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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.
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.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
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.
NASA sure did great things, but "track record"? As compared to? Which other venture is your baseline?
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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"
"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.
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
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.