SpaceX Completes First Launch of 2018: Secretive 'Zuma' Spacecraft (cnn.com)

SpaceX's first launch of 2018 was "a secretive spacecraft commissioned by the U.S. government for an undisclosed mission," reports TechCrunch. An anonymous reader quotes CNN: After more than a month of delays, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket vaulted toward the skies at 8 p.m. ET Sunday with the secretive payload. It launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida... The company [then] executed its signature move: guiding the first-stage rocket booster back to Earth for a safe landing. Just over two minutes after liftoff Sunday, the first-stage booster separated from the second stage and fired up its engines. The blaze allowed the rocket to safely cut back through the Earth's atmosphere and land on a pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station... The company completed a record-setting 18 launches last year, and SpaceX plans to do even more this year, according to spokesman James Gleeson.

Comments

Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[haruchai]

At this point, today's launch was by-the-numbers and something we've become used to even if SpaceX is the only company demonstrably capable of landing a 1st stage from the edge of space, even if it's only been 2 years since their 1st successful landing.
The long awaited Falcon Heavy is their next big challenge and another major milestone if they succeed.

Re: Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

STFU APK!

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[arth1]

How are they faring compared to international competition, like the Japanese and Chinese? Isn't there a risk that the Falcon Heavy will be somewhat outdated before it gets past its first steps?

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Bruce Perens]

Falcon 9 Heavy would be the largest operating launch system by weight carried to orbit. The closest competitor might be Blue Origin's New Glenn, which they haven't really started to build yet and is 4 years away if they work real hard, by which time SpaceX might have a similar large rocket.

National rocket programs and ULA are still in the denial stage. ULA has a theoretical, not built, recovery program called "SMART recovery" which is more efficient in flight but less economically efficient because it throws away most of the rocket, which probably makes it a non-starter given how SpaceX is doing.

SpaceX recovery is not yet proven to be economically feasable - it works and gives them a reserve of first-stages so that they can do launches faster than companies that have to build the first stage, but it doesn't yet save money - but it looks like SpaceX will get there.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Bruce Perens]

I am heading to Orlando for Hamcation and hope SpaceX holds things up just long enough for me to be there. That is going to be amazing, whatever happens. I think they'll pull it off, but it's a really risky launch.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Immerman]

I think in many ways the Falcon Heavy is a combination stopgap solution and proof of concept.

In the short term, if they get it working reliably then they immediately almost triple their maximum payload to orbit, as well as having huge unused capacity margins for to allow reusable landings on many launches that would otherwise have to resort to discarding the boosters. Not a bad deal.

In the long term, it gives them a chance to address the challenges of a multi-booster launch on a relatively low-power rocket, before applying those lessons to the BFR once it enters service. After all, a single BFR is really a lot less than you'd want to attempt a Mars outpost - a triple-booster version would make many things considerably easier.

And hey, why stop at three boosters? The original plans, way back before they had even made it to orbit, was to eventually go with a full 9-booster array. I doubt they'll get there right away, but it would make boosting seriously large payloads into orbit a lot easier. And whether it's Bigelow inflatable habitats, fully assembled nuclear reactors, or as-yet undesigned asteroid-mining facilities, the larger the single-launch payload, the more efficient your infrastructure can be made.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[SJ]

It very likely the reuse saves Space X money, but they aren't passing that on to customers yet, as they no doubt have a rather large R&D expense to recoup. I'm pretty sure Elon has said this at some point.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[PackMan97]

NASA's "Space Launch System" (SLS) was commissioned in 2011 and scheduled for it's first flight in 2018. It's projected payload to low earth orbit is supposed to be 150,000-290,000 lb would be greater than the 140,700 payload of the Falcon Heavy to LEO. The maiden flight for the SLS is scheduled for no earlier than Dec 19, 2019, which translates to 2020 if they are lucky. The Falcon Heavy is set to fly THIS MONTH. The current competition for a Falcon Heavy is a Delta IV Heavy which is flight proven (9 launches) and can take 63,470 lb to low earth orbit.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

A principal reason for the Falcon 9 recovery has already been explained---and the inventory of first stages is a big part of it. They plan on running the factory heavily until they have enough F9's in inventory for many years of launches. And then, change over nearly the entire factory to the new generation of hardware, which would take years.

Reusability is essential as it lets them keep the lights on and the company running during a new period of enormous capital expenditures. That's a good enough definition of "economically feasible".

Re: Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Bruce Perens]

Besides R&D, fixed infrastructure costs are huge. And there are somewhere north of 5000 employees! Block 5 (now also called Falcon 9 2.0, the latest and supposedly final version of Falcon 9) is supposed to refly 10 times. With greater than 20 launches per year in Florida, recovery may reach an economic payoff.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Tossing a core gives them over 200 tonnes to TMI without any fucking around with multiple tanking launches.

It's going to come down to whether churning out Raptors and composite tankage is cheaper than operations and refurbishing for six Saturn V sized launch vehicles. My gut says it will be.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Immerman]

I have a feeling you're right, at least early on. The BFR will supposedly be designed for considerably easier refurbishment though, as well as being fully reusable, so we'll have to see how it plays out.

If nothing else, I suspect the Falcon will have at least a medium-term role for smaller satellite launches for which it's difficult to justify using a BFR.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[phayes]

Shotwell is on the record stating that Space-X saw substantial savings on the first reuse which they very exhaustively vetted. Given that they have certainly streamlined the process, they’re certainly seeing even better savings.

Even though there are no indépendant figures on how much they are seeing it’s certainly already safe to say that they are already saving money.

http://spacenews.com/spacex-ga...

