About bloody time !
I guess we won't see much of a price drop with these early re-launches. I presume they've used all these months of having these supposedly ready-to-fly rockets to give them extra-careful checks to make sure they really can be re-used. But if, not too much further down the line, prices don't start to fall rather sharply, then the whole thing will have been a waste of time.
Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. plans to launch a reused rocket for the first time in the coming weeks, a key step in bringing down space-travel costs for customers and future missions. SpaceX will take to the skies with a reusable rocket before the end of this month, Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and chief operating officer, said on a panel at Satellite 2017, an industry conference in Washington.
“SpaceX has been working on reusability since the get go,” Shotwell said Wednesday. “In order to make that work, you need to inspect it and make sure it is ready to fly again. Once we get really good at that, there will be downward pressure on price.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-08/spacex-reflying-rocket-this-month-in-step-toward-cheap-launches
Not a complete waste of time. If nothing else, SpaceX have set a precedent for the naming of craft in the style of Iain M Banks' Culture vessels.
ReplyDeleteAdmittedly it's probably a fairly expensive way to start a slightly silly nomenclature...
I'd be surprised if prices don't fall. Even a brand new booster probably has to go through a thorough inspection. You would think thorough inspection plus repairs would be cheaper than thorough inspection plus new booster.
ReplyDeleteI have high hopes. However, when pushing rocket technology, anything that breaks tends to break spectacularly.
ReplyDeleteI certainly agree that they should/probably are being extra special careful on their inspections of the returned stages, and will likely be equally so on the returned reused stages.
Aleksander Suchanowski - what current technology is better than a chemical rocket for getting out of a chuffing great gravity well?
ReplyDeleteYou can accuse Elon Musk of a lot of things but I'm not sure "lack of imagination" is one of them.
Call me... concerned. I definitely don't expect to see hundreds of tourists flying on the equivalent of a budget airlines rocket this year. It makes a lot of sense that in the early days they'll have to spend a lot of extra time identifying failure points and how to address them in order to re-use them safely. So initially, sure, this won't save much in the way of time, labour, or money.
ReplyDeleteBut ultimately, the point of re-usability is that the preparations should be something close to refuelling the rocket and launching the damn thing. If the procedure actually stays closer to doing a major overhaul of the rocket, then there's not much point in re-usability : you may as well have built a new one anyway.
What worries me is that we've seen a lot of promises about what a good state the returned first stages are in, but a strange reticence to actually fly them. I would have thought that would be something you'd want to do as soon as possible, to prove to investors that the technology is getting somewhere. Sure, the first time it won't be the mega-savings of the hype, but I'd want to demonstrate to people that the goal is becoming more achievable.
Rhys Taylor I bet it makes it tough to try to make progress because every launch has a real payload. They've probably been going over the rocket with a fine tooth comb since it landed to try to make sure it will be safe. Or maybe they were waiting for the lowest risk payload, the one that would cost the least if it failed. If they blow it with a reuseable rocket they might have a hard time getting new contracts and they could face increased insurance premiums. It does seem like they've been sitting on it a while but with so much risk involved I guess I could see reasons why they would do that.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor, I believe SpaceX is already cost competitive with the other current players, and any cost advantage they eventually bring by reusing stages will improve that advantage.
ReplyDeleteI believe their main focus right now must be on improving their launch cadence and clearing their backlog. Adding new technology can only work against that plan.
I suspect that it is their customers that are reluctant to agree to have their payloads launched on a reused stage. They're already getting a great deal on an already somewhat precarious platform, why take the risk? Although obviously not every customer thinks so!
At this stage I'd guess that they might aspire to eventually cut costs by $25M with the current design. IIRC, a new first stage costs roughly $60M, so an average of one re-use per stage with $10M rehab (I am still guessing here) is essentially getting two first stages for $70M, or $35M per stage.
Whatever the actual specifics, once they achieve a particular reusability rate and cost, they would then work to improve those numbers over time.