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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.
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?
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.
Read it as "SpaceX Falcon 9 Relatively Cheap Compared To NASA's New iPad"
"His name was James Damore."
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...
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
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.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
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."
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
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.
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
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!
"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"?
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"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.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
"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
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
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.