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.
Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:5, Insightful)
Will these cheaper options be more efficient, or just cheaper?
More efficient.
Between government salaries, the way they get contracts, how NASA's budget is dependent on pork barrel spending, NASA having to put some projects in certain states to get votes from Congressmen for a budget, price gouging by contractors, etc...
Just eliminating Congress from the loop is going to save billions. Add in businessmen/engineers and you have a much more efficient space program.
Safety? We'll see if it's reduced. But I have a feeling there won't be change in safety record.
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"Safe" is a large part of "efficient" and "cheap" - if only because cargo is usually quite valuable and time consuming to build.
I still expect SpaceX to get there.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
"BP executives may be responsible for many bad decisions, but I doubt the disaster at Deepwater Horizon is the result of short term thinking."
So risking the big amount of money that the Deepwater Horizon costed just to let it sink down is not a short term thinking result? So expending a lot of millions designing, building and positioning the blowout preventers just to let them fail is not a short term thinking result?
"If those violations didn't result in employee lawsuits then the fines were trivial and not really a risk factor."
It's obvious that a big accident in deept waters will result in life loss not mentioning the financial damage.
There were obvious danger signs; there were millions of already deployed structure at risk; there were oil to be lost in the ocean instead of being pumped out to the oil market; there were human lives at risk. And all that was overlooked so production could start this quarter instead of next one. Tell me *that* is not the result of short term thinking pushed by the most egregious greed.
I'll go (Score:2)
I'm game, send me first and I'll let you know one way or another if it's safe. I'm sure it'll be fun regardless...It's probably safer than driving.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll give you my own anecdotal experience for what it's worth. My father started at a Thiokol (when it was Thiokol) and worked for various contractors as well as NASA. He was involved in the Apollo program from it's inception.
I started out Junior High School in Pennsylvania, and essentially commuted (every nine months or so) from Manned Spaceflight Center to Cape Canaveral to the Johnson Space Flight Center (the MSC renamed for it's principal benefactor) to Cape Kennedy (the original named for it's principal benefactor and back again. The government paid for dual facilities, essentially paid for dual school systems, paid our moving costs and a bunch load of other things essentially so other congresscritters could get a piece of the pie.
And I'm even purposefully forgetting a four month stay in the swamps outside of Huntsville....
If you read TFA, that's really what Musk is saying. Everybody is outsourced seven ways from Sunday. That leads to delays and expenses that really don't help you engineering wise. It's all a political decision. And we know how well those work....
Even Yo-Yo Dyne^HBoeing, who had the lead engineering contract for Apollo and whose managers bitched and moaned about the geographic and political separation (it seemed mostly in our back yard) forgot about all of that with the 787 and outsourced it to pretty much every ZIP code on the planet [zimbio.com] leading to years of delay.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:5, Interesting)
Another thing to consider from recent events is the extra bit tacked onto the Afganistan supply bill to get funding for a cancelled aerospace project through the back door and make anyone that opposed it look as if they wanted the troops to die. Not a major bit of evil but still most definitely an evil and corrupt abuse of the system that nobody worth an inch of trust would ever contemplate.
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NASA won't close. No matter how things pan out otherwise, it'll almost certainly keep it's robotic deep space missions and also do advanced aeronautics research.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Interesting)
.
People tend to massively over-estimate how much money the government spends on NASA. It's about 15 billion a year, or about .05% of the federal budget, or about $50 per person per year. That's roughly equal to the amount of money we spend on over-priced coffee machines or on skateboards. We literally spend about 50 times as much on our military...
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA sure did great things, but "track record"? As compared to? Which other venture is your baseline?
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The space shuttle had 25 launches before its first launch failure. That's a record that has never been equalled by any other venture.
The Shuttle got off to a solid start, but given the billions dumped into its development and construction that was hardly some great achievement. The US taxpayer shelled out a fortune for the Shuttle, ultimately to enjoy a mediocre safety record and abysmal performance. Virtually every booster can hoist payloads into orbit for a fraction of what it costs per-pound to launch
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....
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Shuttle flew more times than all other manned systems combined.
Yes, at a tremendous cost in money and lives.
In other words, Shuttle's safety record isn't mediocre. It's better than Apollo, better than Soyuz.
The Shuttle's safety record is abysmal given its cost. Worse, there's little indication the craft is any safer now than it was the day it first launched - if anything, age seems to be making the Shuttle less reliable (or at least, increasingly expensive to maintain at a safe level). Whereas Soyuz has c
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Bad comparison. The shuttles were not the first set of rockets NASA had launched. You are comparing one generation of rockets (a generation pretty late in the game for that matter) with the entirety of SpaceX's run. NASA had quite as few failures back when it was still learning the ropes, as SpaceX did their first launches.
