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SpaceX Plans to Start Launching Rockets Every Two To Three Weeks (fortune.com)
Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX, plans to launch its Falcon 9 rockets every two to three weeks, its fastest rate since starting launches in 2010, once a new launch pad is put into service in Florida next week. From a report: The ambitious plan comes only five months after a SpaceX rocket burst into flames on the launch pad at the company's original launch site in Florida. SpaceX, controlled by billionaire Elon Musk, has only launched one rocket since then, in mid-January. "We should be launching every two to three weeks," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in an interview on Monday.
SpaceX has had this sort of launch rate as a goal for years now. Repeated delays and two rocket failures, CRS-7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_CRS-7 and last year's on the ground explosion of a Falcon 9 have both slowed things down a lot. They are right now cheaper and more cutting edge than pretty much every other medium payload launcher, but the pressure of that sort of launch schedule is going to be very tough. And we're already seeing the expected slippage- CRS-10 was originally scheduled for late January, then got rescheduled to Feb 14 and is now on Feb 17. Given that they only have two launch facilities and they share personnel, delays for any given launch can easily start eating into prep time for later launches, bumping them even further.
SpaceX has 56 future launches on their manifest, and that doesn't even include most of their NASA crew launches (only the first one is listed on their manifest). Even at 25 launches per year, it will take SpaceX years to catch up with their backlog. If their own constellation ever takes off, that would also add a large number of additional launches.
Is there THAT much shit being sent into space?
Yes. And that's just Spacex, there are a 7 other providers with their own full launch manifests. SpaceFlightNow does a pretty good job tracking upcoming launches.
Some quick searching shows there are about 4500 satellites in orbit, 1500 or them operational. Looks like we are putting about 200+ more per year up there. source So yeah, there is plenty of "shit" to send up there.
But the title is misleading, "plans" to launch (title) and "should" launch (summary) are two totally different things...
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That's the thing, there really is. With launch prices down, satellite tech advancing fast, and a rapidly growing middle class, there's a large demand for commercial launches right now, and it only looks to grow.
My problem with SpaceX's plan isn't the market - that's solid. My concern is that the faster you want to launch, the less you can tolerate failures. The time a failure leaves you unable to launch for is independent of how fast you're launching. The faster you launch, the sooner the time between failures. So an increasingly large percent of your time becomes time down due to failures. The only way to overcome this is to correspondingly boost reliability. Want to 10x launch rates? Better 10x reliability. It's a tall order. SpaceX is already on the low end on reliability (not terrible by rocketry standards, but not great), so they already have a deficit to overcome.
Next to my desk we have an Ire Extinguisher. Our boss is really assertive, so we like the idea of having it.
According to an article on Arstechnica, there is some problem with the current design, which means the recovered boosters are only good for one or two re-launches. They need the next version of Falcon 9, block 5 before they are properly re-usable.
https://arstechnica.com/scienc...
"It now seems likely that SpaceX will fly the landed boosters it currently has, at most, once or twice, before retiring them, instead of multiple times. Although the company hasn't elaborated on the problems with the engines, booster structure or composite materials that has challenged their attempts to re-fly its Falcon 9 first stages, Musk seems confident that changes to the Block 5 version of the rocket will solve the problem. "
Almost a quarter-century ago, people were suggesting that way to drive down launch costs: http://www.fourmilab.ch/docume...
and a rapidly growing middle class
Was that a joke?
Take your blinders off. The middle class may not be doing so well in America and Europe, but in the other 90% of the world it is expanding rapidly.
SpaceX is launching most of Iridium Next this year, so that is 6 more polar-orbit launches (first one launched from Vandenberg last month). With ISS Supply missions and other commercial launches, they have a lot of stuff going up.
The original AC probably thinks that everything space related is a waste of money. He also probably thinks that technology just magically comes into being when we are finished researching it, just like it does in video games.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I'll take take that bet at even odds.
I'll take those odds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
ShanghaiBill? More like ShanghaiSHILL! :)
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Perhaps you limited your definition of "middle class" to the United States.
The middle class is growing world-wide.
It's a backlog that has only ever grown in spite of SpaceX launching up to 8 times per year, and would likely attract more interest from customers if they were launching regularly and didn't have a many-year manifest to work through. Even if they launched 25 times per year and only continued signing launch contracts at their current rate, they'd probably need at least four years to run out of things to launch. Their poor cadence is a problem that has already cost them business (due to the long wait time), and they could probably just reduce their cadence once they manage to reduce that backlog.
