs were high.)

Elon's Penny Pinching

[DynaSoar]

Not sure what they're doing for test sites now, but early on SpaceX tested (sometimes destructively though probably not intentionally) firing chambers and other hotloud technology on a cattle ranch a mile or so east of their McGregor TX site. I've seen (as well as not seen but tripped over) rusty pieces of kaboomage while hunting down my own far more modest but adequately errant rockets during Dallas Area Rocket Society high-power launches. It's obviously not a top dollar test range. I'm thinking they probably had to move elsewhere when stuff got big and bad enough that the vehicles and/or pieces could travel 5 miles downrange before doing some high speed post hole digging. It's 5 miles to Bush's ranch at Crawford.

Not to be out-cheaped, DARS flies smaller stuff at a site that's loaned free, near Rockwall TX. On the land there's a cement pad that used to be a garage floor. On the pad there's marks that used to be some of early Armadillo's H2O2 exhaust. Of the source of the exhaust, I found no traces. Found plenty of my own though.

Maybe that's why they and Blue Origins favor Texas. There's so much land that you can always find some cheap.

Re:To Be Fair...

[DaveV1.0]

You forgot the part where SpaceX didn't do any R&D. Instead, they used old technologies developed by... wait for it... NASA.

And, SpaceX didn't build a launch facility, instead they used.... NASA's.

No wonder SpaceX didn't spend much, they didn't do anything new.

Re:About to get more expensive!

[ae1294]

I have to bow to his awesome ability to spin the facts. He's saying "how about we won't do what we signed the contract to do, but still get the money..." and three different people post to say "sure, that sounds reasonable."

A normally government contracts works like this...

Contractor: We will build x and do y for 100 million!
Government: Great that's a really low bid, your hired! ...Time passes...
Contractor: We had problems, the new cost is 150 million.
Government: Well, these things happen, no problem carry on... ...Time passes...
Contractor: OK well it's done but it doesn't do Y yet.
Government: Well we really sort of need it to do Y.
Contractor: Sure we understand, but it will cost another 100 Million?
Government: Well... alright then.. ...Time passes..
Contractor: Alright done, but well it does do Y but sometimes it also does X?
Government: Ah well screw it, works good enough! Here's a bonus!

So you see if this company can get everything that was to be done in 3 flights done in just 2 then that's a shockingly good thing. If you haven't noticed we have a nice shiny space station and no damn way to get people up to it without Russia's help. It would, kind-of be nice to have a private entity available you know... If SpaceX can figure out ways to save money and "everyones" time while providing the same service why should we punish them for that? They can make extra money, that's OK for a business to do, as long as the job gets done properly and the business is on the hook for any fuck up.

But you're right NASA does have the right to force them to do all 3 even if the third is pointless. But honestly what the hell is the point and how is it going to encourage cost cutting and cheaper rates in the future? How will that build a good business relationship with SpaceX?

If you hire me to install a network and I tell you it will take 3 days and it only takes 2 are you going to make me sit on my ass that third day? Well I guess you probably would but if I ever did business with you again in the future, unlikely, I'd ream your ass.