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

So their vulnerability will be shortly after they shut down the factory, and something happens to all of the inventory.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no competition. There are others who can move payload to orbit but it costs them a LOT more than Space-X.

If they get Falcon Heavy up, that's it for pretty much everyone unless they get smarter rather than just throwing vanity $ at the problem.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[phayes]

If FH allows them to have enough margin for Space-X to add a heat shield to the second stage and start recovering it as well, as had been mooted previously, FH might be even less expensive than F9.

It’s more a question if Elon thinks second stage recovery to be a useful endeavor or whether developing BFR asap is better/cheaper long term.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[phayes]

BFR will be 100% reusable without the second stage and shroud recovery that they have yet to perfect. Once BFR has been debugged and they have enough of them, I fully expect Space-X to shutdown all F9/FH opérations ASAP unless DOD launches still need them.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Kjella]

How are they faring compared to international competition, like the Japanese and Chinese? Isn't there a risk that the Falcon Heavy will be somewhat outdated before it gets past its first steps?

Well there's two kinds of competition, maximum payload and $/kg to orbit. In the former, there is no competition or rather the competition would be in-orbit assembly like how we built the ISS. The market is rather unclear because since there's no operating super heavy launch vehicle you don't design payloads that require it. The other is $/kg, well if you look at their prices you see Falcon 9 starting at $62M and Falcon Heavy starting at $90M, note that they list max performance and min price so you can't actually divide those to get $/kg to orbit. What you can tell though is that they plan to deliver ~3x the performance for less then 3x the price making the Falcon Heavy cheaper per kg.

That is quite opposite from the SLS and quite possibly other plans on the board where the rocket is so special and launches so rarely that it becomes a billion dollar launch. Like for example the Iridium launches, SpaceX has been launching those 10 at a time on a Falcon 9. Would they do 30 on a Falcon Heavy instead? That's really the key issue for SpaceX, they need business. You can produce a technical marvel like the Saturn V - which would still be unrivaled - but once the moon missions were over nobody could afford it. And then there's the potential for re-usability, with three F9-class first stages to recover they'll be a lot of the cost. If they can be launched not only two times but fives or ten times... the competition shivers.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Rei]

It depends entirely on the scale of the market at the time when BFR becomes available. If the market is huge, Saturn V-sized vehicles probably make significantly more sense (rockets in general benefit from scaleup, if the launch cadence can be kept up). If it's not, Falcon-sized vehicles make more sense. Note also that BFR is not just about size, but also full flow staged combustion methalox engines and composite (rather than alumium) construction, in addition to SpaceX's characteristic VTOL launch profile.

It's also worth noting that SpaceX is doing their damndest to try to ensure that the market is huge (a massive internet-access constellation, suborbital transcontinental flights, etc). That doesn't mean that they'll succeed, but it does argue for BFR from their perspective.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[frank249]

By landing the booster SpaceX recovers 9 of the 10 Merlin engines. When they launch the Falcon Heavy, they will be recovering 27 of 28 engines per flight. This is leading up to the BFR which will recover all 38 of the larger Raptor engines. In fact it will be 100% reusable. This is where the big payoff will be evident.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

For What? You have to commit a real crime to get sent to prison.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[swb]

Because you sound like you know what you're talking about, what is the point of diminishing returns in heavy lift rocketry? Is there a point where it stops making sense throwing up increasingly large single payloads?

What about risk management? In our lifetimes, rocket launches will never reach five-9s reliability, and losing some fraction of a finished project (space station, etc) is better than losing an entire large project. I'd imagine that super-heavy lift rocketry will also be generally less reliable due to the cost/launch leading to lower frequency and greater complexity.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The other is $/kg, well if you look at their prices [spacex.com] you see Falcon 9 starting at $62M

So why is NASA paying $133M per COTS supply fly to the ISS?
Spacex.com/Musk is marketing bullshit as usual.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

JAXA seem to be out of the loop. China have a company working on a small (Falcon 1 / Electron scale) tail-landing booster, but they're prototyping. Now that it's been shown to work, I imagine every large launch org has a small copycat plan.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

They're already the cheapest launch provider in this space, so there's not really a strong reason to cut profits when those extra profits can go into R&D. And all the cool stuff they do is because they're so heavy in R&D.

Re: Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Type44Q]

Desperate much?

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Immerman]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say - they're still going to try for a recoverable second stage, they're just making it much larger and more integrated rather than continuing to work on modifying the Falcon 9 analogs. It's potentially a much more productive approach, but at this point they're not exactly a whole lot closer to success than they are with the F9.

As for retiring the F9 ASAP - maybe. That's a big, expensive rocket to launch a 1000kg satellite into an unusual orbit though.
Maybe the refurbishment will actually be so cheap that it'll still look good compared to a Falcon, even after factoring in the risk of losing a much more expensive rocket to explosions.
Maybe they'll have enough capacity to bundle even those weird launches with a lot of other, more typical orbits.
Maybe they'll just let other companies handle such niche launches.

It would certainly be nice to have a cheap, reliable, flexible, heavily tested, and highly reusable launch system available. But at this point we only have intention and speculation to go on, and the whole thing smacks of an ITS scaled down to be profitable for mere orbital launches. That is to say it's a rocket designed to go to Mars, compromised enough to be able to get thoroughly tested paying the bills at home. There's a pretty good chance they had to sacrifice a lot of orbital use-cases to keep Mars on the table.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Topwiz]

Not being the person you voted for or being a complete asshole or whatever you don't like about Trump are not grounds for impeachment or prison. Both require an actual law to be broken.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think SLS should be cancelled and all funding redirected to COTS: BlueOrigin, SpaceX, and maybe one or two others, so there is competition. COTS has proven to be more visionary without being hamstrung by beaucracy and congressional mandates of in government development and contracts.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Immerman]

I'm not well versed on the business aspects, but I'm not sure there is one, at least not anywhere close to current sizes. I think it basically amounts to "is there enough payload to justify regular launches". My gut says so long as it's heavily reusable, the bigger the rocket the more capacity you have for redundancy and safety systems. And the bigger the payload, the less payload needs to be wasted on inter-module connection systems. Especially for inflatable habitats and the like, where enclosed volume goes up with the cube of diameter, while surface area/mass increases much more closely to the square.

