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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."
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.
What a mixup.
There's a Soyuz rocket and a Soyuz spacecraft. Progress (pressurised cargo) and Soyuz spacecraft (pressurised humans) are payloads for the Soyuz rocket.
The Soyuz rocket comes in different variants, all based on the R7 rocket family, first flown 1957! In active service are 5 variants.
Soyuz 2.1b has a payload to LEO of 8,200kg and a listed price of around $50M
The russian cargo work horse is the Proton-M
With a LEO capacity of 23,000kg and an estimatet price of $68M
Then again, part of the reason that you spent 100m$ 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