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.

[AnonymousClown]

Will these cheaper options be more efficient, or just cheaper?

More efficient.

Between government salaries, the way they get contracts, how NASA's budget is dependent on pork barrel spending, NASA having to put some projects in certain states to get votes from Congressmen for a budget, price gouging by contractors, etc...

Just eliminating Congress from the loop is going to save billions. Add in businessmen/engineers and you have a much more efficient space program.

Safety? We'll see if it's reduced. But I have a feeling there won't be change in safety record.

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.

[dragisha]

NASA sure did great things, but "track record"? As compared to? Which other venture is your baseline?

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[drinkypoo]

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?

Are we talking about the same NASA that proceeded with a shuttle launch when the temperature was too cold, when they knew that certain very highly engineered O-Rings were likely to fail, instead of scrubbing the launch because it's expensive to do it all over again? The same NASA that knew they'd be launching in cold weather but accepted specs for these parts that would fail under those conditions rather than spending more money to come up with parts that would operate under the actual operating conditions? Or is this some other NASA?

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[DragonDru]

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%.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[InsertWittyNameHere]

I don't know how you got any of that from what I wrote... All I said is that it's not unfathomable for the private sector to do it cheaper.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[rijrunner]

      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.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[jedidiah]

No one in government gains anything by being efficient.

This is one key problem of letting government solve any problem. You better have exhausted
all possible alternate approaches first. The problem should really be "too big for anyone"
else because you know that any solution created by beaurocrats is going to have serious
inherent drawbacks.

Elon Musk's example about different engine technologies in the same rocket is the sort
of thing that even goes back to Apollo 13.

No one tries "efficient" because no one is motivated and it would actually interefere
with their personal fiefdom building.

Eventually, any technology has to crawl out of the crib and be done outside of government
before it becomes really effective or widespread.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[pushing-robot]

NASA researches space with experimental hardware.

Companies want to commercialize space with commoditized hardware.

Experimental hardware is great for solving problems and learning new things, but it will never be as cheap or reliable as commoditized hardware.

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.

[Idiomatick]

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.

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.

[hardburn]

NASA won't close. No matter how things pan out otherwise, it'll almost certainly keep it's robotic deep space missions and also do advanced aeronautics research.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[CrimsonAvenger]

The US taxpayer shelled out a fortune for the Shuttle, ultimately to enjoy a mediocre safety record and abysmal performance.

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....

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.

[turbidostato]

"BP executives may be responsible for many bad decisions, but I doubt the disaster at Deepwater Horizon is the result of short term thinking."

So risking the big amount of money that the Deepwater Horizon costed just to let it sink down is not a short term thinking result? So expending a lot of millions designing, building and positioning the blowout preventers just to let them fail is not a short term thinking result?

"If those violations didn't result in employee lawsuits then the fines were trivial and not really a risk factor."

It's obvious that a big accident in deept waters will result in life loss not mentioning the financial damage.

There were obvious danger signs; there were millions of already deployed structure at risk; there were oil to be lost in the ocean instead of being pumped out to the oil market; there were human lives at risk. And all that was overlooked so production could start this quarter instead of next one. Tell me *that* is not the result of short term thinking pushed by the most egregious greed.

Re:Cut costs, sure.

[quanticle]

It depends on what you're measuring the success of. If you're looking at the Saturn V booster, then Apollo 13 was a success. There was nothing the booster could have done to prevent or exacerbate the later problems caused by the oxygen tank explosion in the command module.

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.

Ares = manrated, Falcon = cargo.

[Moskit]

As simple as that.

While I agree that often cost of private enterprise is much lower than a government one, one needs to compare apples to apples to be fair.

Re:Ares = manrated, Falcon = cargo.

[Waffle Iron]

And the operational history of the Shuttle program shows that "manrated" = meaningless.

Re:Ares = manrated, Falcon = cargo.

[Ethanol]

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.

Re:Ares = manrated, Falcon = cargo.

[FleaPlus]

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.

If it's only about the cost, give the money

[melted]

If it's only about the cost, give the money to Russians. If you pay a little more, they'll even let you have the blueprints for stuff. They've been launching stuff into space on the cheap for decades now.

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.

Misread the title

[Rockoon]

Read it as "SpaceX Falcon 9 Relatively Cheap Compared To NASA's New iPad"

Re:About to get more expensive!

[ae1294]

The Falcon-9 is about to get 50% more expensive.
Musk has just proposed to NASA that Space-X will fly only two demonstration flights of Falcon-9, instead of three... but he still wants to be paid for all three.