As for risk management, I don't think it actually makes a whole lot of difference - if your rocket has, say, a 2% chance of exploding during the launch, then you expect to lose an average of 2% on *every* launch, and insurance costs reflect that. Moreover, if you have say a 5-module system, and you need all five modules to be useful, then launching them separately instead of all at once dramatically increases your chance of losing part of it. I.e with a single launch you have a 98% chance of success, and a 2% chance of total failure, while with a 5-part launch you have only a 90% chance of success, with a 10% chance of partial failure. If the lost payload was something "off the shelf" - food, fuel, etc., then maybe that's no big deal, just buy more and send it up next week. But if it's something that took many years to build, then you've got a bunch of your assembly floating uselessly in space using up its design life while you rebuild the lost module(s) (no guarantee you only lost one rocket).

As for lower frequency/greater complexity - I'm not certain either holds - at least at this point. Bigger engines doesn't necessarily mean they're any more complex - and if going bigger means they can go fully reusable more easily and reliably, then the individual launch costs may actually be substantially lower than a much smaller partially-reusable rocket with more expensive refurbishment costs.

Basically the cost breakdown of a typical expendable launch is something like 80-90% vehicle construction, 2-5% fuel, and the rest manpower overhead. A bigger rocket takes more fuel, and pretty much the same manpower, so it mostly comes down to how the refurbishment and amortized construction costs compare per pound of payload.

That said - assuming the BFR is everything they hope, then once it's perfected I would fully expect them (or someone else) to build a scaled down version as well - just to increase the profit margins on all those little niche jobs that the BFR is overkill for.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[torkus]

Not unless someone else fills that launch capability. There's no point in launching a BFR for a sat that you could put up with a F9.

At least not until the tech is mature enough that the component wear/lifespan useage/fuel cost for the much larger rocket is about equal to the 'small' one.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone needs to adjust the code to this troll-bot, it has chosen the wrong subject matter.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[torkus]

Not necessarily. In fact, I completely disagree. The large majority of cost for something going to space is R&D, not simple manufacturing. Most sats have a spare or at least spare parts enough to build a replica. But ignoring that...

Space assembly is HARD for one. Designing systems that break into multiple pieces greatly increases their complexity. Some simply can't and need to be built as a whole unit. Launches have significant fixed costs irrespective of size/payload. Oh, and the payload is (well, can be) insured. The higher the reliability, the lower the insurance cost.

You imagine that larger rockets are less reliable, but offer nothing to substantiate that ... and afaik it's untrue. The base systems (flight comp, hydraulics, telemetry, etc.) remain essentially unchanged and are trivial to scale, the tankage solution is a straightforward engineering and materials task, and the propulsion is the most heavily tested aspect PLUS includes redundancy. The engineering of said engine requires a high reliability - it's part of the design spec. And besides that...rocket engines have historically been robust enough for multiple reuses but it's rare that anyone ever gets them back except for the space shuttle. Remind me again how many times those engines failed?

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[torkus]

Not that I disagree with the comedic thought of the SLS making it off the ground in the next two years, but...

The Delta IV Heavy (63k lb to LEO) competes with the F9 FT (50k lb to LEO), not the FH (140k lb to LEO). Granted it *wins* the competition on a simple mass-to-LEO basis but then *completely* loses on $/kg where the F9 comes in around ~$1200/lb and the D-IV-H at about $6,300/lb.

The FH however easily beats both at around $650/lb to LEO...which is 1/10th of the D-IV-H.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[phayes]

You appear to have missed the point in Elon's introduction or BFRv2 where he stated that BFR will be cheaper to fly than F9 or FH.

OK, Elon is an optimist and clearly thinks that the re-usability aspects of the platform are already reachable or will be by the time BFR is regularly flying. So, unless you are claiming that you know better than Elon does, my statement stands: Once BFR is debugged, Space-X will transition to it ASAP shutting down F9 & FH ASAP.

The transition from F9/FH to BFR for DOD launches will take longer than that for commercial flights as Space-X as Space-X will need to get BFR certified. I assume that having suffered through the reams of paperwork for it took for F9 certification, that getting BFR certified will be easier as Space-X is getting used to DOD procedures & vice-versa.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[BasilBrush]

Actually impeachment is a political process, not a legal one, so it requires no law to be broken. It just requires enough politicians that want the president to go.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[phayes]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say - they're still going to try for a recoverable second stage, they're just making it much larger and more integrated rather than continuing to work on modifying the Falcon 9 analogs.

BFR will be cheaper to fly that F9/FH. Take another look at Elon's slides where he announced BFR.

Add to that that 2nd stage & shroud reuse has yet to be perfected and may never be because:
- The F9/FH second stage is too small to have much of a weight margin for the landing legs, and the heat shield,
- The means of protecting that 2nd stage large engine bell have yet to be determined
- Shroud recovery seems to need a bouncy castle in order to recover undamaged sections (physically & from salt water) and the they have yet to attempt even a first version of one.
- Weight distribution of the 2nd stage is different than that of the first stage. The only spot to put the heat shield is on the front but most of the weight is currently at the engine end. Coming in motor end first as they do on the 1s stage is not planned as it is coming in muuuch faster and needs atmospheric braking. Thus they're going to have to flip it when already in the atmosphere, something they most emphatically are not doing for 1st stages.