That also assumes that they're not able to increase their market share. They're working on reducing their prices to try to capture more commercial business, they're working on getting government/military contracts in the US, and they've already lost a bunch of business to the competition because of their poor launch cadence. I'm not sure if all of that would be enough to support 25 launches per year in the long term (beyond the time needed to clear out the current manifest), but they do need that sort of cadence in the near term to clear the backlog.
In the long term, if their own constellation ever happens, that's at least an extra 200 or so launches for the initial constellation, and then roughly 30 launches per year to maintain the constellation (due to the 5 to 7 year lifespan SpaceX has given). I'm still pretty skeptical about their constellation, though. I think the odds are that it won't happen.
Humiliating? This is one of the most successful people in the world, he has nothing to be humiliated about. He is KILLING IT !
You mean, those places where a middle class family makes less than Americans living below the poverty line?
Yes, them. Where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the US. Which you know, but are pretending you don't so you can have a nice little OMG INEQUALITY! rant inside your bubble. Have fun with that.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Every place but Africa and India is wired pretty good with fiber
That's hilarious. Spoken like a true Coastal.
Try driving, say, 45 minutes away from your nearest three-coffee-shops intersection, into any even slightly rural area in the US, and then get back to us with a re-evaluation of that comment. No, everyone outside of your apartment building isn't a redneck. Many of them make plenty of money, and can't buy broadband at twice what you're paying. Or ten times what you're paying. Because stringing fiber down a twenty mile road that's home to five houses is financially foolish for the ISPs. Which you know, but you're pretending not to, so you can act like this is all about that part of Africa you're sure isn't a market.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You don't need to "clean it up." Just consider it raw material for a complete ring around the Earth.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
SpaceX is already on the low end on reliability
That sounds rather disingenuous if we're talking about two or three problems with the first thirty or so units of a brand new vehicle. It's no worse than what Ariane 5 had in the 1990s. Way better than what some old launchers had either initially (R-7) or even now (Proton). (Of course, Arianespace is surely glad it's the 2010s now.)
My concern is that the faster you want to launch, the less you can tolerate failures.
This is true, nevertheless, the Soviets managed to reach something like sixty launches of an R-7 in a year sometime in the 1970s. If you want to do it, you definitely can do it.
Ezekiel 23:20
Come on Rei,
Their reliability as judged by other companies and groups getting started, is nothing less than amazing.
Yeah, Atlas V and Delta 4 have 1 failure each, but most of the other new rockets typically have 2 OR MORE.
As long as they have solved their issue from this point on, they should be rock solid. Even block 5 is supposed to put in a new helium tank that is 2 sided with metal (not 1).
The Ariane 5 has had 4 failures out of 83, the Ariane 4 has had 3 out of 116, etc. And almost all failures are right up front, just like SpaceX's.
And I would have to say that the second failure is actually on the sat company. They are the ones that insisted on loading that on the rocket. Otherwise, it would have failed prior, BUT, it would not have counted against them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
uh no. Go to China, Mexico, Japan, Germany, India, etc. and you will find a rapidly growing middle class.
The fact that our manufacturing in America has been sent overseas, has everything to do with it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
why would say that? Bill has been on here for ages, and longer than you and I have not seen him shill for anybody or any nation. ,
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
yes, they are paid less in $ than Americans, but then again, they also are able to buy many local goods at a fraction of the price that we pay in America.
There is a REAL reason why companies like Walmart and Target have profit margins similar to the high tech world, than to other retailers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
huh. Nearly all assessments differ with you, esp. with launch costs plummeting due to SpaceX. Many nations around the world want to put up their own sats, and some of them want to get up to space with their own space program.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The faster you launch, the sooner the time between failures. So an increasingly large percent of your time becomes time down due to failures.
I think at some point you just take the 'damn the torpedoes' approach.Insurance should be happy to pay-out and most launches aren't NASA grade one-off missions. So maybe delay a New-Horizons class launch or manned mission until you figure out what went wrong, but meanwhile keep launching GPS satellites which have a very small incremental unit cost. If you lose one... that's why you built spares. I imagine a company like iridium would be more than happy to jump-the-line if you've established a reliability record that is within their acceptable losses rate.