For more fun unfair comparisons, check out the progress NASA made on Ares, then check out the progress SpaceX made on Falcon 9. Pick your "track records" correctly and you can make an
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In that is the key to the big savings, They are 3 for 6 but still cheaper. IF they can then get to 25 without a mishap and still have the program be cheaper overall, then they will have proven that particular model for development. Sometimes a few early failures are much cheaper than designing when failure isn't an option.
Part of NASA's problem is that it came into being as a propaganda machine. It's purpose was to convince the world that communism was inferior and that America was superior to the USSR. Fai
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.
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To nitpick, I'm not quite sure if Apollo 13 should be counted as a "success" or not. Nobody died, but only just.
OTOH, if you want to count the entire Saturn series, then you have 32 launches with the only astronaut deaths in the program being Apollo 1, which never actually launched. Even the unmanned ones have a perfect track record.
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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:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's great that they cut costs and all, but what about those pesky corners? I'm all for a private space industry, but NASA has a pretty darn good track record of performance to back up their expenditures. Will these cheaper options be more efficient, or just cheaper?
Are we talking about the same NASA that proceeded with a shuttle launch when the temperature was too cold, when they knew that certain very highly engineered O-Rings were likely to fail, instead of scrubbing the launch because it's expensive to do it all over again? The same NASA that knew they'd be launching in cold weather but accepted specs for these parts that would fail under those conditions rather than spending more money to come up with parts that would operate under the actual operating conditions? Or is this some other NASA?
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so you want NASA to run efficiently, but at the same time spend money on parts. i would say that borders on a contradiction.
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Well, I'm glad someone answered my leading question intelligently, or at least, with the sentiment I was looking for. Frankly I don't care about assigning blame for ruining NASA, although by all means, you can go ahead. All I want to say is that NASA is no longer the can-do organization of the past, not least because we're now in the present and times have changed. Private industry is clearly accomplishing today what NASA can not, regardless of the reason. If we can fix NASA, we should, but private industry
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
No one in government gains anything by being efficient.
This is one key problem of letting government solve any problem. You better have exhausted
all possible alternate approaches first. The problem should really be "too big for anyone"
else because you know that any solution created by beaurocrats is going to have serious
inherent drawbacks.
Elon Musk's example about different engine technologies in the same rocket is the sort
of thing that even goes back to Apollo 13.
No one tries "efficient" because no one is motivated and it would actually interefere
with their personal fiefdom building.
Eventually, any technology has to crawl out of the crib and be done outside of government
before it becomes really effective or widespread.
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on the other hand, as corporations grow, their concept of "efficiency" results in all kinds of clean ups or secondary effects end up getting payed for by the community rather then the corporation, hiding the true cost of operation.
Large organizations are the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
"No one tries 'efficient' because no one is motivated and it would actually interefere with their personal fiefdom building."
In fairness, that happens all the time in private companies, too. It's just less public because they're, ya know, private.
I'm not saying this to defend government so much as to also criticize private companies. They both suck.
If there's any conclusion I can reach, it's that large organizations of any type are the problem. When you scale up, you inevitably get longer lines of communications, a higher tolerance for mediocrity (you need more people than the cream of the crop can provide), the need for more formal procedures (to compensate for the first two), deeper pocket to fund fief building, and more places to hide it all.
I think Space-X wins because they're small, nimble, and fresh. And more power to them for it.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Interesting)
So what happened, did you sleep through the 90s?
You know what really grinds my gears? People who take something as awesome as space exploration, and try to spoil it by injecting partisan politics into it.
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NASA's way of doing things hasn't changed one least bit in that quarter century. That's why two shuttles were lost. Feynman is a big genius in my book since he made an analysis of root organizational issues that NASA had, and that analysis is applicable till this day. We should keep our fingers crossed that NASA won't manage to kill a third crew until the Shuttle program is finished.
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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%.
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NASA is as much a economic life support for the south as it is about space exploration.
Next to military gear, space gear is the perfect line of business. Much of it will either be blown up or sent to unrecoverable locations. This means that the customer will always be coming back for more.
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How sharp do you really need the corners? Seriously NASA has a perfectionist syndrome, many times good enough is better than perfect because perfection can never be achieved.