BFR 2nd stage avoids all these problems by:
- Being much bigger so more weight margin
- Aerobraking sideways then transitioning to tail first landing
- Not needing a separate system for shroud recovery

It's potentially a much more productive approach, but at this point they're not exactly a whole lot closer to success than they are with the F9.

As for retiring the F9 ASAP - maybe. That's a big, expensive rocket to launch a 1000kg satellite into an unusual orbit though.

See above: 100% reusable with a much longer lifetime beats throwing away the second stage and the shrouds.

Maybe the refurbishment will actually be so cheap that it'll still look good compared to a Falcon, even after factoring in the risk of losing a much more expensive rocket to explosions.

Elon certainly thinks so.

Maybe they'll have enough capacity to bundle even those weird launches with a lot of other, more typical orbits.

What "weird launches"?

Maybe they'll just let other companies handle such niche launches.

Like Electron? Until Space-X has enough BFRs, certainly but when Space-X builds enough of them to make flying them on short notice possible, Electron is going to dry up like a beached jellyfish in the sun.

It would certainly be nice to have a cheap, reliable, flexible, heavily tested, and highly reusable launch system available. But at this point we only have intention and speculation to go on, and the whole thing smacks of an ITS scaled down to be profitable for mere orbital launches.

That was exactly the point of BFR versus ITS! BFR is big enough to have the weight margins necessary to be 100% reusable yet small enough to be useful for launching payloads on Earth _and_ Mars. Space-X thus gets it's commercial arm to develop BFR and gets a debugged Mars rocket design free.

ITS was just too big to be attractive to Terran customers and would have to have been developed 100% on Space-X's dime.

That is to say it's a rocket designed to go to Mars, compromised enough to be able to get thoroughly tested paying the bills at home. There's a pretty good chance they had to sacrifice a lot of orbital use-cases to keep Mars on the table.

What exactly are the orbital use-cases you think that they sacrificed in reducing ITS to BFR?

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Kjella]

The other is $/kg, well if you look at their prices you see Falcon 9 starting at $62M

So why is NASA paying $133M per COTS supply fly to the ISS? Spacex.com/Musk is marketing bullshit as usual.

I smell troll but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, primarily the Dragon capsule and a mission to dock, return and recover it. The base price gets you an empty rocket fairing, you design the payload and operate the mission once SpaceX has delivered it to the transfer orbit. And unlike the rockets that share R&D with commercial satellite launches NASA is the only customer for the Dragon, driving price up. It'll be the same for the crewed version launching later this year if all goes well.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[halltk1983]

Because they signed a contract at the earlier, higher cost before the reuse started lowering costs significantly? Perhaps the contract does not allow for rocket reuse?

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[FormOfActionBanana]

How is it I see 4 fucked up curly quote posts per day, but you somehow printed a spurious accented e??

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[cjameshuff]

No, it's as Kjella said: CRS missions are not satellite launches. On top of the rocket launch, you get a spacecraft rated for human occupation while in orbit and cargo delivery services to and from a manned space station. All that doesn't come free.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Immerman]

I do not disagree, except to say you're comparing current reality to future intent, and while Musk has a respectable track record of making his dreams become reality, it's far from perfect.

IF (and assuming that, When) he can pull off high reliability, minimal refurbishment launches to orbit with the BFR, then it should indeed bring a cheaper total launch cost than the Falcon 9, since it will essentially (eventually) amortize away the cost of building the rockets, currently most expensive part of the launch. And the relaitvely fixed costs of ground crew will likely dominate fuel costs for the immediate future, even with the BFR's much greater fuel demands.

If he can only manage cheaper per pound though, then there's a LOT of niche "weird" orbits (high inclination, eccentricity, etc) and time-sensitive launches that may prove too difficult to effectively bundle with other payloads to be able to justify a BFR launch.

I'm totally rooting for him - he's trying to make the (conceptually) simple dream of affordable space access a reality. This is the second major step, after proving the basic concept of reusability was feasible. If he can pull it off, I think it will mark the turning of the tide towards becoming a true interplanetary species. But I won't believe it until I see it.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[phayes]

Oh I agree that we mostly agree as well but this is the internet where the most fun is to be had from nitpicking .

The big thing about BFR is that it is being designed to be 100% reusable by the only people who have achieved 90% reusability. As such, i tend to believe Elon when he says that BFR will be good for 100+ launches with minimal refurbishment giving 24h turnaround times and prolonged by even more reuse after a refit. The model completely changes from expendable to airline and it’ll be both cheaper & quicker to book a BFR than have an expendable throw money away into the ocean.

Another wrinkle you may be missing is that once BFR is debugged, the build/fly ratio of Space-X goes waaay down so it takes much fewer launchers to attain current or even future projected launch rates. With a half a dozen BFRs the problem would already be finding enough work for them, not is one available/cheap enough. It so profoundly changes the market that Elon plans for a Space-X owned/operated multi-thousand network of satellites for internet access that needs to be replenished regularly and even suborbital passenger/cargo transport.

I don’t expect Space-X to get there by the early 2020s but the mid 2020s. By the late 2020s expendables (& even F9/FH) will be pretty much extinct for non government launches.

The reason I believe they will make it and am not waiting for them to prove it as you are is that the problems on the road to BFR seem to be more tractable than those for full reuse of F9/FH. Exciting times...

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[phayes]

Autocorrect when using the french keyboard.

