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Estimating SpaceX's Reusable Rocket Cost Savings (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: On Monday, SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket after launching a group of satellites into orbit. It's a huge breakthrough for the commercial space industry, because reusing rockets will dramatically reduce launch costs. The question now is: by how much? Elon Musk says it takes $60 million to build the Falcon 9, and $200,000 to fuel it. That's a big difference, but we can't expect them to immediately launch the rocket again after refueling it.
"The Falcon 9 experiences major temperature changes during its flights, as well as intense pressures and vibrations from the winds in the atmosphere. These all produce wear-and-tear on the vehicle's hardware — meaning the rocket might need repairs and updates before it can launch again." This kind of refurbishing is why the Space Shuttle ended up being way more expensive than expected. Fortunately, the Falcon 9 is not nearly as complex.
This is now the true test of SpaceX's design talents; if the rocket is built to be durable, then repairs and replacements could keep relaunch costs very low indeed. Steve Poulus, a former NASA project manager, suspects final costs could be driven below a million dollars. That figure would give SpaceX the capability of easily underbidding any competitor for government contracts, not to mention bringing it into affordability for any number of companies who'd like to put a satellite in orbit.
"The Falcon 9 experiences major temperature changes during its flights, as well as intense pressures and vibrations from the winds in the atmosphere. These all produce wear-and-tear on the vehicle's hardware — meaning the rocket might need repairs and updates before it can launch again." This kind of refurbishing is why the Space Shuttle ended up being way more expensive than expected. Fortunately, the Falcon 9 is not nearly as complex.
This is now the true test of SpaceX's design talents; if the rocket is built to be durable, then repairs and replacements could keep relaunch costs very low indeed. Steve Poulus, a former NASA project manager, suspects final costs could be driven below a million dollars. That figure would give SpaceX the capability of easily underbidding any competitor for government contracts, not to mention bringing it into affordability for any number of companies who'd like to put a satellite in orbit.
Still, there are obstacles. SpaceX still needs to demonstrate the ability to consistently produce and launch rockets many times a year after the June accident caused an unexpected, six-month setback, something it will do with several flights planned for the weeks ahead.
Just because it's relatively cheap to use Space X, if I have a 50-50 ( better or worse) chance that my $100 million satellite that took several years to design and build is going to get blown up, I'll pass.
The wear mechanisms are poorly understood and this compounds the difficulty of predicting the reliability of launches. Only time will tell if the Falcon technology can operate more reliably than the historic 1-2% failure rate. I am not optimistic. A 1% catastrophic failure rate is nothing to boast about, even for a reusable launcher.
1) The first stage is 2/3 the total cost to launch. Which would be $40 million.
2) They can renovate the first stage for $5 million.
3) They can get five launches from a first stage (original plus four more).
So, $60 million for five launches, plus the $20 million for the second stage x5.
Which comes to $32 million per launch. A bit more than half the current price.
Now, I consider those pessimistic assumptions.
Alternately...
If we replace (3) with 15 launches per first stage, we get $28M per.
If we replace (2) with $1M per launch, we get $29M for five launches, $23.75 per launch for 15 launches.
Big picture: reusing the first stage only will allow them to drop prices by 40-60%.
Now, if they can reuse the second stage also, we're talking some real money....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The wear mechanisms are poorly understood, and this compounds the launch risk. After decades of engineering work, heavy lift boosters still have about a 1% failure rate, If SpaceX can't beat that, then there is no glorious future for manned spacefight.
Elon Musk and company have been making huge achievements and seems one of the few people in industry to take the long view of things and it's likely to pay off in the end even though the MBAs hate him at the moment.
I, for one, welcome our new Martian overloard!
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Pretty much every mature industrial process takes a certain loss into consideration. If you know that 5% of manufactured goods fail then it might be cheaper to just make more of them and throw a few away to get to the desired amount rather than improve your manufacturing process.
If you are just going to use the rocket to send supplies then the cost of the payload might be insignificant.
At that point it might be worth to consider if it is cheaper to just risk it and reuse the rocket without checking it over. As long as you have a new one ready to be put to use you might end up being better off by just going for it.
It seem to me that the main expense when it comes to space projects is the 0-tolerance for failure. If you accept that 80% of the missions fail you might be able to do it at 10% of the cost.
this doesn't help humanity. It only helps corporations.
The 60 million cost includes the cost of manufacturing the components, inspecting them thoroughly, assembling them and inspecting and passing the assembly. They went for proven technologies and cheap materials, says the article. The rocket shell is relatively simple. The cost is in the rocket motor, the nozzle that holds the combustion products in plasma state, its cooling mechanism, pumps and controls. I am not sure how much of it can be inspected and re validated without extensive disassembly. I suspect most of the cost is in the inspection and certification of the vehicle rather than in the cost of individual components or the cost of assembling them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A quote from an NBC News story about Blue Origin, a company founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, shows one of the differences between SpaceX rockets, which go into orbit, and Blue Origin rockets, which don't orbit:
... important to clear up the difference between 'space' and 'orbit'," Musk posted on Twitter. ... A rocket needs to be traveling about three times the speed of sound, or Mach 3, to reach space, but orbital missions require speeds about Mach 30, Musk said.
