SpaceX Plans to Start Launching Rockets Every Two To Three Weeks (fortune.com) 104
Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX, plans to launch its Falcon 9 rockets every two to three weeks, its fastest rate since starting launches in 2010, once a new launch pad is put into service in Florida next week. From a report: The ambitious plan comes only five months after a SpaceX rocket burst into flames on the launch pad at the company's original launch site in Florida. SpaceX, controlled by billionaire Elon Musk, has only launched one rocket since then, in mid-January. "We should be launching every two to three weeks," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in an interview on Monday.
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I'll take those odds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, aside from containing a thousand times the resources that we have on Earth (just in our tiny little solar system), space is empty
The really nice thing is that much of it is outside of large gravity wells and you do not have to pay a heavy price to launch it
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Re:SpaceX plans to waste tons of fucking money (Score:5, Informative)
Is there THAT much shit being sent into space?
Yes. [spacex.com] And that's just Spacex, there are a 7 other providers [wikipedia.org] with their own full launch manifests. SpaceFlightNow [spaceflightnow.com] does a pretty good job tracking upcoming launches.
Some quick searching shows there are about 4500 satellites in orbit, 1500 or them operational. Looks like we are putting about 200+ more per year up there. source [pixalytics.com] So yeah, there is plenty of "shit" to send up there.
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You don't need to "clean it up." Just consider it raw material for a complete ring around the Earth.
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SpaceX is launching most of Iridium Next this year, so that is 6 more polar-orbit launches (first one launched from Vandenberg last month). With ISS Supply missions and other commercial launches, they have a lot of stuff going up.
The original AC probably thinks that everything space related is a waste of money. He also probably thinks that technology just magically comes into being when we are finished researching it, just like it does in video games.
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Re:SpaceX plans to waste tons of fucking money (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the thing, there really is. With launch prices down, satellite tech advancing fast, and a rapidly growing middle class, there's a large demand for commercial launches right now, and it only looks to grow.
My problem with SpaceX's plan isn't the market - that's solid. My concern is that the faster you want to launch, the less you can tolerate failures. The time a failure leaves you unable to launch for is independent of how fast you're launching. The faster you launch, the sooner the time between failures. So an increasingly large percent of your time becomes time down due to failures. The only way to overcome this is to correspondingly boost reliability. Want to 10x launch rates? Better 10x reliability. It's a tall order. SpaceX is already on the low end on reliability (not terrible by rocketry standards, but not great), so they already have a deficit to overcome.
Re: SpaceX plans to waste tons of fucking money (Score:5, Insightful)
and a rapidly growing middle class
Was that a joke?
Take your blinders off. The middle class may not be doing so well in America and Europe, but in the other 90% of the world it is expanding rapidly.
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You mean, those places where a middle class family makes less than Americans living below the poverty line?
Yes, them. Where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the US. Which you know, but are pretending you don't so you can have a nice little OMG INEQUALITY! rant inside your bubble. Have fun with that.
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There is a REAL reason why companies like Walmart and Target have profit margins similar to the high tech world, than to other retailers.
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Are you sure? One of the things that surprised me when I lived in Tanzania was how similar the prices were.
A TV costs about the same everywhere in the world. If anything, it will be even more expensive in developing countries. But local goods are usually cheaper, and locally rendered services tend to be WAY cheaper.
When I lived in Shanghai, I didn't own a car because I couldn't afford it. But my family had a live in housekeeper for $100 / month.
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The average person could not afford fast food or to go out to eat.
The biggest price difference was in carved elephants - I got one for ~$15 and saw an identical one in Santa Fe a year later selling for $900. I joked that it would be less expensive to fly there and buy it. That was the only local good, other than food, that I saw. The pay breakdown was approx $1/day laborer, $2/day skilled (plumber/electrician) and $3/day college professor/engineer.
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Perhaps you limited your definition of "middle class" to the United States.
The middle class is growing world-wide.
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The fact that our manufacturing in America has been sent overseas, has everything to do with it.
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Every place but Africa and India is wired pretty good with fiber
That's hilarious. Spoken like a true Coastal.
