> Add to that the fuel for the launch vehicle; and fuel for the the cruise stage.
What you've just said is the equivalent of someone witnessing a Ferrari crash into a tree and destroy itself, and saying 'Ouch, that's an expensive tank of fuel he's just wasted'.
In fact the costs of fuel for these things are trivially small, basically inconsequential, compared to the cost of the things that are using the fuel - the rocket and the cruise stage. You don't get them back, they're single use, expended as part of the mission, and they're expensive.
> Why not to use something which is already there, and not expensive?
If engines were the cause of the recent failure, they've just proven to be quite expensive for Orbital.
The company's in a pretty weird place right now. After destroying one on the bench and one in flight, the cost of insuring a flight with these engines has gone up quite a bit. None of the ways to get flying this class of rocket again - new engine production, recertifying and insuring flights using the old engine, etc. - can be done on the cheap.
The thing they might have going for them is the contract with NASA. I don't know the details of that.
He greatly overestimated the amount of fuel SpaceX needs to land a Falcon 9, and especially overestimated the amount of fuel needed for the SES-9 landing attempt. The implication that fuel even matters is pretty weird too; The fuel for a ~$60 million Falcon 9 launch costs about $200,000. He also says that SpaceX loses a quarter of a billion dollars per launch, which makes very little sense.
Really, the fuel thing sticks out at me. Maybe I'm making too big of a deal about it, but reuse is going to be very important, ULA is working on their own version of it (recovering just the engines, not the entire first stage), and he ought to know about it. Or if he doesn't, because details are for underlings, he ought to know what he doesn't know about it.
> Is it just me who can't muster any enthusiasm over it because the rocket is so wasteful? Not very Tintin to trash the entire booster and everything for every launch.
If your instincts come from how SpaceX have done it, then I can imagine it feels extremely wasteful. But SpaceX needs to try and turn a profit, so they have a different set of incentives to NASA.
Because this will be the first time in history that the cost of a launch will be mostly the cost of the fuel. This is the first fully reusable rocket in history. If you had to throw away a dozen tankers it wouldn’t make any sense.
> That doesn't stop them from launching a new Dragon (2? hopefully they'll reuse CRS8's booster before that, but it'd be cool to see the first Dragon 2 on top of the first booster landed on the ship) on top of a reused booster though... and of course, reusing the first stage doesn't mean reusing the second stage (which is, in fact, never even recovered)
Sure. My point is that kind of mission is nowhere near as cheap as "throw a bunch of food/water/fuel on top and send it up".
> Landing still requires a lot of fuel, which needs fuel to be carried up.
That's true, and that reduces the payload of the returning stage. To have it working, you either have to reduce the payload or to increase the size of the stage. In both cases the payload weight to liftoff weight decreases.
> It was a waste and still is.
That's false, as in exchange the operator gets the stage back to be reused on the next flight. That's usually a huge saving in costs. Fuel is relatively cheap, and to make a rocket somewhat bigger or a payload somewhat smaller does relatively small change to the price of a kilogram to LEO comparing to the opportunity not to pay for the stage hardware on the next flight.
Overall SpaceX made a huge improvement in costs and moved the world launch industry quite a bit forward.
Not true considering you need to bring that extra fuel up in the first place, so you need a lot more fuel just to carry the weight of the descent fuel into space. It is a really tricky cost/benefit equation, but Musk seems to have figured that out.
>Aren't their reused rockets significantly cheaper than the competition already?
Are they? Have they re-used their rockets commercially, outside of testing? I was unaware of that, but I don't follow it very closely.
Did they not ditch the idea of re-using the second stage, as it proved too expensive? If so, that demonstrates there's sometimes a gap between targets and reality.
> I can't see re-launching withing hours any time in the foreseeable future. Even once they're proven reusable each booster will need significant inspection and likely maintenance before being ready to re-launch.
Initially, yes of course. But if they manage to launch a stage 100 times and it always passes inspection and etc, etc etc it's not impossible that eventually you'll get to the point where you only inspect every 2 launches, every 3 launches, every 5 or 10 launches.