SpaceX is working to reuse rockets that are returning from the higher altitudes and faster speeds of orbital missions. "It is
You are all cows. Cows say mooo. Mooo! Moooo! Mooo cows mooo! Moooo say the cows. YOU ESTIMATED COWS!!!
Is that like the engineering joke with the punchline, "it works, but only for spherical cows in a vacuum"?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Not go so fast. What's the rush? Take it easy. Come on baby!
Merry moomas to meeeeeeeee!
1) The first stage is 2/3 the total cost to launch. Which would be $40 million.
2) They can renovate the first stage for $5 million.
3) They can get five launches from a first stage (original plus four more).
So, $60 million for five launches, plus the $20 million for the second stage x5.
Which comes to $32 million per launch. A bit more than half the current price.
Now, I consider those pessimistic assumptions.
Interesting numbers. Let's try a variant case. Suppose in addition:
You're assuming that the non-reusable launch vehicle cost per launch is $60M. OK, let's start out by assuming 1/3 of that is fixed costs and operations costs, and 2/3 the vehicle cost, which is split evenly between the two stages (first stage is larger, but not proportionately more expensive). So, of the $60 million, $40 million is spent even if the vehicle first stage was free.
Now assume that re-usability increases the launch cost by, say, $5 million (launch operations are expensive! and the cost is not entirely the vehicle).
Assume that all the stuff needed to make the first stage reusable increases the stage cost by 25%, from $20M to $25M.
And assume that the delta-V and the added mass to do the fly-back decreases payload by 10%, and that the price you sell the launch for decreases a similar percentage (some payloads won't care, but some will.)
economics are much less clear now. The first stage cost drops with refurbishment from $20M to $6M, but the total launch cost only drops from $60M to $51M, whereas the price you can sell the launch for drops from $60M to $54M.
Still an economic advantage... but only a few percent advantage.
Well, that's settled then. Somebody tell Elon that it's been decided.
"This kind of refurbishing is why the Space Shuttle ended up being way more expensive than expected"
It was fully expected to be that expensive, the upper management simply ignored it.
At one point when they were still considering fully reusable designs, the Phase II' candidates, management put the cost of the system at something like $100 per pound to orbit. However, they had already estimated the staffing at the Cape to be on the order of 25,000 people, which meant the payroll alone was about $500 a pound. Most estimates put the absolute lowest cost at $1000/pound. After Challenger it was over $2500, making it the most expensive launch system in US history.
So why was management saying $100 until the end? Because the entire justification for the Shuttle was that it would be lower cost than any other system. And because of that, everyone would move their cargos to it. And since everyone moved their cargos to it, it would be launching all the time. And because it was launching all the time, the embedded payroll per launch was lower. Even then it didn't look like it could match Scout, so they came up with the Getaway Specials to try to take those, and then cancelled Scout.
Now it was clear to everyone, including the very detailed CBO report, that if they didn't get every single payload out there, then there was no way to get the launch rates they needed to make the payroll costs go down. And as the CBO report noted, if any of those assumptions failed, it would end up being more expensive than systems like Titan. And they went on to point out that many of the payloads NASA assumed would move to the Shuttle never even existed in the first place (modular telcomsats for instance, which they just made up).
So management lied, fully aware there was no way they could meet the numbers. And it was this precise attitude that caused the Challenger Disaster, where bad news numbers were simply ignored and replaced with ones that met political or economic criterion.
At some time, all the protons in the universe will have decayed.
The Heavy Lift version uses 3 Falcon 9 rockets so consider the savings on that bad boy compared to the competition. Something to keep our eyes and ears on for sure. Way to go Mr Musk.
First some background. The engineers behind modern rockets have throughout the years gotten pretty good at designing rockets that can launch successfully. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to evaluate a launched rocket to see how the predictions of the stresses have effected the rockets. This is the first orbital booster that has been successfully re-landed.
What SpaceX is likely to do is take one of these returned boosters, strip it down, and evaluate how the stresses from launch/return have effected the rocket body and motors. They'll then determine which parts are over/under engineered. They then make some design changes to ensure that every part of the first stage can be reused with minimal or no refurbishment. This is what they are aiming for aircraft like re-use (pre-flight inspection and periodic maintenance/rebuilds). Move the first stage to the VAB, add the second stage/payload, roll out to the pad, re-fuel, and launch.
As the re-usability of the boosters increases, the operational overhead of launches will come down. Right now they have to pay for a large team to handle rocket prep and launch control even though there are fairly infrequent launches. So these people likely have a fair amount of time where they are not performing at peak efficiency from a ROI perspective. This will improve when the greater number of launches keeps them fully utilized.