My problem with SpaceX's plan isn't the market - that's solid. My concern is that the faster you want to launch, the less you can tolerate failures. The time a failure leaves you unable to launch for is independent of how fast you're launching. The faster you launch, the sooner the time between failures. So an increasingly large percent of your time becomes time down due to failures. The only way to overcome this is to correspondingly boost reliability. Want to 10x launch rates? Better 10x reliability. It's a tall order. SpaceX is already on the low end on reliability (not terrible by rocketry standards, but not great), so they already have a deficit to overcome.
Assuming every failure means you have to ground every launch, it's not like the FAA grounds every airplane of that model when one is involved in a crash. Maybe they can split it into experimental and conservative configurations like say ten experimental launches without failure and they follow different rules, like you don't need a full root cause analysis only to proven the failure is probably related to the new configuration. Not saying it'll happen quite like SpaceX wants but if it becomes a high-volume industry I think the rules will adapt somehow so the world doesn't have to stop because one accident happened.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You can also bring the cost of living in the US to the level of living in other parts of the world. Easily. You might have to give up many things like a big house with a yard, three cars and a swimming pool, but then they don't have those things either.
The reason people can live inexpensive there is that they do not buy expensive things. There is that ability to do the same in more developed countries also, but most people have money and don't look for them. If you lived there you'd be eating a lot of kale, potato and corn. You're not going to find chicken or steak any cheaper.
Yes, aside from containing a thousand times the resources that we have on Earth (just in our tiny little solar system), space is empty
The really nice thing is that much of it is outside of large gravity wells and you do not have to pay a heavy price to launch it
Speaking of waste of money, ULA gets a billion dollars a year without having to launch anything.
ULA has a great record of not recently blowing up rockets that have a 1960's heritage, at three times the cost of SpaceX. But their main effort has been to drive costs up rather than down.
Bruce Perens.
Are you sure? One of the things that surprised me when I lived in Tanzania was how similar the prices were.
A TV costs about the same everywhere in the world. If anything, it will be even more expensive in developing countries. But local goods are usually cheaper, and locally rendered services tend to be WAY cheaper.
When I lived in Shanghai, I didn't own a car because I couldn't afford it. But my family had a live in housekeeper for $100 / month.
The average person could not afford fast food or to go out to eat.
The biggest price difference was in carved elephants - I got one for ~$15 and saw an identical one in Santa Fe a year later selling for $900. I joked that it would be less expensive to fly there and buy it. That was the only local good, other than food, that I saw. The pay breakdown was approx $1/day laborer, $2/day skilled (plumber/electrician) and $3/day college professor/engineer.
What's disingenuous is selecting for comparison launchers that had early problems but leaving out those that didn't.
By rocketry standards, SpaceX's record isn't terrible, but it's not great either.
Because the Soviets didn't have the FAA grounding them until they can prove to a very high degree of confidence that they'd identified and remedied the problem. The Soviets had precisely the opposite attitude. For almost every single Venus mission, for example, they launched in pairs, just in case there was a fault in one launch vehicle / transfer stage or probe en route (and sometimes they'd lose both!)
Next to my desk we have an Ire Extinguisher. Our boss is really assertive, so we like the idea of having it.
The industry average failure rate is commonly stated at 95%, although that number is biased down by older rockets who which were developed at a time where a higher failure rate was considered more acceptable (it's lower with modern rockets). SpaceX was at 93% after their last accident. I repeat what I wrote: "Not terrible, but not great."
As for mounting satellite before static testing:
The idea was SpaceX's. Operators can opt-out, but as a general rule customers go with whatever the launch provider thinks is best. And to be fair, there is some risk from opting out as well. If something is messed up with how the payload is mounted it might become clear during the static test.
Lastly, I would not call SpaceX's most recent failures "right up front". And while I was willing to give them a pass for their first failure (the short of it: a supplier who lied about their QA process), this last failure falls entirely on their risky decision to store COPVs with no external liner submerged in densified LOX. I certainly wouldn't have taken such a risk. And the design isn't changing. Great that they're trying to reduce buckling and changing their helium loading procedure and all of that, but at the end of the day, composites have poor LOX compatibility, and densification just makes it worse.
Next to my desk we have an Ire Extinguisher. Our boss is really assertive, so we like the idea of having it.
Except 1) A failure takes out an (expensive) launch pad for half a year, and 2) the FAA won't let you just take a "damn the torpedoes" approach, because these "torpedoes" contain the energy of a small nuclear bomb.
Next to my desk we have an Ire Extinguisher. Our boss is really assertive, so we like the idea of having it.
I was jesting hence the :), c'mon, is banter not allowed? I seriously find Bill's comments very interesting.
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