SpaceX Falcon 9 Relatively Cheap Compared To NASA's New Pad 352
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Motherboard.tv:
"As debate over the future of spaceflight rages on — and as the axe all but falls on NASA's mission back to the moon and beyond — the successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 two weeks ago proved at least one of the virtues of the private option: it's a heckuva lot cheaper than government-funded rides to space. In fact, the whole system was built for less than the cost of the service tower that was to be used for NASA's proposed future spaceflight vehicle (yup, the service tower is finished, but the rocket isn't, and the whole program may well be canceled anyway)."
CEO Elon Musk spoke recently about some of the ways SpaceX finds to cut costs in the construction of their rockets.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:3, Informative)
For those who do not know, budgets for academia and government work are calculated roughly as:
Actual Costs * Overhead = Budget
The Overhead goes to things like facilities, accounting, IT, etc.
Actual Costs include salaries (possible benefits), parts and supplies.
The Universities I have worked for have overheads around 50%.
Re:Ares = manrated, Falcon = cargo. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the Falcon 9, unlike most reusable boosters, was designed in advance to carry humans. It meets all of NASA's requirements for a human-rated vehicle except for an escape system. SpaceX has stated their intention to dot that final i within a couple of years. The Dragon spacecraft they're designing for the Falcon 9 will support a crew of 7.
Cancel Greater than Develop (Score:4, Informative)
I read that the Falcon cost about 700 million to develop, the government was having to put out one billion just to cancel the Constellation program.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/science/space/11nasa.html?hpw [nytimes.com]
Re:Have you seen the rocket? (Score:5, Informative)
The shuttle was a series of mistakes. First there were the design compromises necessary for accommodating the defense department's wanting to launch bulkier payloads at high angles to the elliptic, for a large reduction in capacity. Then there was the whole fiasco with costs and turn-around times for each launch because it has to practically be re-built each time. So much for 25 to 60 flight a year. [spaceline.org]
Evem early in the game, the solid booster system was known to result in a cost increase of 60% per pound into orbit.
Re:Ares = manrated, Falcon = cargo. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the Falcon 9, unlike most reusable boosters, was designed in advance to carry humans. It meets all of NASA's requirements for a human-rated vehicle except for an escape system. SpaceX has stated their intention to dot that final i within a couple of years. The Dragon spacecraft they're designing for the Falcon 9 will support a crew of 7.
A few additional points:
* As you allude to, Falcon 9 is designed and built to NASA's human-rating standards. With Ares I on the other hand, NASA had to lower the human-rating standards when it turned out Ares was unable to adequately meet them.
* Falcon 9 is an all-liquid rocket, meaning it isn't prone to catastrophic solid propellant explosions like the Ares I is. The Ares I design uses a gigantic solid rocket as its first stage, and a USAF analysis [spaceref.com] showed that an explosion of that stage would create a giant cloud of solid propellant debris which would melt parachutes on the escaping capsule, with 100% chance of killing the crew.
* The sort of PRA analysis used to show that Ares I was the "safest rocket ever" with a supposedly "1 in 3145" chance of losing crew tend to have a fairly loose correlation with how safe a rocket actually ends up being, as the types of failures accounted for in a PRA (probabilistic risk assessment) end up being only a fairly small fraction of all launch failures. Most launch failures are caused by unexpected failure modes in a design, which are completely unaccounted for in a PRA.
* The best way to determine rocket reliability is through its track record. By the time humans are first launched on the Falcon 9, it will have had at least a dozen or so unmanned flights to prove itself. The Ares I, on the other hand, plans on carrying crew on its -second- flight ever.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:5, Informative)
They have a fair track record, They also have failures. With a competitive fully commercial program, we can actually begin to answer these questions. Mainly, the current safety record is more dominated by the fact that the Delta and Atlas are mature technologies as far as launch vehicles are concerned and have had time to fix errors in the design. Advances in model design were based off upgrading the previous model rather than new designs from scratch. The major telling difference between SpaceX and the Ares rocket is that SpaceX, as a company, was founded in 2002 and has, to date, developed 2 working launch vehicles. NASA selected the Ares design in 2005-2006, awarded contracts in 2007 and estimates first launch in 2014 (although the Augustine Commission thinks 2017 is more likely). Will it be cheaper and more efficient? Barring systemic flaws, which are unlikely, they should have several design generations to apply engineering fixes for problems prior to Ares ever launching.SpaceX is designed for lower operating costs and is fairly conservative in most of its design selection. Theoretically, that should be more efficient in the long run. The specific engineering choices will determine the real answer and only by flying hardware do you get to actually see. For the design path SpaceX has chosen, higher launch failures at the leading edge of the life of the vehicle is not really a bad thing.
