SpaceX to Attempt Launch of Falcon 1 Today

fatron writes "After yesterday's flight readiness review, SpaceX announced they will be attempting the second launch of their Falcon 1 Spacecraft today. The launch is scheduled for 4:00PM Pacific time with a webcast available from T-60 minutes until launch."

Re:hmm

[QuantumG]

They should use exclusively private launch vehicles and demand competition from their suppliers.

Re:Most launches are private rockets.

[pavon]

To elaborate on my previous post and provied some examples:

Mars Rovers were launched with a Delta II built by Boeing.
Cassini probe was launched with a Titan IV-B built by Lockheed-Martin.
New Horizons was launched with an Atlas V built by Lockheed-Martin.
Many satellites, including the latest GPS satellites are launched using Delta IIs by Boeing.

The Minotaur rocket is built by Orbital Sciences using decommisioned Minutemen ICBM engines and are used to launch some military satelites. They also build many of the rockets used for missile-defense tests.

At least at first, SpaceX would most directly compete with the Pegasus rocket by Orbital Sciences, and hopefully would help to expand the market to include new cliental that can't afford current prices. If they show themselves to be reliable they could also go on to challenge the bigger launchers.

Re:Most launches are private rockets.

[pavon]

Those goals are too large for anyone to meet with private investor funding, and the prizes are too small for tasks that don't have other profit motive behind them (and don't go off about space mining - it is not economically viable). I mean really, a prize managed to provide some tipping point motivation for a (very cool) suborbital rocket plane, and now people think that can scale to sending someone to Mars?

Both NASA and the military are giving SpaceX serious consideration for their future contracts and that will do more to shake up the launcher industry than a silly competition ever will.

Re:Most launches are private rockets.

[Rei]

Prizes work well in the small scale, where you only need a few people to form a team, and where a few million dollars can win fame and PR that can be cashed into real commercial projects that bring in more money. Prizes work very poorly in the large scale. There, market forces take the lead: if investors are going to put five billion dollars into a project, they're going to want a return on that. The more the risk, the more the return they'll want.

Re:hmm

[hey!]

They should use exclusively private launch vehicles and demand competition from their suppliers.

You mean like Haliburton?

I think we can be pretty certain that any industry which caters primarily to the government will not be dramatically more efficient than the government at doing anything, and possibly less efficient. All the negative risk aversion aspects of government decision making are retained, with whole new opportunities for graft and fraud added on.

At best, it's like the difference between a golf ball landing on some blade of grass, and a golf ball landing on a particular blade of grass. Buying something on the open market is like the golf ball landing on some blade of grass. If there are things out there which are proven to do the job, the might not be exactly what you'd want, but the difference between perfect and good enough is negligible. The difference between landing on one blade of grass on the green and another a foot or so away is negligible.

Specifying something for government consumption is like trying to get a golf ball to land on a particular blade of grass. In order to make sure the competition is fair, you have to ensure a level playing field. In order to ensure that the playing field is level, you have to make sure everybody is proposing to deliver exactly the same thing more or less. Not only does the solution have fewer degrees of freedom, the number of organizations who can respond to such an RFP is limited. In other words, the usual suspects. In other words Haliburton.

And so far we've been talking about the best case.

The worst case, you assume that because the private sector is supposed to be more efficient, you are saving money by using a private contractor. There are very few companies capable of delivering certain things the government wants, and fewer still who can negotiate the contracting process as well. This means that when the government buys those things from the private sector, it is not necessarily buying them from the free market.

I'm not saying that buying from the private sector is a bad idea. What I'm saying is that the problem of financial efficiency, when we are talking goods and services primarily consumed by the government, is an orthagonal problem to insourcing or outsourcing.

It's not a bad idea, it's just not an automatic win. Not until there is a healthy industry that can exist without government business.

Re:Most launches are private rockets.

[inviolet]

No offense, but I think part of the problem is the publics lack of understanding how difficult these things are (too much watching Armageddon) combined with ignorance as to what NASA is currently doing.

No offense, but I think most of the problem is NASA's lack of desire to commit bureaucratic suicide. Now that free markets are en vogue again, NASA is willing to dribble out some small (relative to the size of the overall mission) prizes... but no real prizes, such as would get Ford Motor Company's attention, such as would instantly obsolete whole NASA wings.

The really sad part is, it wouldn't cost NASA a thing to offer a $10B prize for a successful private Mars mission, unless the mission succeeded, in which case it has already paid for itself in side benefits (if NASA's own justifications are valid). If (as you imply) $10B is not enough to motivate any private enterprise to give it a try, then what harm is there in offering?