Autocorrect uses the current keyboard & as I'm conversing in both French & English I'm often switching between the two.

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[Anonymous Coward]

"SMART recovery"

Really? They couldn't even be bothered to Google it once?

Re:Next up - Falcon Heavy!!

[ElizabethGreene]

I don't see a launch abort system on the BFR, and I shudder when thinking about a propulsive emergency staging on top of the giant gas tank first stage. I know it's too soon to ask, but I'm curious to see what the abort options are. (Aside from Plan A don't abort and Plan C be incinerated.)

Shame it's not NASA

[DogDude]

It's really a shame that it wasn't NASA making that launch. The US gave up the idea of space exploration for the sake of science, and sold it to the highest bidder. This country is fucked.

Re:Shame it's not NASA

[Bruce Perens]

The US gave up the idea of space exploration for the sake of science, and sold it to the highest bidder.

That's not actually how things are going at all. The U.S. has always had contractors build its rockets, now some contractors have chosen to build their own and sell rides to NASA and others. This is an inevitable consequence of the development of rocketry.

If you want to cry about something, go back to the 50 year vacation the U.S. took from space development at the end of the Apollo program.

Re:Shame it's not NASA

[Immerman]

NASA's still doing plenty of work on space exploration - they're just not investing as heavily into the rockets to get into orbit. And that's fine, it is after all now mature enough technology and market that private companies are willing to do the R&D themselves. A big win for NASA, who's now getting their launches cheaper than ever before, and without the headache of managing the details.

Meanwhile, NASA is still investing in next-generation propulsion systems - the stuff that will really let us expand into the solar system and study the universe. Solar sails, high-power ion drives, space telescopes. Stuff where there's no short-term profit to be made. Chemical rockets are great for getting from a planet's surface into orbit - a brief trip where raw power is needed in spades to offset the massive amounts of power being wasted just keeping it from falling out of the sky. Once in orbit though, they're a third-rate technology whose biggest saving grace is that they're mature and readily available.

If we want to conquer the solar system, we need engines designed for space. Not to mention low-mass radiation shielding, sustainable ecosystems, etc. Let NASA focus on developing that, and leave surface-to-orbit cargo runs to the companies who can focus on shaving down the costs without lots of bureaucratic overhead bogging them down.

Re:Shame it's not NASA

[thrich81]

"If you want to cry about something, go back to the 50 year vacation the U.S. took from space development at the end of the Apollo program." As much as I'd like to agree with you on an emotional level, I don't think the facts support it. At worst the STS was an expensive detour from space development and some development came of it. For all its expense and underdelivering on promises, I read an analysis that the ISS provides person-days on orbit more cheaply than Skylab did. It's just that Saturn-Apollo hardware was really expensive, but us who grew up watching it happen didn't realize that because Saturn-Apollo budgets were really big, more like DOD budgets for competition with the Soviets in the 60's. Those 60's NASA budgets were not sustainable going forward, even Kennedy got cold feet when he saw them laid out. Its not like anyone else is any further, for all the Russian's vaunted prowess in space, they are only incrementally improving on their tech from the 60's. At least we tried something different.
Plus I won't go into the US's complete dominance and mind-boggling developments in uncrewed science missions to everywhere in the solar system for the last 20+ years.

Re: Shame it's not NASA

[Bruce Perens]

Ha ha ha ha ha he he haw! More proof of my thesis on anonymous cowards.

Re: Shame it's not NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Literally not what he said.

Re: Shame it's not NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Behind? NASA has been far out-stripping all others in every area bar manned spaceflight, and even there the Commercial Crew program has been moving forward well, if somewhat underfunded.

And if you think NASA should be doing more manned spaceflight, then maybe you should look at the (Republican) Congress' funding priorities, which NASA is required to follow. And in particular, all the billions wasted annually on the SLS monstrosity at the behest of the (Republican) pork barrelers - despite it being many years behind schedule and far too expensive to even fly, let alone compete against the private-sector alternatives that will be flight-proven before it.

Re:Shame it's not NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

NO TEETH FOR BOB!

Re:Shame it's not NASA

[stealth_finger]

DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING

Re:Shame it's not NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

You're comparing apples to oranges. Sure NASA has always had "contractors", but the contracts have always been open ended cost-plus contracts, where the (defense) contractors basically offered an estimate, and then virtually always exceeded that estimate often to comical/criminal levels. SLS/Constellation is a pretty good modern example, despite basically throwing together old space hardware it is costing tens of billions of dollars. Compare that to the Falcon/New Glenn programs which are developing similar capabilities for a few hundred million.

Good riddance Mr Zuma!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they're not planning to recycle him.

This is fine

[PopeRatzo]

SpaceX's first launch of 2018 was "a secretive spacecraft commissioned by the U.S. government for an undisclosed mission,"

I'm sure there's nothing to be alarmed about. We've got a steady hand in control of the U.S. government.

Re:This is fine

[DCFusor]

Luckily, it doesn't appear that any one hand - or branch, or subset of the uniparty, has much control over the US government. I happen to agree with Sam Clemens about when we are safest - when the government isn't in session. Thing is, the damn bureaucracy is ALWAYS in session now.

Facts please?

[mykepredko]

Sorry, I have to challenge you on a number of things about your post and the assertions within it - maybe you can provide some links to the analysis that you read to help provide some facts.

