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SpaceX Finds a Customer For Its First Reused Rocket (arstechnica.com)
What do you do after you successfully land a rocket on a floating barge in the Atlantic? You reuse it. SpaceX has been on the hunt for someone to reuse some of its first-stage Falcon boosters, and now SpaceX has finally found a customer. Ars Technica reports: "The Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES said Tuesday that it intends to launch a geostationary satellite, SES 10, on a reusable rocket in the fourth quarter of this year. SpaceX has not yet specified how much it will charge for launch services on one of its flown boosters, but industry officials anticipate about a 30 percent discount on SpaceX's regular price of $62 million for a Falcon 9 launch. The company has not shared how much it is spending to refurbish and reuse a Falcon 9 stage, nor has it offered much public information about the extent to which the vehicle's engines have had to be tested and prepared for a second flight." "Having been the first commercial satellite operator to launch with SpaceX back in 2013, we are excited to once again be the first customer on SpaceX's first ever mission using a flight-proven rocket," said Martin Halliwell, Chief Technology Officer at SES. "We believe reusable rockets will open up a new era of spaceflight and make access to space more efficient in terms of cost and manifest management."
You wanna buy my 93 Escort? It's a road proven car, so that's a big plus!!
We just have to fill up the rocket tanks with used fuel recycled from the exhaust nozzle of their last flight. There is no warranty on it, however.
>$62 million That is three times the cost of a Soyuz launch
The satellite is doing this for the publicity.
.. Should have a name.
Here's hoping for a successful re-launch.
Year end clearance! No money down .. No credit! bad credit! we don't care! we will make sure you leave here in a rocket! Head on down to your friendly Falcon dealer in the rocketmall.
Is that a Soyuz launch all the way to geostationary orbit or are you comparing apples to orchards?
Are you confusing the cost of one SEAT on a Soyuz vs the cost of the entire Falcoln 9? Even if so, the whole Falcoln 9 isn't three times the cost of a seat on a Soyuz.
The Soyuz 2 costs about $57 million to take 7,000 pounds to GTO. The Falcon 9 is about $62 million to take 18,000 pounds. So about the same total cost per launch, but the Falcon 9 FT carries over twice as much.
I your satellite is 7,000 lbs or less, you can either split the cost with another customer and pay about $30 million on the Falcoln, or pay $57 million on Soyuz. Falcoln wins on cost. If your payload is over 7,000 pounds, Soyuz won't get you there at any cost, unless you split it into multiple launches at $57 million each. Falcoln wins again.
On the other hand, IF you spent $100 million building the cargo, you might prefer to spend more on the Soyuz due to its proven track record.
You are comparing apples to oranges. Progress is a spacecraft, not a rocket. Falcon 9 is a rocket, not a spacecraft. They cannot be directly compared, because they aren't even the same class of thing! SpaceX's equivalent of Progress is the Dragon capsule.
The Soyuz ROCKET , specifically the newest version (called Soyuz-2, has a payload of 8200 kg to LEO and 3250 kg to GTO. It's still not nearly so powerful as Falcon 9, even the reusable configuration (I believe the numbers you quoted omit the F9's grid fins, landing legs, and reserved fuel for recovery), but it's far more than one ninth as powerful.
Sigh...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Soyuz rocket launch cost is 48-61 millions depending on configuration (LEO launches cheaper due no upper stage)
Soyuz capasity to is 8.2 tonnes to LEO and 3.25 tonnes to GTO.
Falcon 9 expendable capasity is 22.8 tonnes to LEO and 8.3 tonnes to GTO,
and Falcon 9(stage 1 recoverable) capasity is over 13 tonnes to LEO(propably much more) and 5.5 tonnes to GTO.
So, falcon 9 on fully expendable mode lifts over 2.5x more than soyuz, and falcon 9 on stage 1 recoverable mode lift over 1.5 x more than soyuz.