Try driving, say, 45 minutes away from your nearest three-coffee-shops intersection, into any even slightly rural area in the US, and then get back to us with a re-evaluation of that comment. No, everyone outside of your apartment building isn't a redneck. Many of them make plenty of money, and can't buy broadband at twice what you're paying. Or ten times what you're paying. Because stringing fiber down a twenty mile road that's home to five houses is financi
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SpaceX is already on the low end on reliability
That sounds rather disingenuous if we're talking about two or three problems with the first thirty or so units of a brand new vehicle. It's no worse than what Ariane 5 had in the 1990s. Way better than what some old launchers had either initially (R-7) or even now (Proton). (Of course, Arianespace is surely glad it's the 2010s now.)
My concern is that the faster you want to launch, the less you can tolerate failures.
This is true, nevertheless, the Soviets managed to reach something like sixty launches of an R-7 in a year sometime in the 1970s. If you want to do it, you definitely can do it.
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What's disingenuous is selecting for comparison launchers that had early problems but leaving out those that didn't.
By rocketry standards, SpaceX's record isn't terrible, but it's not great either.
Because the Soviets didn't have the FAA grounding them until they can prove to a very high degree of confidence
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Their reliability as judged by other companies and groups getting started, is nothing less than amazing.
Yeah, Atlas V and Delta 4 have 1 failure each, but most of the other new rockets typically have 2 OR MORE.
As long as they have solved their issue from this point on, they should be rock solid. Even block 5 is supposed to put in a new helium tank that is 2 sided with metal (not 1).
The Ariane 5 has had 4 failures out of 83, the Ariane 4 has had 3 out of 116, etc. [wikipedia.org] And almost all failures
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The industry average failure rate is commonly stated at 95%, although that number is biased down by older rockets who which were developed at a time where a higher failure rate was considered more acceptable (it's lower with modern rockets). SpaceX was at 93% after their last accident. I repeat what I wrote: "Not terrible, but not great."
As for mounting satellite before static testing:
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The faster you launch, the sooner the time between failures. So an increasingly large percent of your time becomes time down due to failures.
I think at some point you just take the 'damn the torpedoes' approach.Insurance should be happy to pay-out and most launches aren't NASA grade one-off missions. So maybe delay a New-Horizons class launch or manned mission until you figure out what went wrong, but meanwhile keep launching GPS satellites which have a very small incremental unit cost. If you lose one... that's why you built spares. I imagine a company like iridium would be more than happy to jump-the-line if you've established a reliabil
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Except 1) A failure takes out an (expensive) launch pad for half a year, and 2) the FAA won't let you just take a "damn the torpedoes" approach, because these "torpedoes" contain the energy of a small nuclear bomb.
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My problem with SpaceX's plan isn't the market - that's solid. My concern is that the faster you want to launch, the less you can tolerate failures. The time a failure leaves you unable to launch for is independent of how fast you're launching. The faster you launch, the sooner the time between failures. So an increasingly large percent of your time becomes time down due to failures. The only way to overcome this is to correspondingly boost reliability. Want to 10x launch rates? Better 10x reliability. It's a tall order. SpaceX is already on the low end on reliability (not terrible by rocketry standards, but not great), so they already have a deficit to overcome.
Assuming every failure means you have to ground every launch, it's not like the FAA grounds every airplane of that model when one is involved in a crash. Maybe they can split it into experimental and conservative configurations like say ten experimental launches without failure and they follow different rules, like you don't need a full root cause analysis only to proven the failure is probably related to the new configuration. Not saying it'll happen quite like SpaceX wants but if it becomes a high-volume
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ULA has a great record of not recently blowing up rockets that have a 1960's heritage, at three times the cost of SpaceX. But their main effort has been to drive costs up rather than down.
Re:Not going to happen (Score:5, Informative)
SpaceX has 56 future launches on their manifest, and that doesn't even include most of their NASA crew launches (only the first one is listed on their manifest). Even at 25 launches per year, it will take SpaceX years to catch up with their backlog. If their own constellation ever takes off, that would also add a large number of additional launches.
Re:Not going to happen (Score:4)
It's a backlog that has only ever grown in spite of SpaceX launching up to 8 times per year, and would likely attract more interest from customers if they were launching regularly and didn't have a many-year manifest to work through. Even if they launched 25 times per year and only continued signing launch contracts at their current rate, they'd probably need at least four years to run out of things to launch. Their poor cadence is a problem that has already cost them business (due to the long wait time), and they could probably just reduce their cadence once they manage to reduce that backlog.