I read TFA you linked and you make it sound all evil. If they can prove everything in two flights (three if you count the first launch) then good for them, they should get paid for not fucking up. I guess you'd rather just waste everyones time having an extra flight instead of moving forward and getting shit done. I'd rather move forward and start suppling the station instead of flying by it a few times and waving...

Re:About to get more expensive!

[Loadmaster]

Well, the deal was for certain things to be accomplished and not just to launch another rocket. If they can achieve the next to goals of the COTS missions why shouldn't they get paid?

Cancel Greater than Develop

[Yergle143]

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

Musk may be the Henry Ford of space travel.

[maillemaker]

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

Instead of each item being lovingly hand-crafted by thousands of pork-fueled constituents, SpaceX is making a rocket factory. It's fantastic.

Moon-Mars was never more than a pipe dream...

[elwinc]

Bush announced Moon-Mars and provided about a billion dollars of funding to "study" Moon Mars. No one ever said where the remaining hundreds of billions of dollars would come from. Moon Mars never had a chance because no one could fund it. However, NASA took billions from unmanned space science to continue to "study" Moon Mars. It's too bad, but since we're not going to pay for a Moon Mars mission, space science is better off spending those billions on robotic probes than on never-to-be-implemented "studies."

Re:Have you seen the rocket?

[tomhudson]

It's nowhere near the complexity of the Shuttle. It's great that they can launch a rocket cheaper than NASA can launch a shuttle...but you're comparing the cost of a garage of a Pinto to that of a Lamborghini.

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 - it has already been done, sort of

[sznupi]

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?

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.

Friction Stir Welding

[clyde_cadiddlehopper]

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.

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.

Re:A woman/man can do it

[sznupi]

We do refueling in orbit quite often. ISS is refueled every few months; and the version of docking ports used by Progress even has provisions for fuel transfer IIRC.

Re:Cut costs....

[Idiomatick]

Because those two things are perfectly logically connected and that isn't at all a poor argument.

Re:Not a valid comparison

[wjsteele]

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

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"?

inventors

[Tom]

Not having to reinvent everything from scratch certainly helps the budget. Never forget that when NASA started out, there was no such thing as space travel.

Going into orbit after someone else figured out how to put people on the moon and robots on Mars and Venus is a lot less of a challenge then going into orbit when nobody quite knows how to do it.

It's still a great feat, but don't forget that a lot of the cost savings are also because someone else invested a lot of money into figuring it all out.

Re:inventors

[wiredlogic]

Also take note that much of SpaceX's engineering staff is drawn from existing players in the industry and collectively they have a lot more experience in developing spacecraft than their 8 year history would suggest.

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.)

Re:Solid rocket costs

[tomhudson]

I already did! Read the link. The SRBs are more expensive per flight.

A high-pressure liquid fueled series or parallel burn Booster was projected to cost $7 billion to develop and $100 per pound of payload to operate.

A parallel burn Booster utilizing large solid rocket boosters was projected to cost $5.5 billion to develop and $160 per pound of payload to operate.

While the Booster employing large solid rocket boosters would likely be more expensive to operate, NASA opted to take advantage of huge cost savings up front.

Since costs of ultimate operation could be absorbed throughout the life of the Space Shuttle program, the parallel burn Booster using large solid rocket boosters was selected.

The SRBs were actually worse than projected in the above quote. They could not be re-used "100 to 500x each", they wiped out all the dev. savings with the Challenger explosion and then some ... and the SRBs were not up to military spec (single-piece body).

They never got anywhere near $160/lb. - not at over $10,000/kg.

Re:Solid rocket costs

[dbIII]

A solid fuel rocket is like a firecracker - once you light it there is nothing you can do to control it in any way. Other systems have to be changed to compensate for that.
In outward appearance the shuttle looks somewhat insane from an engineering perspective due to the compromises required on the original design. Strapping to the side of a rocket instead of on top of it created a large number of challenges that took years to overcome and reduced the performance. It's like bolting a Volkswagen to the roof of a formula 1 car and trying to get the whole thing to be stable at high speed.

Large organizations are the problem

[DragonHawk]

"No one tries 'efficient' because no one is motivated and it would actually interefere with their personal fiefdom building."

In fairness, that happens all the time in private companies, too. It's just less public because they're, ya know, private.

I'm not saying this to defend government so much as to also criticize private companies. They both suck.

If there's any conclusion I can reach, it's that large organizations of any type are the problem. When you scale up, you inevitably get longer lines of communications, a higher tolerance for mediocrity (you need more people than the cream of the crop can provide), the need for more formal procedures (to compensate for the first two), deeper pocket to fund fief building, and more places to hide it all.