If you assume that based on testing the booster can be reused 12 times before retirement/major rebuild (yet to be proven) with an initial manufacture, transport (across country), fuel, launch cost of $60M and $300k transport (short distance), fuel, launch cost. I'm ignoring staging assembly at the VAB and launch operation control costs here (would vary by mission/payload). You get an average of $5.275M/launch. Average costs can be driven down further if a rebuild/refurbishment can extend the number of launches. i.e. $10M rebuild after 12 launches and then it can then do another 12 for $300k per gives an avg of $3.2M per launch. This can of course vary in that if a launch customer insists on a first/early use booster they may pay more for it front-loading the costs and reducing the costs of later launches.
So, if SpaceX attempts to aggressively drive down launch costs then the cost of the first stage could be cut eventually by a avg. factor of ~20x. Or SpaceX can itself use recovered boosters at cost to launch orbital refueling stations, components for it's mars ambitions, etc, paving the way for deep space missions.
Isn't it possible for space to be TOO accessible? If it becomes too cheap to put a satellite into orbit, and every Joe Blow with a million dollars can do it, doesn't that make it more likely that space will become overcrowded, causing hypervelocity satellite collisions increase in frequency, bringing us ever closer to ua Kessler Syndrome scenario?
Space will need to be regulated more than it currently is in order to keep that from happening.
No, not because fast repairs. Simply have 10 rockets, and if repairs take 9 days, you will always have 1 ready to launch each day. Or produce as many as days it takes.
Whast about the cost of putting too mnay satellites in orbit? Dont' we also hear about how much junk is floating around in space too? If the cost goes much lower lowering the barrier of entry for satellites, won't we end up having an orbiting ring of junk around the planet?
I'd bet half next year, tapering to 1/10 in the next year or two.
There are two things going on here. The cost, and making space no-big-deal.
Must have the normal launch crowd interested/concerned/looking at time to retirement.
SpaceX did seem to loose composure in the middle of the delivery mission when the booster landed.
This is understandable and no harm done, but they need to stay focused then party.
Another time it may matter.
Refurbing the first stage will need to he much much less, and doable many times to save on the build cost.
If refurbing takes the same people as the build and if the reusable number is not much greater than 2, then the "savings" margin will be very small. Also, if a refurbed stage 1 fails on the second flight, also causing the loss of the pay-load, then the reland-ability becomes an expensive option greater than "build to throw away"!
It may all come down to "inventive" accounting.
I.E. SpaceX will have to "Inventively" account so that SpaceX and Musk technically owes no taxes to the IRS. This is the option that Al Capone enjoyed in Chicago in the 1920s.
Ha ha
The big reason why Falcon costs only $60 million is due to the production volume. Reuse slashes production volumes, which means the cost to produce will soar. 10 launches of disposable Falcon rockets means 100 engines built, while 10 launches of a reused Falcon will only result in 19 engines built. Cutting production volume means higher costs, so it is not a slam dunk for SpaceX.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
There is a lot being made about SpaceX re-using the rocket for future launches. Hasn't NASA been re-using solid rocket booster for decades?
...that all SpaceX flights with people will use First-Time boosters and they will be refurbished for unattended missions. At least I hope so.
Perhaps in the future, they can make the third stage returnable, so that if the 1st stage blows, the payload is saved.
He had a vid up that shows recovery of all stages.
Space X last I heard had 8 billion dollars worth of launches on their manifest. Companies do their due diligence and consider Space X reliable and competent.they clearly do not read the drivel on this slash dot about the reliability or competency of Space X from the armchair loons writing with zero knowledge of this company. Looking at the inventiveness of their engineers and the minor reasons for their launch failures which have always been fully understood within days of the engineering error and resolved on essentially newly designed and engineered rocket motors and on the total assembly they are hugely ahead of the curve. Their use of extremely r dundant systems are of the highest quality. I have watched rocket development for 60 years and personally attended launches from the 1950s onward and I can assert that the engineering inventiveness even to the means they use to structure the rocket on the launch stand put them ten years ahead of any other company. Next year they will begin testing the largest launch vehicle ever assembled. This is no mean feat. You naysayers do not understand what you are of seeing as Space X will go down in history as an original the way Northrop was in the aircraft world...they are an original and they will make a lot of money to carry the ideals on Mr.Musk to his publicly stated goal..Mars. He is not kidding.
Just as the reusable booster is a strategy to reduce costs, they will he looking at other cost-savers. The Dragon launch system is the largest ever built, plus by using super-cooled, denser fuel, they can put more hardware in orbit than anyone could before them. One strategy they may employ would be, as they could have done on this last momentous launch, was to have put a full 12 satellites in orbit rather than just 11 plus one dead weight for balance. When the first of those satellites does go haywire, that 12th satellite could be taken out of hibernation to fill the slot of that first dead satellite. And, going forward, using all excess launch potential to put "spares" in orbit that hibernate until needed.