Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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. "
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.
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.