I think Space-X wins because they're small, nimble, and fresh. And more power to them for it.

Easy to be cheap when you don't have a history.

[trout007]

The reason things move slow and are expensive at NASA is because there are a lot of reviews. It isn't a government vs commercial thing at all. There are very few actual NASA employees. Most are contractors. NASA employees are there to write the contracts and provide a unbroken link of institutional knowledge. For example 3 employees of Scaled Composites died during a test where an engine exploded. If that test was going to be done at a NASA facility someone in NASA safety would have calculated the potential energy in the rocket test and established a radius where spectators had to be behind. Why? Because many years ago someone was either hurt, killed or had a close call. That institutional knowledge is passed on and maintained which causes development to go slow because there is someone that did something similar that has a warning for you. Some call that the bureaucracy that slows down innovation. SpaceX right now I'm sure has very little of this. So far their luck has held and I hope it continues. But someday they will have a close call or an accident. Then they will have to slow down and grow their own bureaucracy. Or most likely come ask the greybeards at NASA what went wrong and someone will have a story about the same thing happening in 1964.

It is very similar to the BP disaster. I'm sure all of the oil companies operate this way BP's luck just ran out. So they will most likely go bankrupt eventually paying for this because they will have so many eyes on them that they won't be competitive. Then their competitors with a little more luck and maybe a bit smarted will continue until the next accident.

Solid rocket robustness

[DragonHawk]

"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.

To Be Fair...

[DynaSoar]

SpaceX's main cost-cut compared to NASA is they're building it for themselves, by themselves. NASA doesn't build any spacecraft, they hire contractors. They have to pay their own people to operate the project plus the contractors to make the vehicle.

To be honest as well as fair, this is where things should expand into the BigAero Sucking NASA'a Corporate Welfare Teat Dry, but everybody knows that one already and the punchline sucks. Or used to. Looks like the new punchline just might be 'SpaceX', which, to quote Spock, "thrills me no end."

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:To Be Fair...

[strack]

what, you mean how they demolished the old titan launch tower and pretty much started again? and only needed a much smaller tower? and developed all their engines in-house, while learning from the past? and yes. there not doing anything all that new, apart from trying to recover and reuse the first stage, and mass manufacturing of rocket engines in house for economies of scale.

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: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.

Apple Tomato Comparison

[prefec2]

The article compares tomatoes with apples. This rocket is designed as a cargo transportation system. Like Ariane 5 which is also a very low cost space transportation system. That's why they have a 50% market share in commercial space flight. However, the Ares I launch system is for people. Therefore the launch tower needs a way to deliver people to the top of the system. The rocket itself has also to be much more reliable than a cargo system.

And by the way, while looking at the missile photos it has 9 engines. This is like one of those ancient Russian designs, based on the fact that they cannot build a bigger engine. This is normally more expensive in testing and you get a higher possibility of failure. however they claim to be cheaper than Arianespace on launch basis. Ariane 5 approx USD 120 while Falcon 9 approx. USD 50.

Re:Apple Tomato Comparison

[prefec2]

Redundancy does not work here, as you need all engines working perfectly to get it into orbit correctly. So if one engines fails, the missile is not going where it is supposed to go. And if it explodes, it will destroy the entire device. So it is not like you have redundant parts who can compensate for each other, like in redundant web-servers, it is more like an n-tier installation and if one tier fails the whole system is no longer usable.

Re:Ideological nonsense

[Nyeerrmm]

As I pointed out before: this isn't comparing SpaceX of the present to NASA of the 1960s, which would be a very unfair comparison for the reasons you're saying. Its comparing SpaceX to the NASA of now -- which can use exactly the same developed technologies. Somehow NASA has ended up doing things that cost 10x as much and are destined to be cancelled due to the realities of a system that is rooted in politics.

Many of us involved with the space program are simply fed up and want to try something, anything, different that might make things work better than the failure of the past 30 years to develop a viable launch vehicle using cost-plus contracts. This isn't gov't vs. corporations. Its behemoths that suckle at the gov't teat and profit off of the taxpayer vs. smaller entrepreneurial ventures. The people who get the most out of the current system are the higher-ups at Boeing, Lockheed and ATK, and the politicians who get the votes from bringing the pork home.

You can have good and bad gov't programs: the unmanned programs and aeronautical research are astounding at NASA. Its just that in manned spaceflight, the JSC/MSFC way of doing things has demonstrated itself as insufficient. For basic launch services, things that don't require new research and insane amounts of risk, we're better off going with a more standard contracting method: the government purchases a service for a fixed-price rather than paying for development and paying for overruns as well. Its not idealogical, its practical.