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What It Took For SpaceX To Become a Serious Space Company
An anonymous reader writes: The Atlantic has a nice profile of SpaceX's rise to prominence — how a private startup managed to successfully compete with industry giants like Boeing in just a decade of existence. "Regardless of its inspirations, the company was forced to adopt a prosaic initial goal: Make a rocket at least 10 times cheaper than is possible today. Until it can do that, neither flowers nor people can go to Mars with any economy. With rocket technology, Musk has said, "you're really left with one key parameter against which technology improvements must be judged, and that's cost." SpaceX currently charges $61.2 million per launch. Its cost-per-kilogram of cargo to low-earth orbit, $4,653, is far less than the $14,000 to $39,000 offered by its chief American competitor, the United Launch Alliance. Other providers often charge $250 to $400 million per launch; NASA pays Russia $70 million per astronaut to hitch a ride on its three-person Soyuz spacecraft. SpaceX's costs are still nowhere near low enough to change the economics of space as Musk and his investors envision, but they have a plan to do so (of which more later)."
To compete in price against anyone you only need money. With enough money, you can set a price of $0.
The main question is "will they be able to recover the cost of that competence once they get the contracts?" and it's way too soon to know the answer to that.
It's like judging the acquisition of online "businesses". Nobody can prove the price was or wasn't right until the buyer makes that back as profit or doesn't.
Eh, PayPal was among the first revolutionary online-payment services that enabled the rapid expansion of e-commerce. What you know now as the "evil PayPal" is what happened after Ebay bought it.
I still can't believe it is legal, in so many ways. I mean, I don't think anybody could argue ebay is not a monopoly in the online auction space, and yet they are allowed to only permit their own payment service (so they take a percentage on top of their commission).
Then, they hold your money like a bank account and even extend credit, and yet, unlike banks, they can freeze your money with no explanation.
The PayPal situation boggles the mind, but it is not related to Musk's X.com/PayPal.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
It took a ton of money and the vision of a leader looking more than 3 years into the future. Anyone with enough money and willingness to throw that money at a "problem" will be able to compete.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
I heard it's the same for Space X, not one rocket has actually been launched.They are always in the design and testing phase! What a joke! It's all a scam and the FTC is going to shut him down soon!
The main problem with space travel so far has been a combination of custom parts and lack of scale. Get a cheap, rugged design made with commodity parts and then run it mass production style and you can really bring the cost down.
Make a rocket at least 10 times cheaper than is possible today.
Hardly "prosaic"; Sounds pretty damn ambitious to me.
OK, they had access to some of the body of knowledge so expensively won by the Germans, USA, Russians et al, but they're still privately funded, developed in-house a working product that's much, much cheaper than the competition and employ nearly 4000 people.
Like Musk or not, he made it work so far.
The ebay/paypal double dipping is frustrating, and the money freezing risks are pretty sketchy, but for the most part, paypal is a useful and functional service. I have used it to buy and sell many things (both on and off ebay) without issue. I also use it to print postage for most things (their multi-order shipping thing is easier to use than any other site I have come across and I don't have to enter any new payment information since there is always a couple of bucks in my paypal account). I transfer any large amount of money back to my bank account right away, so I am not that worried about it being frozen.
If I were running an ebay business, I might be a little more concerned about the forced use of paypal, but at the end of the day, that is the price you pay for using their storefront service, having them market for you, and accessing the faith and trust of their customers vs trying to run your own online store. Sucks when something happens to your paypal account, but at the same time, half of your customers may only be comfortable dealing with you knowing that paypal can freeze your money if you don't deliver the item.
Bottles.
Anyone with enough money and willingness to throw that money at a "problem" will be able to compete.
Just because you throw lots of money at a problem doesn't mean you'll ever make a profit. If you cannot make a profit you will eventually go out of business. A bottomless (or effectively so) checkbook isn't necessarily enough. For example Microsoft may never make back all the money they invested in trying to make the Xbox competitive. Sure they "competed" but it was a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Yet another Musk fantasy with no hope of becoming reality. Wake me when he DOES something, rather than pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
What have you done that is so spectacular? Go ahead and dazzle us.
Elon Musk has founded several very influential companies, turning those industries upside down in the process. You actually think starting Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX is not impressive? If that doesn't impress you then you plainly don't understand what all that means. You don't have to like the guy but he's certainly earned a measure of respect for his accomplishments.
nah, he's just realized that Paypal's pissed off so many people that he'll have to escape to Mars.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
They get all that done AND do all the technical documentation crap that other people pretend makes their components so expensive.
That's really not that big a deal. Being AS9100 or ISO9000 registered basically involves documenting the stuff you already have to do anyway in order to run your organization well and then actually doing what you document. It's really not all that big a deal. It doesn't mean you produce a good or bad product - it simply means you say what you do and do what you say. Pretty much any company that wants to do business in aerospace is AS9100 certified just like almost every company that works in automotive is ISO9000 (or equivalent) registered.
Anyone who claims that ISO9000 means they produce a good product is either lying or doesn't understand what ISO9000 means. Same with any of the other quality standards.
Nonsense. It's all vaporware until they at the very least have a reasonably dense Dyson sphere around the solar system.
Well, you heard wrong. SpaceX has launched satellites and delivered cargo to the International Space Station. And to find this out all you had to do was go to their website and click on "NEWS".
At $4,653/kg to LEO it would cost rought 400K to push an average human to LEO
Don't forget your life support and re-entry systems.
The real cost of any (liquid fueled) launch is in the vehicle, rather than the fuel. Thus, the ultimate goal of cheap spaceflight is to recover and reuse that launch vehicle. Whether you achieve that with an extremely elaborate multi-mode gas turbine engine on an SSTO spaceplane, or a traditional staged rocket whose boosters abort and return for a powered landing back at the launch facility, you get the same end result. The question simply becomes which one is cheaper to design and maintain.
Considering no one has ever done that, are you saying the last half century of spaceflight has just been amateur hour?
Quote from Hans Koenigsmann, early German SpaceX employee, "My German accent helps in presentations. When I say, ‘This will work,’ it is more convincing than other accents for some reason.”
You people and your slight differences disgust me! - Prof. Farnsworth
A SpaceX flyback first stage a) only resuse part of the rocket and b) has to be reintegrated with the rest of the rocket before launching again
Of course, you're ignoring that a) the first stage has most of the engines (and consequently most of cost savings) and b) SpaceX has been planning to fly the second stage back to the pad also
it seems without any further evidence that getting a Skylon prepared for reuse is simpler because you get the entire vehicle back just as it left.
Baseless assumption; you're looking exclusively at reintegration times when other factors could easily be dominant in this equation. How easy is it to clear Skylon's heat shield for another launch?
I doubt the future will be Falcon vs Skylon though. If Skylon proves viable, why wouldn't SpaceX just buy SABRE engines from reaction engines and make their own SSTO plane?
Ignoring the drawbacks of a lifting body design for a minute, why would SpaceX want to abandon their competitive edge to simply mimick a competitor? Your argument is as absurd as the suggestion that GM should stop making GM cars and instead start buying and assembling Honda parts. Even if you feel Hondas are better than GMs, how the fuck do you expect that business plan to work out?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.