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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.
The Space Shuttle Main Engines, which push the envelope far more than SpaceX's Merlin, were reused up to 19 times. According to the Wikipedia article: "After each flight the engines would be removed from the orbiter and transferred to the Space Shuttle Main Engine Processing Facility (SSMEPF), where they would be inspected and refurbished in preparation for reuse on a subsequent flight. A total of 46 reusable RS-25 engines, each costing around US$40 million, were flown during the Space Shuttle program, with each new or overhauled engine entering the flight inventory requiring flight qualification on one of the test stands at Stennis Space Center prior to flight." There is also a chart of which engines were used on which flight. Musk and his team seem to have a clear engineering vision. This first landing of an orbital booster is just the beginning, but the potential for cutting cost to orbit through reusability is enormous.
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.
SpaceX has launched 20 times, with one failure. So, that's a 5% chance of loss, not 50%, assuming they maintain this success rate.
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[Citation Needed]
Rockets are not coins. So far, the failure rate seems to be 5%. If the one failure was a statistically early event and/or the issue around that one failure is fixed, the true failure rate will be much lower.
We need a larger data set to firmly set the real failure rate, but there is no evidence of 50/50.
In fact, if a per launch odds really were 50/50, the probability of 19 successful launches would be 1/(2^n) or 0.00000190734 or 0.000190734%
TLDR; you have no idea what you're talking about. Take a stats class.