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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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"?

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.