SpaceX Successfully Lands Its Rocket On A Floating Drone Ship Again (theverge.com)

Early Friday morning, SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship at sea for the second time. The company has recovered the post-launch vehicle a total of three times, two of which involved the rocket landing on a floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Before the launch, the landing was deemed unlikely as the rocket would be "subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating" in its attempt to launch a Japanese communications satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit high above Earth. Elon Musk tweeted: "Rocket reentry is a lot faster and hotter than last time, so odds of making it are maybe even, but we should learn a lot either way." As a result of the successful mission, Musk followed up with, "May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar." The first successful launch was in December, when the rocket landed at a ground-based spaceport in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The second landing occurred in April on a floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Comments

SpaceX's Next Big Challenge

[Bruce Perens]

Landing a first stage after a ballistic re-entry is a pretty big deal. This means that SpaceX can recover the first stage in low-remaining-fuel situations like heavy payloads, geostationary injection (because it's a higher orbit) and when the booster is the center stage of a Falcon Heavy (and is really high and far downrange).

Since they've recovered 9 out of 10 engines, they've recovered most of the cost of both stages. If they can get a high recovery rate (and this more-difficult recovery argues that they might), that drives down the cost of a launch.

People at ULA watched this one and it sure wasn't good news for them. They can't compete financially with SpaceX as an expended rocket, forget about their competing with working first-stage recovery. It also blows the ULA recovery strategy - ejecting the engines and recovering just them, instead of the entire booster - out of the water.

But the big challenge for SpaceX now isn't one with astounding demonstrations of technology. It's doing the same thing over, and over, and doing it quickly, and making a profit. SpaceX wanted to reach a cadence of 18 launches this year, and they have so far launched 4 in the first third of the year. To be a profitable company and to reap the economic advantage of first-stage recovery, they will need to get higher than 18 per year.

So, I'm disappointed that Elon announced the "instant Mars demo" immediately after last month's at-sea landing. Yes, for Elon SpaceX has always been about Mars. But now is the time for SpaceX to focus on making a profit and having a rapid cadence. If Elon does that, he will have lots of $$$ and recovered boosters for Mars projects.

Re:SpaceX's Next Big Challenge

[AK Marc]

So, I'm disappointed that Elon announced the "instant Mars demo" immediately after last month's at-sea landing. Yes, for Elon SpaceX has always been about Mars. But now is the time for SpaceX to focus on making a profit and having a rapid cadence. If Elon does that, he will have lots of $$$ and recovered boosters for Mars projects.

Cheaper launches are about Mars. You don't launch to Mars. You launch 10-100 times to build a launch platform in orbit, then launch to Mars from orbit, not the surface. So as the costs drop, the profitability increases. The profits are "reinvested" into more launches (unpaid ones) to put up a Mars launch platform. With 18 per year, and 10% being profits launched as "bonus" launches, that'd be about 2 a year dedicated to Mars. Depending on the plan, that puts the Mars launch a few years off. If they can launch more per year, they can speed that up, but they seem very connected. Launches = Mars. Not today, not tomorrow, but eventually.

Re:SpaceX's Next Big Challenge

[Rei]

Indeed, I have to wonder what ULA is thinking going forward. They made the mistake of seriously underestimating SpaceX. It's understandable - there have been a lot of wannabee private rocket companies over the years. But they really dropped the ball on this one. Now they're deep in the middle of working towards an incremental, 50% price reduction via the Vulcan, which isn't anywhere close to being enough to be competitive.

So what do they do? I assume they finish their current efforts and try to get as many (probably at least partially coerced) launches out of it as they can. But meanwhile? Some possibilities:

1) Start over from scratch and target an even lower launch cost than SpaceX. It's certainly possible; rocketry costs are still orders of magnitude more than the cost of the energy that the rockets consume.
2) Move to a launch niche market filling in the gaps in SpaceX's product line (smaller rockets, storeable rockets, etc)
3) Take a "bold leap" in another direction, such as focusing on space tugs (such as Lockheed's "Jupiter") - basically, giving SpaceX LEO while claiming for themselves beyond-LEO.
4) Refocus away from rockets, to satellite development
5) Focus on NASA contracts unrelated to delivering payloads for low prices - for example trying to become a prime contractor on interplanetary crew vehicles, whatever-giant-rocket-congress-has-mandated, etc, things of that nature.
6) Move into a rocketry supporting role, focused on launch/range/communications services/etc
7) Try to crush SpaceX by whatever dubious legal and political means they can dream up
8) Put head in sand, pray that SpaceX shoots itself in the foot
9) Give up on the space market altogether, focus on other businesses.

Right now they seem to be going for 20% #7, 80% #8, meaning that they're probably headed toward #9.

Re: SpaceX's Next Big Challenge

[cbhacking]

SpaceX is a big player indeed. Take a look at http://spaceflightnow.com/laun..., and you'll see that SpaceX is right up there in launches scheduled. It's even competitive with Soyuz. That's with Falcon Heavy not online yet, too; they'll be able to pick up even more jobs once they can put heavy and even super-heavy-class payloads up. For that matter, they may not even need FH for that; according to their latest payload limit updates, the F9 is a Heavy-Lift Launch Vehicle (more than 20 tons to LEO) if flown in expendable configuration (no legs, no fins, probably little if any first-stage RCS, and no need to conserve fuel for re-entry and landing). They can't re-use those boosters, but they can use the profit margin on them to focus on making reusable launches even cheaper and faster.