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manned space was about political one-ups. once the moon landing was no longer politically potent, they killed them (at exactly the same time NASA started sending scientist rather then fighter pilots).
and NASA got badly burned when their first launch of a "civilian" ended up in disaster.
then there is the question of what to use space for. There is right now no political, military or economic incentive to send anything more then automated devices into space. Heck, corporation have killed of all kinds of blue
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.
Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA researches space with experimental hardware.
Companies want to commercialize space with commoditized hardware.
Experimental hardware is great for solving problems and learning new things, but it will never be as cheap or reliable as commoditized hardware.
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Think of it this way. Unlike NASA, SpaceX has been building the majority of everything in-house. That means unlike NASA spacecrafts, SpaceX crafts are not build by the lowest bidder [brainyquote.com].
Of course NASA has had a pretty good track record in recent years, but I think we will find that SpaceX will as well.
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Re:Cut costs, sure. (Score:4, Interesting)
too much safety can be a bad thing
e.g. payload worth 100mil
you can pick:
a) rocket for 50 mil with 5% chance of failure
b) rocket for 60 mil with 1% chance of failure
cost for option A, plus 5% chance of having to rebuild and relaunch: $157.5 mil
cost for option B, plus 1% chance of having to rebuild and relaunch: $161.6 mil
this ignores double failure - but the point is that your cheaper 'riskier' launch makes more sense.
or with people:
imagine, for 10 billion, we can get 10 astronauts to mars with a probable 2 deaths, or for the same amount of cash we can get two astronauts to the moon with only a 2% chance of any deaths.
perhaps less obvious which is better, but I'm certain we would have no problem getting volunteers for the mars mission.
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maybe not if all of them are military personnel with short turn around to train replacements. Tho i wonder if the same is true for someone thats spent most of their life studying for a highly specialized topic.
Ares = manrated, Falcon = cargo. (Score:2, Insightful)
As simple as that.
While I agree that often cost of private enterprise is much lower than a government one, one needs to compare apples to apples to be fair.
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Ares = manrated, Falcon = cargo. As simple as that.
It's not if people are willing to sign a wavier and climb on-board the "cargo" version....
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I'm guessing cargo spaceships don't have life support systems.
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I'm guessing cargo spaceships don't have life support systems.
That's ok, I'll bring my own...
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And the operational history of the Shuttle program shows that "manrated" = meaningless.
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NASA fucked up a lot of things w/ the shuttle but safety was pretty damn good.
In which universe does killing the entire crew one time in fifty count as 'pretty damn good' safety?
If the Falcon merely has to kill the crew one time in fifty to be 'man-rated' then it's pretty much trivial.
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Shaken Rocket Syndrome?
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.
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Whoops, I meant "nonreusable", sorry. (Though I believe they're also planning to make the Falcon recoverable and reusable eventually.)
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Not eventually. That was their plan from day one. The recovery system failed on Falcon 9 flight 1, but it was there. They'll try to recover flight 2, and so on.
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.
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.
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Better comparison: Ares = nonexistent, Falcon = flying.
Not much point in comparing Ares to Falcon till there is an Ares out there to compare. Because the Falcon isn't going into stasis - there's the Heavy Lift version in the pipe, the planned man-rated version (Dragon is intended to have both a cargo and a manned version), etc.
Just where Falcon's development plan is going to be when (if) the first Area flies isn't terribly clear just yet.
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"Besides, Ares isn't even near being tested..."
Umm, apparently you missed it, but the Ares I-X launched last October!!!
Bill
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True enough, but Ares I-X [wikipedia.org] is only a approximation of an Ares system:
If it's only about the cost, give the money (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's only about the cost, give the money to Russians. If you pay a little more, they'll even let you have the blueprints for stuff. They've been launching stuff into space on the cheap for decades now.
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The problem with relying on the Russians is that they keep increasing prices every few years.
Misread the title (Score:5, Funny)
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]
Musk may be the Henry Ford of space travel. (Score:5, Insightful)
What Elon Musk is doing is similar to the assembly line process Henry Ford brought to the automotive industry.
Instead of each item being lovingly hand-crafted by thousands of pork-fueled constituents, SpaceX is making a rocket factory. It's fantastic.
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?
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What about the Russians and Soyuz? (Score:4, Interesting)
"What Elon Musk is doing is similar to the assembly line process Henry Ford brought to the automotive industry."
What about the Russians and the Soyuz ships? They've built over 1700 launchers so far, from the 60s to present... surely that's got to count as "assembly line process"?
Moon-Mars was never more than a pipe dream... (Score:4, Insightful)
Friction Stir Welding (Score:3, Informative)
Have we forgotten about Pegasus? (Score:2)
Have we forgotten about Pegasus from Orbital?
http://www.orbital.com/SpaceLaunch/ [orbital.com]
It's important to note the existing, efficient commercial solutions out there. The government-supplied rockets can be replaced with commercial versions.