Orbital Sciences has the Pegasus lunch vehicle, which they built on their own funding. It has 40 launches. 3 of those were failures and 2 were partial successes. The failures were all at the beginning of their development line, where you would expect them. To date, they have had over 500 launch missions of various types. Their Taurus rocket is still in its initial development path and has the expected launch failures for that.
The thing most people have to realize now is that NASA does not really own or control most aspects of the launches now. They contract out to private companies. Those expenditures come from locked in contracts. It is hard to get competitive bidding if your only provider is ULA.
Actually - it has already been done, sort of (Score:4, Informative)
We already had a mass produced, succesfull, and very cheap launcher. Suborbital, sure - but while orbit requires from rocket an order or magnitude more work, the logistics & manufacturing aren't that dissimilar...
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html [fourmilab.ch]
Sadly, the lesson was forgotten. Until now?
Friction Stir Welding (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A woman/man can do it (Score:3, Informative)
We do refueling in orbit quite often. ISS is refueled every few months; and the version of docking ports used by Progress even has provisions for fuel transfer IIRC.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:5, Informative)
Small:
Atlas-Centaur (Lockheed) = 51/61
Kosmos-3M (Russia) = 422/442
Medium:
Tsyklon-2 (Soviet/Ukraine)= 105/106
Delta II (Boeing) = 65/67
Soyuz-U2 (Soviet) = 90/92
Voskhod (Soviet) = 277/300
Vostok-2M (Soviet) = 92/94
Heavy:
Proton (Soviet/Russia) = 294/335
Shuttle(NASA)= 126/128
Also, looking at a company's record Space-X is doing really well. 3/6 might sound bad but every group starting out has had failures.
Lockheed Martin was a missile company for decades. Was building ICBMs and their first launch vehicle was a modified one of these missiles. That is a pretty unfair comparison. They got to launch the things to test tons of times before they put a launch vehicle sticker on it. They also built spacecraft for many years before their 1st launch vehicle. And they still had failures (17% on their most popular vehicle).
Boeing as well aka 'Boeing Defense, Space & Security' is built up from ICBMs and military history. The Delta I is built up from a PGM-17 Thor missile.
Doing so much from scratch is hard but paybacks could be high. Space-X is doing everything right. In the Falcon-9 they have tons of redundancy, hoping for a repeat of the Saturn-V's 12/12 record, they basically have copied what made them successful. They have copied from the recent Delta heavy-lift vehicles for their own (Take a medium lift vehicle and replicate the first stage on the sides, it is cheaper and simpler (therefore safer)). And they've taken things further hope to recover more of the craft. They've added redundancy by making the stages even more similar reusing as many parts as they can. And they have used the same engine in both stages just more of them in the 1st stage.
They might not have a track record yet but they are a good bet. Why do you think everyone has their eyes on them. Why are they getting juicy contracts?
The whole concept of a startup space company going nothing -> Launch in 6 years is crazy, they only had 160~ employees until 2005. And they have been profitable and they only needed 120Million initial investments.
Unless things go horribly wrong Space-X is a BIG TIME game changer.
Re:Not a valid comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Bill
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:5, Informative)
Note that Shuttle had two loss-of-crew failures. Shuttle flew more times than all other manned systems combined.
Soyuz also had two loss-of-crew accidents. Soyuz flew more than all other manned systems combined (other than Shuttle).
Apollo had one loss-of-crew accident. On the ground. And 16 successful manned flights. As opposed to the 100+ for each of Soyuz and Shuttle.
In other words, Shuttle's safety record isn't mediocre. It's better than Apollo, better than Soyuz.
I won't go into "abysmal performance" beyond noting that 30 ton cargo capacity. When you find another manned space vehicle that can carry as much as five tons of cargo, let me know....
Solid rocket robustness (Score:4, Informative)
"Falcon 9 is an all-liquid rocket, meaning it isn't prone to catastrophic solid propellant explosions like the Ares I is."
Right, it's "prone" to catastrophic liquid propellant explosions instead.
Historically, solid rockets are more reliable when it comes to them not exploding. They're much simpler designs, and much more robust. Heck, parts of the SRBs on STS-51-L (the one that killed Challenger) survived the initial explosion and kept flying. They had to detonate the range safety charges to stop them. If it hadn't been for the giant liquid fuel tank next to the SRBs, the O-ring leak wouldn't have been a problem. (Obviously, since there was a giant liquid fuel tank, that's a huge problem, but the point of discussion is the reliability and robustness of solid rockets, not the STS as a whole.)