Once the ride to orbit costs: $100million/X + $Ymillion + $Zthousand
where X is the number of reuses
Y is the second stage cost
Z is the fuel, launch fees, refurb, etc
There's an experience curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects) that shows you how much you'll save as you build more and more units and it's entirely possible that the (expendable) second stage could eventually get very cheap to the point where you don't want to spend $1 million (or whatever) going over the rocket for every launch.
If you're launching priceless (or very, very expensive) fancy space telescopes that cost tens of billions then the cost of a failed launch is very, very high. But if you're launching a bunch of food and you can lob another shot next week if it fails, and everything else is cheap enough, it might someday make sense.
Before you ask me if I'm crazy, please understand that airplanes do exactly this; you have to get your engines overhauled every few thousand hours and I'm sure there are inspections, but they don't tear the plane down and rebuild it after every flight. Once systems get reliable enough, that's a thing.
>Thanks to its reusable, low-cost Falcon 9 rocket,
Is the Falcon 9 really low-cost or maybe is it that NASA and the American government is indirectly subsidizing the company by overpaying for their launch contracts?
Rocket technology hasn't really changed in decades. Reusability is not a panacea. It increases complexity, decreases safety and much of the cost savings are mitigated by the fact that you have to carry extra fuel for the return back (thereby cutting into the amount of payload you can carry). The space shuttle was reusable and yet, it is generally seen as a disappointment (and I don't believe for a second SpaceX engineers are better than NASA engineers).
> There just aren't that many big payloads worth launching. About once a year, somebody buys a Falcon Heavy launch, and once or twice a year. China launches a Long March 5.
Are you certain it's because there's no big payloads worth launching, and not because there's no big payloads worth launching *at the price*? Small payloads have become financially accessible but big ones are still very, very expensive, because the cheap modern rockets aren't an option.
> But if they had reusability, they might have been able to fly it more often, thus helping make it cheaper on average to fly.
This is true, but the issue is that there just isnt the need for it really. Very, very few missions actually require a SHLV. There just arent enough payloads atm, and that probably wouldnt change a ton even if the rocket was cheaper
> SpaceX has to supply an awful lot of equipment, and they have to do an awful lot of refurbishment.
Right, they've already stated that with the current rocket there's no economical way to recover the second stage, which aren't cheap, and so far nobody knows how many launches the cores will be good for. Also the infrastructure for supporting the recovery efforts, including the drone ships and their operations, can't be cheap. I expect the SpaceX re-use project will probably be in the red economically for years before it starts paying off it's setup costs.
> When your rocket engine is constructed by the the best TIG welders you can find carefully fitting Inconel parts together... it feels a waste to see that work crash and burn
Note that the rocket engines used by SLS (RS-25, and to a lesser extent the solid rocket boosters) were explicitly designed for reuse, as part of the Space Shuttle program; all the way back in the 1970s.
The four RS-25 engines that Artemis 1 dumped in the ocean had previously flown on Space Shuttles. IIRC they first flew in 1999 (although Shuttles only used 3 engines).
> If your booster is as disposable as a paper cup, with new ones flying off the assembly line faster than you could hope to rework anything, perhaps either the materials or the fuel are wasted but not so much work is wasted.
Also note that the marginal cost of an SLS launch is 4.5 billion dollars. That doesn't include all the one-off costs, like R&D; certification; restarting production lines; etc. Famously, it cost over a billion dollars to restart the RS-25 production line (so they can replace those engines being dumped in the ocean); despite claiming that the use of existing tech would save money!
In fact, refurbishing & upgrading those existing Shuttle engines cost more than producing brand-new RS-25s. Again, it was claimed that reusing the existing Shuttle engines would save money...
Despite the cost of these assembly lines, SLS rockets aren't "flying off" them. The (few) scheduled Artemis launches are separated by years.
What you've just said is the equivalent of someone witnessing a Ferrari crash into a tree and destroy itself, and saying 'Ouch, that's an expensive tank of fuel he's just wasted'.
In fact the costs of fuel for these things are trivially small, basically inconsequential, compared to the cost of the things that are using the fuel - the rocket and the cruise stage. You don't get them back, they're single use, expended as part of the mission, and they're expensive.
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