Ideological nonsense (Score:2, Insightful)
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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,
Dear NASA, (Score:2)
I guess you really don't understand. [youtube.com]
It's not about sitting on my @** and discovering the universe, it's going into the universe to discover it. [youtube.com]
Lets just part as friends [youtube.com].
inventors (Score:4, Insightful)
Not having to reinvent everything from scratch certainly helps the budget. Never forget that when NASA started out, there was no such thing as space travel.
Going into orbit after someone else figured out how to put people on the moon and robots on Mars and Venus is a lot less of a challenge then going into orbit when nobody quite knows how to do it.
It's still a great feat, but don't forget that a lot of the cost savings are also because someone else invested a lot of money into figuring it all out.
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Also take note that much of SpaceX's engineering staff is drawn from existing players in the industry and collectively they have a lot more experience in developing spacecraft than their 8 year history would suggest.
Easy to be cheap when you don't have a history. (Score:4, Insightful)
It is very similar to the BP disaster. I'm sure all of the oil companies operate this way BP's luck just ran out. So they will most likely go bankrupt eventually paying for this because they will have so many eyes on them that they won't be competitive. Then their competitors with a little more luck and maybe a bit smarted will continue until the next accident.
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."
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You forgot the part where SpaceX didn't do any R&D. Instead, they used old technologies developed by... wait for it... NASA.
And, SpaceX didn't build a launch facility, instead they used.... NASA's.
No wonder SpaceX didn't spend much, they didn't do anything new.
Elon's Penny Pinching (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure what they're doing for test sites now, but early on SpaceX tested (sometimes destructively though probably not intentionally) firing chambers and other hotloud technology on a cattle ranch a mile or so east of their McGregor TX site. I've seen (as well as not seen but tripped over) rusty pieces of kaboomage while hunting down my own far more modest but adequately errant rockets during Dallas Area Rocket Society high-power launches. It's obviously not a top dollar test range. I'm thinking they probably had to move elsewhere when stuff got big and bad enough that the vehicles and/or pieces could travel 5 miles downrange before doing some high speed post hole digging. It's 5 miles to Bush's ranch at Crawford.
Not to be out-cheaped, DARS flies smaller stuff at a site that's loaned free, near Rockwall TX. On the land there's a cement pad that used to be a garage floor. On the pad there's marks that used to be some of early Armadillo's H2O2 exhaust. Of the source of the exhaust, I found no traces. Found plenty of my own though.
Maybe that's why they and Blue Origins favor Texas. There's so much land that you can always find some cheap.
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.
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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.
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Was recovering satellites (hence also building a vehicle that can do that by wasting most of its mass that's put to LEO on airframe) ever shown to be economically justified? Why no commercial launch companies and satellite operators seem to interested in it now?
Plus, we already have launchers that can put the same amount as Shuttle into LEO. And they are cheaper, they rule the commercial launch market. SpaceX is likely to push the market into even lower prices.
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.
Solid rocket costs (Score:3, Interesting)
"Evem early in the game, the solid booster system was known to result in a cost increase of 60% per pound into orbit."
Can you provide a reference for that? I've been told by an actual rocket scientist that solid fuel rockets are significantly cheaper than liquid fuel rockets, especially for the boost phase, where thrust-to-weight matters more than propellant efficiency.
I've also seen inflation-adjusted figures for Saturn V vs STS, and the Saturn V was vastly more expensive. Now, they only flew about two dozen Saturn V's, so they never had a chance to develop economies of scale, but it's not like the STS is a huge win in
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Re:Solid rocket costs (Score:4, Insightful)
In outward appearance the shuttle looks somewhat insane from an engineering perspective due to the compromises required on the original design. Strapping to the side of a rocket instead of on top of it created a large number of challenges that took years to overcome and reduced the performance. It's like bolting a Volkswagen to the roof of a formula 1 car and trying to get the whole thing to be stable at high speed.
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SpaceX seems to be building "Lamborghinis", too...just of a much more useful kind. [wikimedia.org]
(and generally, you really think complexicity of something is a good thing?)
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I think a more appropriate comparison is of a Model-T to contemporary Olds or Daimler. Less flashy, but more affordable.
I've never understood why people say that the shuttle is one of the most complex machines in the world like its a good thing.
Re:About to get more expensive! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Falcon-9 is about to get 50% more expensive.