That also assumes that they're not able to increase their market share. They're working on reducing their prices to try to capture more commercial business, they're working on getting government/military contracts in the US, and they've already lost a bunch of business to the competition because of their poor launch cadence. I'm not sure if all of that would be enough to support 25 launches per year in the long term (beyond the time needed to clear out the current manifest), but they do need that sort of cadence in the near term to clear the backlog.
In the long term, if their own constellation ever happens, that's at least an extra 200 or so launches for the initial constellation, and then roughly 30 launches per year to maintain the constellation (due to the 5 to 7 year lifespan SpaceX has given). I'm still pretty skeptical about their constellation, though. I think the odds are that it won't happen.
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Let's hope they do, but not too optimistic (Score:2)
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Space-X's has 2 launch centers at the Cape, SLC40 which was damaged but should be repaired and ready in a few months and SLC39C which would have already launched F9 Heavy had it not been for the COPV incident, Vandenburg and is building facilities at Spaceport America near Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Besides which, Falcon 9 is not the Shuttle and does not need weeks/months of launchpad testing.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] states that the Spaceport facility will be used for testing returned 1st stages but I did indeed omit the Boca Chica site as information on it's readiness is hard to find.
Thanks for the correction.
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The New Mexico Spaceport facility of SpaceX was never activated. SpaceX retired the Grasshopper at McGregor and they never started the F9-Reusable phase 2 flight tests, since the final tests of that were done with customer boosters after their missions. SpaceX is doing all of the engine tests of Falcon 9 boosters at McGregor. But they are not allowed to free-fly at McGregor any longer (local parents got upset when they had to destruct the last F9R - their school is only 3 miles away). So, when the time come
Hate to be the one to say this... (Score:1)
Reusablility problems (Score:5, Informative)
According to an article on Arstechnica, there is some problem with the current design, which means the recovered boosters are only good for one or two re-launches. They need the next version of Falcon 9, block 5 before they are properly re-usable.
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
"It now seems likely that SpaceX will fly the landed boosters it currently has, at most, once or twice, before retiring them, instead of multiple times. Although the company hasn't elaborated on the problems with the engines, booster structure or composite materials that has challenged their attempts to re-fly its Falcon 9 first stages, Musk seems confident that changes to the Block 5 version of the rocket will solve the problem. "
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Google tells me that it currently costs $62 to launch the Falcon 9. Show me any company out there that wouldn't jump at the chance to save $6.2 million dollars.
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Not considering fixed costs. The costs of all of the things other than the rocket itself that go into making the rocket, flying the mission, and recovering the rocket. It will only be possible to amortize these costs if the launch volume is sufficient. This is why SpaceX must now approach a cadence of 2/month and that eventually gets higher.
At this point someone who once took economics will ask if the market for launches is elastic. In other words, "if SpaceX builds it faster, will customers come faster?" P
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It depends on volume, I guess. An automotive engineer will sell his soul for a buck savings on a $30K car, because that savings if extended over several model years you could be talking millions of cars.
The more repeatable an activity is, the more marginal improvements in financial efficiency matter. We only launched a dozen Saturn Vs, at a billion plus per launch, only 10% of which was the rocket itself. So you put a high premium on simpler operations than minor cost savings on the rocket. But if we we
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According to an article on Arstechnica, there is some problem with the current design, which means the recovered boosters are only good for one or two re-launches.
There is an issue with turbopumps cracking. [slashdot.org] I suspect this issue was only detected because the rockets have been recovered after launch.
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The turbine cracks seems to be more of an issue for manned flight.
Turbine cracks were not a problem on the space shuttle. NASA solved the issue but redefining them as a maintenance problem.
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They need the next version of Falcon 9, block 5 before they are properly re-usable.
That's a misinterpretation of what was stated. What Elon Musk said was that they want to consolidate their entire fleet onto one design. That means they will only be flying the current generation once or twice before they phase the 'legacy' design out of their fleet.
There have been no statements about fitness of the design itself, just the business case for maintaining multiple builds. A problem every software developer should be familiar with. If you can, you want to update everybody to a single relea
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Actually, the current design issue is not known to limit reuse, however there is a "block 5" design which is being done to incorporate what they have learned about reuse and SpaceX is not interested in learning the block 4 reusable lifetime with block 5 starting to come out. Musk claims this is the last F9 redesign, which is waaaaay optimistic considering that they've not flown crewed missions yet and they are bound to run into some qualification issues before the first crewed mission and as experience is g
A rocket a day keeps the high costs away (Score:3)
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