SpaceX Successfully Launches Its Used Block 5 Rocket (theverge.com) 85
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:This just never gets old (Score:5, Informative)
Someone actually made a video about why this happens. Found it while looking around after another 'aaaaiugh video cut out!' moment with tonight's landing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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That was fascinating, and makes a lot of sense. As those things come down, they brake late from supersonic speed, so it's not just the thrust setting the boat wobbling, but four loud thumps hitting the deck as the pressure waves catch up. Thanks for the link.
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its old. interest is dying with each launch.
which is what it should be, if this is going to be a successful commercial operation.
stable sustainable success is boring. risky novelty is interesting.
continuous volatility and excitement, indicates high risk of failure.
hardly anyone watch soyuz launches.
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The best thing that can happen is for these launches to get boring because it is the same thing over and over.
Right now, SX has really only a couple of interesting launches coming up. I want to watch the FH, as well as Dragon V2.
FH really needs to launch at least 3x before it starts to be boring. And V2 is very important to getting ISS and new space going.
After these, the next interesting thing might be the lunar launches, but I would say BFR is far more interesting. And BO's new Glenn
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its old. interest is dying with each launch.
which is what it should be, if this is going to be a successful commercial operation.
stable sustainable success is boring. risky novelty is interesting.
continuous volatility and excitement, indicates high risk of failure.
hardly anyone watch soyuz launches.
A LOT of people went out to the Denver Stapleton Airport to watch the first landing of the Boeing 747 airliner, in October of 1970. The newness lasted about a week. After that only occasionally did people stood on the side of the road near the end of the runway to watch a 747 fly over head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Capitalism and private industry victorious (Score:1)
Big advances for humanity.
Re:Capitalism and private industry victorious (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If it's not their win, how come others are not competitive? Even countries with cheaper labour like Russia can't push the price down, not to mention ESA's Ariane that is directly threatened.
Re:Capitalism and private industry victorious (Score:5, Informative)
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... [kym-cdn.com]
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.
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You don't get his point. It's not (just) about preserving jobs for the sake of it. It's about preserving the capacity to produce rockets even though you make only a tiny amount a year. You need launches in the dozens per year to have reusable rockets and still manufacture enough to keep production capacity going. Arianespace has no path to this, at least not unless they somehow found a way to out-compete SpaceX drastically.
But yes, the end result is that Arianespace is going to shift from being the biggest
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SX KNOWS that they need loads of launches. That is why BFR is not just devoted to mars solely. It would make the BFR as pricey as SLS or Ariane 5. Instead, they are building new markets. Markets that Russia OR Europe could be building.
1) launches between continents. Considering how fast and relatively cheap these launches are, it will mean that some business ppl will use it, but the military is also looking into this now. The ability to send fir
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I think you are confused about the concept of "economies of scale".
If you only make a few rockets for a few missions, they will cost a lot of money per rocket.
If you make many rockets for many missions, cost per mission will go down because of economies of scale (efficient production line,...).
However. if you make few rockets for many missions, that costs EVEN LESS! Making lots of rockets makes them cheaper per rocket but still raises the total price. A production line that makes half as many rockets is nev
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Even more obvious reaction, lower launch costs, and there will be more launches. Rockets won't be endlessly reusable. There will be jobs.
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Ariane space has a unique problem that is a fair assessment in regard to labor. They are ostensibly working on "Rockets" but in reality they're maintaining their solid-rocket motor know-how and ICBM capability. Reusable ICBMs ready to launch at a moment's notice aren't really feasible at this point. So Europe can either just have a bunch of rocket engineers sitting around in between ICBM refreshes or else they can give them something do designing "expensive" rockets.
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Yeah, those other companies didn't get massive amounts of money from their governments, right...
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Russia and Europe fully fund all of their launch vehicles.
ULA gets 1B / year subsidy for nothing
Boeing and L-mart are jokes when it comes to their cost+. They are as inefficient as China, Russia AND Europe.
SpaceX got
SX has/is getting some 2B for dragon v2 (along with another 1B for 6 launches to ISS). It remains to be seen how long it will take, if at all, to get this to pay back. Even if
Company structure (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
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Isn't capitalism great (Score:3)
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.
Random startup has shown they are willing to throw money behind industries they think are important and don't mind taking losses to gain market share.
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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.
They'll get around to it eventually unless their moles in SpaceX can pilfer enough secrets but they simply lack the cultural attributes needed to pull it off smoothly; expect a lot more 'sudden releases of kinetic energy' than Western efforts - just don't expect to actually hear about them.
Re:Capitalism and private industry victorious (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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they invested in an implementation of a long existing idea obviously
And what was the more expensive part: coming up with the idea, or putting it into practice? Sure, plenty of research into this has already been done by others, but it's not like SpaceX just copied the blueprints from a couple of research papers, they had to do the hard engineering themselves in order to build the first LEO-capable reusable 1st stage.
Also, SpaceX doesn't do space tourism. They do commercial launches for a variety of customers.
Re:Capitalism and private industry victorious (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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?
2 things.
1) Some of these competitors still don't believe that there is sufficient demand to make it cost effective. Let's say there are 100 customers in the world and you need 80 customers to break even with reusable technology. By competing you both lose money until one or the other fails. So whichever is 1% more money all else being equal will win. SpaceX has the experience and time on their side.
2) Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is presumably doing precisely that.
But saying "Falcon 9 only cost $300m" isn't
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And meanwhile, NASA doesn’t think it could get to the Moon starting from today even as fast as it did the first time. So much for sitting around waiting for governments to do high technology.
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Amazing what you "invented" comrade!
Oh cool. So where in Russia, China, or North Korea are you from?
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So, with that being there, and expanding the space economy, why do you want to see SX die?
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...yet only SpaceX went the way of saving costs by reusing rockets
Why do Carmack and Armadillo Aerospace never get any credit?
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Maybe you were thinking of Blue Origin, who did fly, land, and relaunch a reusable 1st stage (they were the first who succeeded in soft landing one), but at the moment they are playing in a different league (suborbital flight), with their rocket capable of launching a payload into orbit not expected before 2020.
T-ball vs the Bigs (Score:2)
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First off, we have all of the planetary landers.
Secondly, the Delta CLipper had travelled to 10K' and then softlanded as well.
Thirdly, SX had already sent a stage 1, grasshopper, up to what, 6K feet and then brought it down? It was their attempts at trying the boats that prevented them from being before BO.
All BO did was go a little bit higher, and then come down. Not that big of a deal.
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Yeah, people don't seem to understand how big the difference between getting into space and getting into orbit [xkcd.com] is.
But getting to space is easy. The problem is staying there.
The delta-v required to get something up to the Karman Line (100km) is 1,400 m/s, assuming an instance impulse and no atmosphere. In reality you need about 2,000 m/s because of atmospheric and "gravity" drag. That's a mere 20% of the delta-v required to get into LEO where you not only have to get into space (2 km/s), but also travel fast enough to stay up (8 km/s).
Re: Capitalism and private industry victorious (Score:2)
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Re: Capitalism and private industry victorious (Score:2)
The entire development cost of the Falcon 9 has been around $350 million, whereas NASA estimated that developing a similar rocket would have cost them over $3 billion. NASA funded development dues to the obvious potential for cost savings over their existing launch providers. How the fuck you think this is socialism rather than capitalism ... that's just mind boggling.
Re: Capitalism and private industry victorious (Score:2)
The "entire development cost" is the know-how that has been accumulated from tax funded expenses by NASA over decades. Discounting that is so plain stupid it hurts.
No, including it would be absolutely idiotic given that spacex spent $350 million when NASA by their own estimation would have spent $3 billion to accomplish the same damn thing. Why stop at just including the cost of the original rocket programs? Let's include ALL technological development since the time man first developed fire. That makes just as much sense as your asinine suggestion.
Saying "Musk and his few men built Space-X from nothing" is like saying "Robert Goddard built the American space industry" totally ignoring the fact that the US had no usable rockets until it plucked the best of the Nazi rocket engineering and brought it to America.
Nobody is saying spacex was "built from nothing"; that's a figment of your overactive and deeply misdirected imaginatio
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Basically, space, like most innovations, is a case of building on the work of others with the initial work typically not even recognized. Nobody but the Germans recognized how great Goddard was. They BEGGED him to come work with them on developing his stuff. And when we captured V2s, and examined them, apparently a fair amount of Goddards work had gone into it, along with improvements. It is said that Von Braun was EXCITED to meet Godd
Re:Capitalism and private industry victorious (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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There's no plan for SpaceX to reduce prices even if they can recover the 2nd stage and the fairings - the business plan calls for increased profits as they have more reusable pieces.
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If they're able to increase launch cadence to the point where they can do more launches than they have customers for, that's when they'll lower prices to try to grow the market (to companies that currently aren't considering satellites due to the launch costs).
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BFR is 1 stage, with an upper load that is part stage/part carrier. IOW, like the shuttle. As such, they will be landing BOTH stage 1 and the carrier similar to how F9's stage 1 lands.
There will be no fairing. At least at this moment, there will not be. Instead, it would just be the cargo version of the carrier.
Some more information on the sat here.... (Score:2)
https://spaceflightnow.com/201... [spaceflightnow.com]
he Merah Putih satellite launched Tuesday will provide C-band telecommunications services over Indonesia and India. The new telecom craft was built by SSL in Palo Alto, California.
SSL completed construction of the Merah Putih satellite ahead of schedule, according to Telkom Indonesia, also known as PT Telkom. The new satellite will replace Telkom 1, which failed in a mysterious debris-shedding event in geostationary orbit last year.
Officials from Telkom Indonesia expected th
Re:Some more information on the sat here.... (Score:5, Insightful)
People caring about space is good. If it takes fanboyism, so be it.
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Up to now the gating factors in getting to space have been the cost of getting out of Earth's gravity well and dependence on government programs. Now that both of these barriers have fallen, we no longer have to listen to that 'priorities' argument.
How much is insurance? (Score:5, Interesting)
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reused rocket vs. a traditional rocket
I like "tested vs untested."
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CPF: Certified Pre-Flown.
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The last mention of it I can good is from last October and states that -- as of October 2017 -- the insurance price was exactly the same for a flight-proven rocket as a new rocket. Odds are that remains the case today, since there've been no Falcon 9 launch failures since.
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*good=google somehow.
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