Musk has just proposed to NASA that Space-X will fly only two demonstration flights of Falcon-9, instead of three... but he still wants to be paid for all three.
I read TFA you linked and you make it sound all evil. If they can prove everything in two flights (three if you count the first launch) then good for them, they should get paid for not fucking up. I guess you'd rather just waste everyones time having an extra flight instead of moving forward and getting shit done. I'd rather move forward and start suppling the station instead of flying by it a few times and waving...
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Well, the deal was for certain things to be accomplished and not just to launch another rocket. If they can achieve the next to goals of the COTS missions why shouldn't they get paid?
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That's a rather single-sided interpretation of that article (though I'm not saying it's wrong).
“The goal of the program was the demonstration of cargo transport to and from the station. The goal was not three flights,” Musk told Space News in a June 10 interview. “That is a means to an end. But if there is a better means to that end, it makes more sense to go with the better means to that end.”
[...]
Musk says if the modified second flight is unsuccessful, the third demo flight could serve as a backup. But if his plan works, the combined demo would clear the way for SpaceX to begin delivering cargo to the orbiting outpost under a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract it signed with NASA in December 2008.
They're keeping the third one as a backup (so they're not cancelling the plans yet), and if they can do what they have to do with two flights instead of three, why not? Among other things, it means they'll be ready for "real" launches a lot sooner.
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That's a rather single-sided interpretation of that article (though I'm not saying it's wrong).
I'll accept "not wrong."
The contract was for three flights. He's now proposing to do two flights, and says "but of course we will be paid the full contract."
That's fifty percent more expensive.
If he had said "we can demonstrate what we need to demonstrate in two flights, and we propose saving the government money by flying one less flight"---I would have been cheering. But when he says "we will take the money but won't do the flights that we signed a contract to do"-- that's not unacceptable. He's saying
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to bow to his awesome ability to spin the facts. He's saying "how about we won't do what we signed the contract to do, but still get the money..." and three different people post to say "sure, that sounds reasonable."
A normally government contracts works like this...
Contractor: We will build x and do y for 100 million! ...Time passes... ...Time passes...
Government: Great that's a really low bid, your hired!
Contractor: We had problems, the new cost is 150 million.
Government: Well, these things happen, no problem carry on...
Contractor: OK well it's done but it doesn't do Y yet.
Government: Well we really sort of need it to do Y.
Contractor: Sure we understand, but it will cost another 100 Million?
Government: Well... alright
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The Falcon 9 would be the equivalent of the Ares I rocket. There is no equivalent of the Ares V, except the defunct Saturn V and the Russian N-1. Only the upper (escape and cruise) stages of the Ares V are actually manrated.
Bill
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
... except the defunct Saturn V and the Russian N-1
Also Energia (and too bad its heaviest variant, Energia Vulcan, never had a chance; that would be some sight). Not so old, and part of it still flies (Zenit). Though even if it would be possible to ressurect it, there's no funds to do it and no reason to direct them (Ares V has the same problem - what's wrong with rendezvous in orbit using few cheap launches?). Plus politics: Russia wouldn't want to depend on Ukraine, so they're building new heavy launcher - Angara; heaviest variants of which aren't quite
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But there is an equivalent of Ares V: Falcon 9 heavy.
Re:Not a valid comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Bill
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There are two rockets in the Ares program, the Ares I man rated version, which is designed to get astronauts into orbit and the Ares V heavy lift vehicle, which is designed to carry the rest of the equipment that the voyage will need.
The funny part is that astronauts are easier to replace than the 'rest of the equipment' required to get to the Moon; so in any rational world the 'Ares V' should have been designed to be _safer_ than the 'Ares I'. If you lose an 'Ares I' but the translunar stage gets into orbit then you can have another crew up there in a few days... lose the translunar stage and you'll be waiting months to replace it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As has already been pointed out, Ares I and Falcon 9 are very similar in capabilities.
But furthermore - if Falcon 9 (or some other launcher for that matter) can launch a comparable mass to LEO, in several launches (we're good at rendezvous by now...), as one launch of the heavy Ares V (that's the rocket you're thinking of), and if it can do it still much cheaper (despite needing several launches) - then why wish for Ares V? A rocket which would be launched very rarely, hence driving the costs even more up b
A woman/man can do it (Score:2)
If there is one thing the humaned space program has shown, it's that we're really good at putting stuff together and fixing stuff (cf. Hubble and that hulking massive space station). But the sole brass ring seemingly out of reach -- correct me if I'm wrong -- is refueling. If we can do that multiple launches lock and load just about any vessel.
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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.
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