I don't think it's fair comparing Skylab to the ISS as you're comparing a short term outpost to a long term station. Skylab was occupied for a total 171 days with 3 astronauts - 513 days in operation at a cost (in today's dollars) of approximately $10B ($2.2B in 1975). That works out to $19.5M/astronaut-day in today's dollars. The ISS has a cost (so far) of $150B but has been in operation for over 17 years - let's say during that time there were only three astronauts on board, it works out to $8M/astronaut-day or about 40% of Skylab's per operating day cost. The longer the ISS stays up in it's present configuration (and you expand the calculation to include the number of days its had more than three astronauts), that number will be significantly less and continue to fall.

Sorry, NASA budgets have never approached DOD budgets - Take a look at the US budget for 1967 in which the major investments in Apollo was taking place:
  (http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/69/1967): "General Space, Science and Technology" (which I'm guessing is more than just NASA) is 7% of the budget while the DOD was 49%.

It's hard finding costs for Saturn boosters sans payloads, but I think you would find that their costs are very competitive compared to existing expendable launchers (as well as the space shuttle) and in the ballpark of the Falcon 9. What makes difficult to get apples-to-apples costs is that the Saturn V was not designed to deliver payloads into LEO - the third stage was used to achieve orbit as well as restarted to send the CM/SM/LM to the moon. Probably the best way to calculate costs per pound are to use the Saturn V first and second stage to put up Skylab as well as the Saturn IVB used to send the CM/SM to to Skylab.

The Skylab Saturn V first and second stage costs were $50M (in 1975 dollars) with a Skylab payload of 170,000 lb. which works out to $294/lb to LEO. The Saturn IVB which sent the CM/SM and consumables to Skylab cost $25M (in 1975 dollars) with a payload of 46,000 lb. which works out to $543/lb to LEO. I have a Time book on Apollo, from when I was a kid, in which the cost per pound for the Saturn V launch was stated to be $500/lb. - so these numbers seem reasonable. In today's dollars (using http://www.usinflationcalculat...), that's $1,347/lb for the Skylab Saturn V and $2,487/lb for the Saturn IVB. As a point of comparison, the Falcon 9 costs $1,240/lb. The Ariane 5, in its smallest/cheapest configuration is $4,700/lb.

The STS was a bad left turn for launchers and set the expectation that launch costs would be in the range of $10,000/lb or more. I think that was the real crime - the shuttle's costs got out of control very quickly and nothing was done to reign them in. If the decision was made to drop the STS and keep with Apollo technology (just like the Russians that continued working with their 1960s/1970s technology), which was proven, reliable and cheap compared to the resulting STS and expendable boosters costs, along with the same NASA budgets for space exploration, then I suspect a station of the ISS' capabilities could have been put up by the late 1970s as well as maybe an outpost on the moon by 2001 - and we would have avoided the long drought in government sponsored manned space exploration.

Re:Facts please?

[thrich81]

I am bandwidth starved here and you deserve a better answer than I can give you, but a few things:
First of all I shouldn't have implied NASA got DOD level funding in the 60's, but it got funding as if it were a major DOD program in the 60's and using your own numbers, 1/7 of the DOD budget would be a major program. And in any comparison to DOD in the 60's you have to note that the DOD share of the federal budget was much larger then than it is now so the NASA budget was also a much larger percentage of the federal budget. So more accurately I would have said that NASA received DOD-like priority in the federal budget, which it hasn't enjoyed since then. Good old wikipedia says NASA got 4.4% of the federal budget in 1966 (at peak) vs about 0.5% now, so a major change in priority. That NASA priority in the 60's was driven only because of the competition with the Soviets, it was another front in the Cold War.

I don't think you can quote 1975 dollars for Saturn hardware as none of it was built in 1975 unless you quote numbers already inflated to 1975. The more accurate pricing would have been from 1966 through 1969 -- that's about a 50% difference right there. From the wikipedia article on the Saturn V: " In the time frame from 1969 to 1971 the cost of launching a Saturn V Apollo mission was US $185 to $189 million,[1][2] of which $110 million was for the production of the vehicle[3] (equivalent to $1.26 billion in 2016)." So about $750 million for the vehicle, (which come to think of it is actually pretty good compared to $400 million for a Delta IV Heavy now) and I acknowledge that you can subtract the cost of the S-IVB for some applications.

I think the ISS vs Skylab comparison is appropriate especially since the ISS is often held up as a bloated, underperforming boondoggle (my opinion for a long time, still is somewhat). But the elegantly executed Skylab was more expensive per astronaut-day... Would Skylab successors have been cheaper, nobody knows.

"The STS was a bad left turn for launchers..." -- I totally agree with you there. Would we have been better off sticking to Saturn hardware? It's hard to say. I've had many arguments with younger co-workers who are STS fans. (Somehow I got off to kind of defending the STS vs Saturn in my original post, wtf?). Politically in the 70's the Saturn program was over, the assembly lines were shut down, the assembly personnel laid off (my father was laid off from his Saturn V job in 1970). The US populace was bored with space, we'd beat the Soviets, the space race was over. I doubt the country in the 70's had the desire to start those assembly lines back up again, while the STS offered a "new way, cheap and reusable", which didn't work out but it got the vehicle built. Maybe NASA could have gotten ahead then sticking with the DOD launchers still in production. One point I had to concede to my STS fans -- the STS at its best had a higher launch rate than NASA ever got with the manned Titans and Saturns.

This is an argument which has been argued many times and it is moot now since the history has already been written. Personally I would have loved to see von Braun's missions to Mars with a nuclear upper stage on the uprated Saturn V, etc. That just wasn't going to happen in the 80's as he planned though, STS or not.

Re:Facts please?

[Rei]

A more important aspect is that NASA's costs don't inflate with the CPI. They inflate with the NNSI (Nasa New Start Index), which is a much steeper rate. Why? The CPI is based on a "grab bag" of consumer goods. Consumer goods have in general become much cheaper to produce over time, moving from domestic hand labour to varying combinations of mass production and overseas production. NASA, however, still builds things in small quantities with labour from a highly trained workforce. So it's natural that their inflation index would be higher than the CPI.