This means that:
for LEO launches, reused reusable(assuming the 30% discount) falcon 9 is 10% cheaper than Soyuz, while lifting over 1.5 times more.
for GTO launches, reused reusable(assuming the 30% discount) falcon 9 is 29% cheaper than Soyuz, while lifting about 1.7 times more.
Then again, part of the reason that you spent 100m$ on building the cargo, is that the launch was been so darn expensive.
The reason that you spent that much money building the cargo has comparatively little to do with the cost of the launch and everything to do with the fact that you really don't get multiple chances to get it right plus the fact that the destination has pretty much the harshest environmental conditions imaginable. Satellites and probes are expensive because they are (usually) one off bespoke products designed from scratch. If Ford could only sell a single Ford Taurus but it needed to be build to the same standards as the production model you can buy from a dealer you better believe it would cost many millions of dollars.
You could propably build a supercheap satelite with the exact same functionallity for a fraction of the cost using standard parts.
I run a company that makes custom wire harnesses for all sorts of applications. We've had some of our products go into space. The notion that you could build a "supercheap satelite" using "standard parts" is more or less nonsense at present. Maybe in the distant future that will be true but for all but a handful of corner cases it isn't true today and won't be for some time to come. It is possible to design a set of standardized space rated components but we're a long way away from that happy state of affairs for most applications.
First off "standard parts" (stuff you can order from a catalog) are generally not designed with space travel in mind. I buy components daily from distributors and they are designed for particular environmental conditions. You exceed these conditions at your own peril. Space travel is WELL outside of the performance specifications envelope for most off the shelf components. Even for the comparatively few off the shelf parts you can buy that will work, the components are not what really makes it expensive.
Second, even if you can find some components that would work in space you most likely are still building a custom product. I can assure you that a single version of anything custom that has to be right the first time is not going to be cheap. If you want your product to work for any meaningful length of time there are going to be very detailed assembly instructions, designs, reviews, audits, checks, test procedures and calibrations. You have to make sure the whole thing works together even if the components individually would be fine in space. You will spend enormous amounts of engineering time to do even the seemingly simplest things because you only get one chance to get them right. All of this is very expensive. You can try to do in on the cheap and hope you get lucky but in my experience customers who buy components for space travel aren't real fans of trusting to luck.
Third, to reduce costs of engineering you need to be able to design products that can be sold multiple times. Then you can spread the engineering costs across them. I expect that will happen eventually but right now most products intended for space are one off designs so there are no economies of scale to be enjoyed. There will have to be considerable standardization of products before that happens and we're a long way from that right now. Kind of like in the early days of aviation we're still figuring out what works because you don't want to build a lot of something that doesn't work.
Just saying that if the launch prices go down far enough we will see a whole another market of cheap hardware, where the reason for building really expensive satelites or other cargo partly vanishes.
They would have to go down a LOT further for that to be the case. I'm talking almost unrealistically cheaper. Science fiction levels of cheaper. Nothing that is likely to happen in my lifetime cheaper. It isn't the hardware that is the primary cost center in many cases. It's the design and engineering and assembly and test
First the daily Musk meme, then an article about cars with model numbers.
That's some fine reporting there Lou.
Gotta love the reverse Orwellianism of "flight-proven rocket." Anyone interested in my old car? With 140,000 miles on the clock, surely it is amply "distance-proven." :-)
SES is the operator of the Astra satellite fleet that provides satellite television to Europe. It has literally hundreds of millions of satellite dishes pointed at their satellites.
Once reuse is proven to be economically feasible..the problem will be getting people to pay the extra $$ to use the new ones to keep the supply of discounted rockets available.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Even more confusing, the actual Russian name for the rocket for years used to be simply "Number 7" ("Semyorka")
I like how the customer uses the term "flight proven", I bet they only buy "pre-owned" cars rather than used cars too :)
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I think you have it backwards ... reused will have proven safety record, the new ones are unproven.