Solid rockets are cheaper, simpler, more robust, and have a higher thrust-to-weight ratio. But control options are limited. You can't vary thrust from plan, and once lit they will consume their entire fuel supply. No stop-and-restart.
Liquid rockets are more controllable, restartable, and have better propellant efficiency. But they are more costly, more complex, and more fragile. To quote a rocket scientist I was conversing with, "There are plenty of examples of liquid rockets going BOOM and everyone being surprised."
Now, I believe the mechanics of launch to orbit dictate that you pretty much need at least one liquid fuel stage. SpaceX reasons that you're better off using the same technology everywhere, to reduce overall design, manufacturing, and support costs. I suspect they are correct. If you have to build a good liquid rocket engine, you might as well use it everywhere. Using two different technologies means twice as many problems.
Re:Solid rocket costs (Score:3, Informative)
The SRBs were actually worse than projected in the above quote. They could not be re-used "100 to 500x each", they wiped out all the dev. savings with the Challenger explosion and then some ... and the SRBs were not up to military spec (single-piece body).
They never got anywhere near $160/lb. - not at over $10,000/kg.
To Be Fair... (Score:3, Informative)
SpaceX's main cost-cut compared to NASA is they're building it for themselves, by themselves. NASA doesn't build any spacecraft, they hire contractors. They have to pay their own people to operate the project plus the contractors to make the vehicle.
To be honest as well as fair, this is where things should expand into the BigAero Sucking NASA'a Corporate Welfare Teat Dry, but everybody knows that one already and the punchline sucks. Or used to. Looks like the new punchline just might be 'SpaceX', which, to quote Spock, "thrills me no end."
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:3, Informative)
It depends on what you're measuring the success of. If you're looking at the Saturn V booster, then Apollo 13 was a success. There was nothing the booster could have done to prevent or exacerbate the later problems caused by the oxygen tank explosion in the command module.
Re:To Be Fair... (Score:2, Informative)
Apple Tomato Comparison (Score:3, Informative)
The article compares tomatoes with apples. This rocket is designed as a cargo transportation system. Like Ariane 5 which is also a very low cost space transportation system. That's why they have a 50% market share in commercial space flight. However, the Ares I launch system is for people. Therefore the launch tower needs a way to deliver people to the top of the system. The rocket itself has also to be much more reliable than a cargo system.
And by the way, while looking at the missile photos it has 9 engines. This is like one of those ancient Russian designs, based on the fact that they cannot build a bigger engine. This is normally more expensive in testing and you get a higher possibility of failure. however they claim to be cheaper than Arianespace on launch basis. Ariane 5 approx USD 120 while Falcon 9 approx. USD 50.
Re:Apple Tomato Comparison (Score:3, Informative)
Redundancy does not work here, as you need all engines working perfectly to get it into orbit correctly. So if one engines fails, the missile is not going where it is supposed to go. And if it explodes, it will destroy the entire device. So it is not like you have redundant parts who can compensate for each other, like in redundant web-servers, it is more like an n-tier installation and if one tier fails the whole system is no longer usable.
Re:Ideological nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
As I pointed out before: this isn't comparing SpaceX of the present to NASA of the 1960s, which would be a very unfair comparison for the reasons you're saying. Its comparing SpaceX to the NASA of now -- which can use exactly the same developed technologies. Somehow NASA has ended up doing things that cost 10x as much and are destined to be cancelled due to the realities of a system that is rooted in politics.
Many of us involved with the space program are simply fed up and want to try something, anything, different that might make things work better than the failure of the past 30 years to develop a viable launch vehicle using cost-plus contracts. This isn't gov't vs. corporations. Its behemoths that suckle at the gov't teat and profit off of the taxpayer vs. smaller entrepreneurial ventures. The people who get the most out of the current system are the higher-ups at Boeing, Lockheed and ATK, and the politicians who get the votes from bringing the pork home.
You can have good and bad gov't programs: the unmanned programs and aeronautical research are astounding at NASA. Its just that in manned spaceflight, the JSC/MSFC way of doing things has demonstrated itself as insufficient. For basic launch services, things that don't require new research and insane amounts of risk, we're better off going with a more standard contracting method: the government purchases a service for a fixed-price rather than paying for development and paying for overruns as well. Its not idealogical, its practical.