Re:Facts please?

[Kjella]

A more important aspect is that NASA's costs don't inflate with the CPI. They inflate with the NNSI (Nasa New Start Index), which is a much steeper rate. Why? The CPI is based on a "grab bag" of consumer goods. Consumer goods have in general become much cheaper to produce over time, moving from domestic hand labour to varying combinations of mass production and overseas production. NASA, however, still builds things in small quantities with labour from a highly trained workforce. So it's natural that their inflation index would be higher than the CPI.

Well, I wouldn't say that it's obvious. Through advances in computers and simulation I'd think that a lot of the design/prototyping/testing now happens virtually even though the actual construction is still very low volume.

Re:Facts please?

[mykepredko]

I chose 1975 as the numbers in the Time "Apollo and Skylab: Looking to the Future" (copyright was 1976) book were based on 1975 and there are additional numbers corroborating these in NASA's "Space Settlements A Design Study" (NASA SP-413), which is the 1976 Gerard O'Neill Space Colonization study, which also provide cost numbers for 1975 - and it was at the end of Apollo/Skylab era so that seemed appropriate looking forwards.

The cost of launching a Saturn V Apollo mission is NOT equal to the cost of launching a Saturn booster on another mission (which is why I went to such pains to try and isolate the booster costs so they can be compared to modern day boosters). The numbers I quoted are assuming development costs were amortized by the Apollo program (which I feel are defendable). The numbers quoted in the Wikipedia entry include development costs paid for during the Apollo years and don't reflect the fact that they should not be included in later missions.

"Elegantly executed Skylab"? Wow. I have never heard that description for it before - I can only think that you weren't around when it was damaged during launch, the various problems during the manned expeditions, including what was thought of as a ridiculously high per day cost to it ending up being regarded as uncontrolled space junk crashing to Earth. I didn't think anybody regards it as a shining example of NASA technology and know-how.

Why aren't you looking at Mir as a comparison point? I would think that is a much better example of a long term space outpost.

I'm not sure that you can consider STS launches to Gemini-Titan/Apollo-Saturn as an apples to apples comparison. Don't forget there were up to four orbiters available at the highest rate years and they were extensively rebuilt between missions. I don't know how that factors into your comparison.

The problem with history is that it is based on the goals of the person writing it and their sources. It's too easy to find conflicting perspectives and data that challenges "current wisdom" that we can rely on what we think we know and what we can find through basic Google/Wikipedia searches - or, for books written more than forty years ago.

Re:Facts please?

[Solandri]

The STS was a bad left turn for launchers and set the expectation that launch costs would be in the range of $10,000/lb or more. I think that was the real crime - the shuttle's costs got out of control very quickly and nothing was done to reign them in. If the decision was made to drop the STS and keep with Apollo technology (just like the Russians that continued working with their 1960s/1970s technology), which was proven, reliable and cheap compared to the resulting STS and expendable boosters costs along with the same NASA budgets for space exploration, then I suspect a station of the ISS' capabilities could have been put up by the late 1970s as well as maybe an outpost on the moon by 2001 - and we would have avoided the long drought in government sponsored manned space exploration.

That's the thing most people (except the Russians) don't seem to get about rocket launches. It's not a technology-bound problem, it's a physics-bound problem. You throw mass out the rear, and that pushes your rocket forward. The calculations for pretty much every type of rocket fuel were already done in the 1940s-1970s, and the fuels we've been using for the last 50 years are pretty much optimal.

Any new launch vehicle you design is just a pretty wrapper to hold the same fuel and throw it backwards the same way as old designs. So there's little to no performance to be gained by a new design. You need to economically justify the new design in other ways (e.g. reusable stages). Otherwise the most cost-effective strategy is to continue to use the old designs. Which is exactly what the Russians have done. And heaven forbid you spend $35 billion making a new design - that means amortized over an estimated 134 future launches (number of Space Shuttle missions), you've just increased the cost per launch by a quarter billion dollars.

Incidentally, STS was approved with exactly this in mind. The expectation was that by re-using the shuttles, money could be saved thus making launches cheaper in the long term. Unfortunately, that accounting calculation was made assuming about 50 shuttle launches per year. In reality it was less than 5 per year, meaning its facilities, equipment, and personnel costs per launch were 10x higher than projected, turning it from a cheaper-than-Apollo launch vehicle into the most expensive launch vehicle ever created.

Re:Facts please?

[mykepredko]

I always felt that the fact that the shuttle was designed with technology that didn't meet the application requirements was the biggest issue. Don't forget that a good fraction of the protective tiles and the engines had to be removed/refurbished between flights (which was not part of the concept) - this added $400M to $1B (depending on your source) to each flight. I think the design amortizations costs became insignificant pretty quickly with that additional cost for each flight.

A recurring criticism of the shuttle was that the weight/drag/cost/complexity penalty of the wings made it an inefficient approach in many people's minds - they felt that the "wrapper", as you so eloquently put it, had to be as simple as possible to maximize payload and minimize costs - the refurbishment costs seemed to validate this approach.

Now, we have SpaceX where the design was made with the thought that a certain amount of payload would be held back to provide for fuel and hardware to return to the launch pad, allowing the booster to be reused. Many of the same criticisms made about the shuttle came back with the initial Falcon concept until SpaceX was returning and reusing boosters as well as providing significantly cheaper access to space. I'm looking forward to seeing Dream Catcher's first orbital flights to see if it can provide a cost-effective reusable lander.