Ultimately I believe the SpaceX model will become a single pricing model, you get a ride to space for X amount, you don't get to choose the core you ride on? Do you choose the plane you fly on, why would the rocket core be any different?
SpaceX reusing a booster is a significant milestone but it will really start paying off with Falcon Heavy when they can reuse three boosters from each launch.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
At multiple millions of dollars for a thirty minute flight I'm damn sure going to the plane, pilot AND the flight attendants.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Once reuse is proven to be economically feasible..
Except it won't be, and hasn't - certainly not with rockets.
Exactly. Let the rocket company manage the rockets.
Goatse guy was first in line. He just couldn't pony up the dough.
Here you a grown adult and can't do third-grade arithmetic. I'm going to hazard a guess that you went to public school.
Suppose you're using the most common satellite form factor, the cubesat (or tubesat). You spend $10,000 building it, and if needed you can build a replacement for $10,000. You can either spend $40,000 to launch it on a time-tested rocket, or spend $20,000 on a less established vehicle.
If it goes well, your total cost is $50,000 for the old rocket, $30,000 on the new rocket. New rocket wins by a large margin.
If the new rocket blows up the first time and you have to try again, total cost for two launches on the new rocket is $50,000. The old rocket doesn't save you any money even if the new rocket fails the first time.
As I said, if you have a $100 million payload, you should use the most reliable rocket. Otherwise, you need to use arithmetic to decide.
The other assumption of spacecraft uniqueness is becoming less and less true. Most of the bigger comm satellites are built on a more or less common backplane. The radios are not one off devices.
To a meaningful degree this is true. I would expect some amount of standardization over time and there is some evidence of it happening. But we're still a long time away from spacecraft that are built from parts you can buy from a figurative Digi-Key if you get what I mean. It will (probably) happen but it's going to take a non-trivial amount of time.
With lower $/kg to your selected orbit, replacing a satellite is economically possible and building a satellite with a much shorter projected lifetime is probably optimal because the alternative is for the operator to be stuck with 20-year-old technology in orbit
The $/kg to orbit would need to fall quite a lot to make it practical to design less robust equipment. And the difference in cost between a satellite designed to last 5 years vs one designed to last 10 years or more is probably not a linear function and the engineering costs will be very large in either case. To make up an example with bogus numbers even if you cut 1/3 out of the engineering costs it still will be a big number. Even if you can cut some corners by being able to launch more frequently you still have huge cost in engineering until you can standardize the stuff you are sending to orbit to realize economies of scale.
It will happen just like it does in other industries but it's just going to take a while because the starting dollar amounts are so large and the engineering challenges are still being addressed. Plus the economic model for space is still being figured out and it's hard to standardize something if you don't know what the goal is yet.
When SpaceX launches a Dragon to ISS is is a flight to LEO, a coule hundred miles up and at about 14.5K Mph
When SpaceX launches a comsat like this, it is to Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO) which is a HUGE and very elliptical orbit at a far higher velocity. The satellite then only needs to provide the additiona limpulse to circularize its orbit out at about 22K miles.
The difference can easily be seen in the condition of the returned first stages. The stages that land after a GTO launch are significantly more blackened and crispy and there's more evidence of wear from the extreme heat and shock waves on things like the grid fins, because the 1st stages on the GTO flights are going higher and faster when they drop away. SpaceX has also had better success on landing the LEO flight first stages. Before they stretched the 1st stages and went to densified LOX, the talk was that SpaceX would not be recovering 1st stages from the GTO launches because all available performance would be needed by the primary mission. Now with the most-recent upgrade, which some call version 1.1, there is enough performance margin to recover a GTO 1st stage and Musk's team has done a remarkable job of it.
It's a LAUNCH VEHICLE.
The Redstone, Atlas, Titan, Saturn I, Saturn V, Delta, and Falcon 9 are all "launch vehicles"
The Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Dragon are all "spacecraft", and also happen to be "payload" from the perspecive of the launch vehicle.