As for mass market, though, that's a case where SpaceX's success will feed on itself. Right now, satellites are super expensive to launch. This means that you want to make the ones you launch super-reliable (sucks to get them into space and discover they don't work), very feature-rich (to maximize value per launch), as long-lived as possible (to amortize their launch cost over a longer time), and as future-proof as possible (because expanding capacity or capabilities later will be extremely expensive). All of this, of course, makes the satellites themselves extremely expensive. Therefore, there's less market for launches, because there's only so many satellites that it makes sense to launch at $200M a pop.

Now, imagine that the launch costs go way down. Suddenly, the total cost of launching a satellite also goes way down, and the vast majority of it is now the cost of the satellite. When you can launch two cheap satellites for less total cost than one expensive one and get the same capabilities, or launch four three-year satellites (planning each one to be an upgrade on the last) instead of one long-lived beast that will need bleeding-edge components at launch and still be quite obsolete in 12 years (but costs more than 4 times as much), you will end up with double or quadruple your launch count. When launches become cheap enough that it's viable to build an affordable global personal communication network like what Iridium wanted to be, you'll see a wave of companies wanting to put up the network that will replace the concept of cell towers, and they'll need to put up a *lot* of satellites.

Also, it's not just satellites. Remember that Dragon 2 is designed to be reusable as well. When launching a human-rated vehicle into orbit becomes cheap enough that space tourists don't have to be one of the 0.001%, you'll have a lot more people lining up to go... and you'll need places for them to go, so that'll increase your satellite market again as Bigelow and such launch space hotels. Then there's things like asteroid mining, which is currently hampered by launch costs but could become a regular source of launch contracts if the costs come down enough to make the business model viable.

As for "any time soon"... launches are already accelerating. It'll snowball as prices drop, as reliability increases, and as capacities expand.

borg^h^h^h^hSpaceX interpret damage as education

[xeno]

On one hand, it's thrilling to see the incredible become very credible. The very idea of this kind of spacecraft landing was thought to defy the laws of physics a decade ago, considered an engineering impossibility just a few short years ago, foolish to attempt last year, and by the end of this year, it probably won't get a headline. I'm not sure I'd want to work there, but the pace of SpaceX's science and engineering advancements is astounding. Kudos to anyone who can take the stress; the output is truly impressive.

More in the moment, though, I see what they meant by "subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating" as it appears the octaweb shielding took enough heat damage from the 2x re-entry speed and 3-engine retroburn that the shielding and some underlying componentry continued to burn for a bit. But the borg over there interpret damage as education, and I doubt we'll see the same problem again. F*ing impressive. I look forward to more info in the morning.

Re:borg^h^h^h^hSpaceX interpret damage as educatio

[Bruce Perens]

We don't know what was burning down there. It might just have been fuel seeping out of the turbopump. They did a 3-rocket burn this time, and the other two times we've seen a 1-rocket burn.

It's got a much larger fire on the way up. I agree it was alarming, but we don't know that it represented actual damage yet.

Re:borg^h^h^h^hSpaceX interpret damage as educatio

[Bruce Perens]

There's a lot of water dumped on the pad at launch, and I'm sure some of it splashes on to the bells.

I don't think they are worried about pushing it sideways, the word from Musk is that they don't really have to tie the rocket down once it's landed, and winds and rocking on something 160 feet high are probably more force than that water stream. The rocket is very bottom-heavy with the tanks empty.

When they turned the water on, the nozzle was tilted upward. It wasn't aimed at where the flame was. So it's not too clear what was going on, but I agree that nozzle looked like it was commanded or the result of some sort of fire alarm.

Re:Musk runs on vision

[Bruce Perens]

I had an office across the hall from Steve at Pixar for some years. I wasn't that important, maybe they just wanted to keep an eye on me. One day, he made his peace with Bill Gates, and sometime that day I looked up and the NeXT workstation wasn't on his desk any longer. There was a Windows laptop there.

Maybe Elon will get that sort of rude awakening sometime.

Re: So what?

[gerf]

I recall that back in the 1990s Bill Gates wanted to build a satellite based cell network. It failed partially due go launch costs. The joking image showed Bill tossing satellites up by jumping on a springboard. More immediately, we need more weather satellites to improve weather forecasting, to keep GPS working, and better communication to far flung places. I recall possibilities of better balanced high speed bearings made in space, balanced better due to microgravity, so cheap launches could spur that. Long term, Musk wants to colonize Mars, and further. He's making the space elevator look less necessary after all.

Re: So what?

[Teancum]

Part of that effort to build the satellite network resulted in the Iridium satellite constellation. A combination of 1990's electronic technology (it wasn't all that good... really) along with as you said the extremely high launch costs caused the companies to go bankrupt. Iridium itself has gone through several sets of owners, and it was kept on life support financially basically because the U.S. military couldn't find any alternative that could provide global coverage like Iridium was doing.

To give an example of the technical capabilities of Iridium, the first generation had a data throughput speed of 2400 baud for individual customers. That might have been sufficient for reading a few e-mails in the 1990's, but is grossly slow for current needs. The costs for Iridium phones are also insanely expensive compared to what was promised.... and frankly the satellites couldn't handle the crush of millions of users in that first generation either to spread those costs around.

Bill Gates' plan to have a large number of cheap satellites might have worked, but as you have pointed out it needed cheap launch costs to make it possible. $10k/kg to orbit is not cheap.