So, to maybe articulate my thoughts more efficiently, the US should have stayed with the hardware developed for the Apollo moon missions until the technology to effectively reuse space hardware became available.

Re:Facts please?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Any new launch vehicle you design is just a pretty wrapper to hold the same fuel and throw it backwards the same way as old designs. So there's little to no performance to be gained by a new design. You need to economically justify the new design in other ways (e.g. reusable stages). Otherwise the most cost-effective strategy is to continue to use the old designs. Which is exactly what the Russians have done. And heaven forbid you spend $35 billion making a new design

Until the penultimate sentence, you were making sense. Then you forgot that the Angara exists. So the Russians aren't getting it either...

I almost got excited.....

[Anonymous Coward]

What a pity it wasn't our useless South African president sent into orbit!

Why Zuma?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fine article does not shed any light why this is named after the much-hated South African president.

Here's hoping he's on board and on his way to be the first man on the sun. (Or in it will also do.)

Re:Why Zuma?

[jfdavis668]

Ever think it may be named after the Neil Young album?

Re:Why Zuma?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe a intentional miss-spelling of zoomer, a new form of propulsion...

Re:Why Zuma?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zuma? Alcoholic beverage?
Maybe they're setting up a secretive brewery on the moon. Zuma Moon Beer.

Re:Elon Musk

[jfdavis668]

Hitler was able to launch reusable spacecraft better than Musk? That is news.

nasa's unmanned launches...

[Anonymous Coward]

were largely unconvered by media... so what the fuck, guys.. this is worse than always having a post about every single fucking linux kernel and every single distro's point release......

Inauspicious Name

[totallyarb]

Anyone have any information on why it's called Zuma? It seems unlikely that they're trying to honour South African President Jacob Zuma, so what gives?

Re:Inauspicious Name

[catchblue22]

How about this for Zuma: The Marine's Hymn

From the Halls of Montezuma

To the shores of Tripoli;

We fight our country's battles

In the air, on land, and sea;

First to fight for right and freedom

And to keep our honor clean;

We are proud to claim the title

Of United States Marine.

Re:Inauspicious Name

[jfdavis668]

The Neil Young album?

Re: Inauspicious Name

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a tribute to Zuma Blitz, the recently discontinued game that was on Facebook.

I have to applaud Musk's crew

[BlueCoder]

A very troubling start but at current rate he might lose 1 in 30 which to me is very impressive and a lot earlier than I would have anticipated. Not sure how but they need to get a few of those first stages in orbit around mars. A little bit of heat shielding for mars's thin atmosphere.With the lower gravity it should be able to land with a second stage crew module attached. Preferably they would land it in some valley where it wouldn't be subjected to strong winds and dust.

Sadly, They Misspelt It

[Anonymous Coward]

They meant to call it the "Zima" spacecraft!

Light, sexy, here today and gone tomorrow!!

More than a month of delay

[Kokuyo]

So in terms of comparable projects of similar magnitudes, it was way ahead of schedule then?

Re: In before nazi traitorbot shill Shanghai Bill

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that is really APK. there's no mention of HOSTS files

Payload failed??

[jfdavis668]

Rumors going around that the payload failed after releasing from the second stage. Any truth to those rumors?

Re:Payload failed??

[Anonymous Coward]

There appear to be quite a few reputable news sources (USA Today, WSJ, Popular Mechanics. etc) that are saying they have information suggesting some kind of failure, but some of the statements appear to be in conflict. On one hand SpaceX is saying that the Falcon 9 operated normally, but other statements are claiming that somehow the second stage failed (a separation failure?) and it ended up reentering the atmosphere. All observations of the second stage also seem to suggest a good orbital operation for the second stage (fairing separation, fuel venting after deorbit, etc) so I would guess if there was a failure it was with something idiotically simple (a bolt/strap/umbilical that failed to detach) or something wrong with the satellite itself.

Re:Payload failed??

[Anonymous Coward]

The rumour mill has it that Northrop's payload had a custom Northrop payload adapter instead of the usual SpaceX one. If it did fail to separate, that's an occam-friendly special pony to suspect.

Re:Payload failed??

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be consistent with most of the rumors so far ("failure to perfectly separate", SpaceX: "No comment, but Falcon 9 operated nominally", NG: "No Comment", satellite burned up due to reentry). But there are also some rumors that the satellite is in orbit but dead. I have a bit of a hard time believing that it reentered with the second stage as with such a cut and dry failure I would have expected a public statement by now about its fate. My guess would be it's in orbit damaged/tumbling and they're trying some last ditch efforts to recover it before declaring it a total loss.

Re:Payload failed??

[Thud457]

Pics and analysis of second stage fuel dump over Khartoum here

"Our secret satellite? It burned up. There is no secret satellite."
Yeah, right. Gentlemen, don your tinfoil hats.

Re:Payload failed??

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure the US (and most countries for that matter) would love to place stealth satellites in orbit, but firstly I don't think it is technically possible with current technology. Satellites have to transmit, they have a significant thermal signature & they generally need large (and reflective) solar panels. Secondly this would be the worst way to go about placing a stealth satellite in orbit, the uncertainty of the outcome of the mission has resulted in a lot of attention. A true attempt to place a stealth satellite in orbit (if it is/was possible) would probably look like a routine DOD satellite launch, only unbeknownst to everyone there would have actually been two satellites launched. One standard (and highly visible) satellite that everyone could "ohhh" and "ahhh" over and one stealth satellite that would quietly slip away when the time was right, probably a few hours/days after the launch over a nice large stretch of ocean.

Suspiciosuly familiar name

[Anonymous Coward]

Flies for sure!