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SpaceX Successfully Launches Its Used Block 5 Rocket (theverge.com)
SpaceX successfully launched one of its used Falcon 9 rockets from Cape Canaveral tonight at 1:18AM ET, deploying the Merah Putih communications satellite just over half an hour later. This marks the first time that SpaceX reused one of its new powerful Block 5 boosters -- the final upgrade of the Falcon 9 that is supposed to be able to go to space and back up to 100 times. "The Falcon 9's first stage booster also performed another successful landing on one of the company's drone ships in the Atlantic, becoming the 28th booster that SpaceX has ever recorded," The Verge adds. From the report: For this mission, SpaceX is using the very first Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket it's flown, a vehicle that sent up a large communications satellite for Bangladesh in May from Florida. The vehicle landed on one of SpaceX's drone ships after the flight, and the company has since done inspection and refurbishment on the vehicle over the last three months to get it ready for flight again. Eventually, SpaceX hopes to do as little refurbishment on these Block 5 vehicles as possible, if any at all. Limiting the amount of inspection and tweaking needed between re-flights could significantly up the cost savings that SpaceX gets from reusing its rockets. Less money is needed if fewer people and materials are needed to turn around the rockets each time. Ultimately, SpaceX hopes to fly each Block 5 vehicle a total of 10 times before any refurbishment is needed. As for the satellite, it will reportedly provide telecommunications services to parts of Indonesia and South Asia.
This just never gets old. But they've got to do something about losing that drone barge video literally seconds before the booster puts down. Such a tease.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They've already brought costs down dramatically. If they can do rapid, low-labour reuse of rockets - the whole point of Block 5 - it will let them bring down prices even further. Two more aspects that are important for them in this regard are learning to capture and reuse fairings, and to recapture the upper stage (they haven't attempted the latter yet; they're looking at a balloon-based entry system).
Of course, their longer term goals are BFR, which is to be even cheaper, but it's critically important that they learn from the (lower production cost, greater-mass-production scale) Falcon 9s.
Assuming ethanol comes from murdered children and the hydrogen from magic, hydrogen saves 132% more lives than ethanol.
Doing anything hard... like reliably landing, refurbishing and relaunching a first stage?
Everybody is in a position to “ride the last 50 years of R&D” as you put it, yet only SpaceX went the way of saving costs by reusing rockets. And it’s not like the likes of Boeing and Energya are still bleeding and suffering for doing that R&D in the first place, those are sunk costs by now, there’s no “decades of liabilities” as you argue in your other post. What the hell does that even mean?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I was reading an interview earlier this year with one of the top execs at Ariane about why - despite SpaceX showing that it's not only doable, but looks to be a big cost saver - that they're not doing so. And he responded something along the lines of, "if I do that, we'll only make a few rockets per year, and what am I supposed to do with all of my workforce then?"
Obvious reaction to that statement...
Of course, it's a fundamental problem for heavily-government-backed (some would say "propped up") rocketry companies: their backing is contingent on them being effective jobs programmes in the regions that their backers represent. They need to be burdened with high labour costs in order to be supported.
Assuming ethanol comes from murdered children and the hydrogen from magic, hydrogen saves 132% more lives than ethanol.
You're ignoring their point. The first version of Falcon 9 was developed at a cost of $300M, by a company that had to build up its workforce and experience and software and manufacturing and everything else from scratch. Why exactly couldn't literally everyone else have done the exact same thing? Why are they still so far behind?
Everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants. Why has only one been using that shoulder to climb even higher? Why have the others been content to just wander around on the shoulders for the past couple decades?
Assuming ethanol comes from murdered children and the hydrogen from magic, hydrogen saves 132% more lives than ethanol.
1. The overwhelming majority of SpaceX's revenue is from commercial launches.
2. NASA launches with SpaceX because it saves them money. That was the whole point of COTS in the first place, and it's the current whole point of Commercial Crew. The savings have been massive.
Your argument is akin to saying that because there are US government employees who fly on commercial aircraft rather than running their own private planes, because that saves them money, that commercial carriers are "piglets of corporate socialism".
Lastly:
3. NASA sets the safety standards and testing requirements for its launches with SpaceX - same as it does with its ULA launches. Which is why among other things SpaceX will literally be destroying a rocket on purpose for NASA later this year, to test the abort system. Also, with 61 launches having one failure and one partial failure, and one ground failure, the Falcon 9 is above industry average in terms of reliability. Furthermore, there has not been a ground failure in 32 flights (aka, over half of their launches have happened since their last ground failure), and not an in-flight failure in 42 flights (aka, over 2/3rds of their launches have been since then).
Assuming ethanol comes from murdered children and the hydrogen from magic, hydrogen saves 132% more lives than ethanol.
People caring about space is good. If it takes fanboyism, so be it.
If it's not their win, how come others are not competitive?
Mostly because the competition is primarily government contractors who built their businesses around cost plus pricing or government agencies like NASA. Once you design a business model around a cost structure like that it is nearly impossible to change to adapt to severe price competition from a private company focused on cost reduction. They didn't design their rockets with cost as a primary driver and more importantly they didn't design their company cultures with cost as a primary driver. It's the same problem a lot of retailers have in competing with Walmart or Amazon. Those companies designed their entire organizations around efficient infrastructure and once you fall behind in building that it is nearly impossible to catch up unless you are willing and able to lose a LOT of money in the process.
In many cases they also had to please political entities with goals that had no relationship to cost reduction (see the Space Shuttle) which isn't their fault but it makes it impossible to do low cost rockets. Also if someone comes along with a better design than yours then it is difficult for these companies to respond quickly because building a new rocket design takes many years and big capital investments which aren't easy to do even under the best of circumstances.
Even countries with cheaper labour like Russia can't push the price down, not to mention ESA's Ariane that is directly threatened.
Russian labor isn't all that cheap, particularly for the sorts of people you need to build and launch rockets. (we're not talking sweatshop labor here) To make cheap rockets you need to do at minimum two big picture things. 1) You need to design the rockets with cost reduction as a primary goal and 2) you need to build the organization structure and culture to support designing and operating less expensive rockets. Russia knows how to make good rockets but they've taken the approach of using proven designs which work well but which have all the efficiencies already worked out. Basically they are already as cheap as they can make those designs. To make cheaper products they'll have to build new designs from scratch and at that point they really have no advantage over companies built like SpaceX.
The biggest risk to SpaceX is probably Chinese companies with substantial government subsidies. China has shown they are willing to throw the government weight behind industries they think are important and don't mind taking losses to gain market share.
I'm curious to know what it costs to insure a SpaceX payload launched on a reused rocket vs. a traditional rocket.