Shuttle was unusual in that the orbiter was both a spacecraft, and the aft section with the LH2 and LOX plumbing and 3 SSMEs was part of what would traditionally have been called the launch vehicle. That was why it was designed that way: to recover and re-use the ectremely expensive high-performance 3 main engines, and the solid rocket booster casings, while discarding the rest of the expendable launch vehicle.
The first re-used spacecraft, a NASA Gemini capsule that was refurbished and modified and re-flown by the USAF is on display at the Air Force museum
IIRC and has been nicknamed "blue gemini" ("blue" because: Air Force) but did not have an official "name". Shuttle orbiters, of course, set a great tradition by being named like sea-going vessels. Re-used Dragons, Dream Chasers, and Starliners might be well-suited to follow that example.
"space vessel" is a pulp sci fi name, which one MIGHT be able to stretch an apply to something like the Apollo Lunar Module, which was not so much a "vessel" as a mobile phone booth in space. It might be best to reserve the "space ship" and "space vessel" names for some bright and shiny future when we have very large craft that are built in space and shuttle hundreds of people back and forth between Earth and Mars.
The FAA will not even allow customers to ride on the first flight of an airliner, and you have never been in an automobile the first time it was fired-up and moved under its own power, or on a ship the first time it was put into the water and sent underway.
One reason spaceflight is so very expensive and all the activities surrounding it are so very stricly controlled and documented and tested is that the entire machine is traditionally a very complex beast that has been assembled from many thousands of components and it must function PERFECTLY the very first time it is used or millions of dollars and possibly human lives are lost - and then it's thrown away after the first use, just as it is proven to be properly assembled.
I am so utterly tired of snarky sarcastic internet posts by people in pajamas in basements./p.
For a Soyuz-2 1a launcher (lightest mod). Proton-M with Briz upper stage is about $28 million for state customers. What foreigners pay is very different. Reality is the Russian rockets cost MUCH less than Space-X offerings. What Space-X does mean for the Russians is they can no longer gouge foreigners like crazy but Space-X is not going to win a price war with Russia anymore than shale oil is going to win a price war with Rosneft.... Is only a question of time and pressure my Yankee friends.
Or they'll just average out the price and maybe you'll get a new one and maybe you'll get a used one.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
They shouldn't offer a discount to fly on a used rocket.
Rather they should simply guarantee every flight.
This is product vs service.
Miss-remembered the name. "Blue Gemini" as actual manned project did not fly, but the Gemini capsule I was thinking of did indeed fly twice as I stated and is what's in the museum. It was however called "Gemini B" and can be seen in this launch photo as the Titan 3C was lifting a boilerplate mockup of the USAF space station called "MOL" with the re-used Gemini-B capsule atop. This Gemini was a previously-flown Gemini that was modified to have a hatch in its heat shield that wouls have allowed future USAF astronauts to pass through the heatsheild into to the MOL while on orbit and return to the Gemini before heading back to Earth. The test was successful as the Gemini-B in the museum displays its post re-entry ablated heat shield with the hatch in it.
The MOL program got cancelled, and Blue Gemini with it since they went together, and also unmanned spy sats were getting better so rapidly that putting men in an air force recon sat became unimportant.
The flown NASA Gemini capsule, recycled and re-flown by the USAF, did however fly and produced a few interesting results including probably giving NASA more confidence later that it would be safe to make a shuttle with landing gear doors in its heat shield.
why would the rocket core be any different?
Because there's such a thing as satellite insurance, which considers the launch vehicle in determining its rates.
If reused rockets are as reliable as new ones, then this shouldn't be a factor at all. But if there is a difference, the customer will face a higher insurance bill.
Also, if a launch is particularly important to my company then I might want whichever vehicle is more reliable, regardless of whether it is new or rebuilt.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.