Second Falcon Heavy launch successful, 3/3 on the landings

[Muzjhath]

That's great and all but all this means just cheaper satellites. We're not changing the game, just paying less to do the same things.

Paying less for the same things is what put the US ahead of the Soviet during the cold war after the first decade, decade and a half.
Making things cheaper is as important as cutting edge development and research. As if you don't get things cheap no one can afford to use them, not even the developers.

[Skroe]

How are SpaceX economics @Skroe? They can't be getting a lot of out of regular launches like this, yet they are spending millions if not billions on both Starlink and SS/SH simultaneously - where are they getting it all from?

I know this isn't about Tesla but most of this problems where of his own making. That said, I think Tesla will float belly up this year, especially as downturn begins to set in. Oh well.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/7/1...tion-investors
https://seekingalpha.com/article/422...cex-profitable
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatsp.../#3c31a65dbde9
https://www.slideshare.net/carlesdeb...ap-for-space-x

SpaceX has a market valuation of around $28 billion last year and will be $32 billion this year. It has annual revenues of $2.5 billion against $1.7 billion in operating expenditures and $400 milion in capital expenditures. This leads to profits of about $340 million a year, of which SpaceX invests 80% back into R&D, or $270 million.

This only tells part of the story though because funding recieved under DoD and NASA contracts are not tallied into these totals due to how the funds are released.

The Operating Margins of the Falcon 9 are amazing though, at 74%, due to reusability. For a $62 million Falcon 9 launch, they're making about $19 million in profit on the first flight of one built, then about $46 million for every launch after the first. This is because the only thing they have to rebuild is the second stage, which cost $7 million.

In short, because of reusability, the more flights the same rocket does, the more profitable every launch gets.

The short of it is, SpaceX is a titan in a small industry. With about 20 launches a year, it's a testament to the axiom that it's easier to get richer selling a lot of small things cheaply than a few big things expensivley. SpaceX is killing the competition, but the global need for annual space launches is limited. Even if SpaceX, with all of its technology, didn't invest a cent into R&D, it's profits would still be "just" about $340 million a year.

Does this mean SpaceX can sustain itself and grow its business indefinetly? Absolutely. It's not going anywhere and its business is much more profitable than ULA, which is sustained soley by government contracts. So long as there is launch needs, it will be fine. But it's a far cry form the next Boeing, which produces hundreds of $100-$250 million aircraft every year and sees $100 billion in annual revenues.

One of the key components to mention here is that SpaceX's rockets have been pretty cheap to develop. The entire Falcon 9 development cost, including landing, has come to about $1.4 billion since 2005. The entire Falcon Heavy modification of the Falcon 9 technology base has cost $500 million. The two capsule programs - Dragon 1 and Dragon 2 - has come to about $900 million and $1.5 billion respectively.

That sounds like a lot, but it's nothing. The Boeing Starliner - the competitor to Dragon 2 - cost $4.2 billion to develop. The Orion capsule (albeit a more sophisticated vehicle than both) has cost about $16 billion since 2005. The Space Launch System whose first version is "just" 20 tons more capable than a Falcon Heavy, has cost Taxpayers $16 billion (which means Orion + SLS = a $30 billion program since 2005). Scrapped cost on various systems that existed around the Orion and SLS programs add another $20 billion to that cost to a whopping $50 billion since 2005.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019...still-distant/

In short, SpaceX is lean, but a big part of that is that it aims to be profitable in an industry with narrow profit margins in general, unless you're Boeing, Lockheed, ULA or Airannespace, and garanteed a fat payday from the US government.

SpaceX for its part, is not immune to this. What is "paying the bills" is DoD National Security launches. It had to compete for them, but they can charge a premium of $90 million per launch to US taxpayers for it (the difference is largely due to mission requirements and payload insurance... yes that's a thing).

Musk's problems with Tesla have overshadowed that, in terms of his interest level and priorities, Telsa is his hobby, SpaceX is his job. SpaceX's advanced technology give it a massive advantage over its market competition in a rather simple market, namely when it comes to launch costs which matters above all. By contrast Tesla, despite it's impressive performance record, it's competing for a vast where it isn't remotely the most affordable option and its draw is mostly its all electric capability and brand recognition. I think Elon Musk would be having as hard a time versus Tesla if SpaceX were instead 'AirX' and building competitors to the 737. SpaceX is successful because it is pretty much perfectly fit a market need, that was torn between high costs of ULA launches and increasingly unreliable Russian launches.

[Vakna]

Depends on the rocket and the destination.

One's going to Geostationary Transfer Orbits or to LEO are discarded as space junk and may eventually decay depending on the orbit.

Others, when used on interplanetary missions, keep coasting along into the void unguided.

For example, when the New Horizons probe was nearing Pluto back in 2015, its Star 48B upper stage, which had long since detached, actually crossed Pluto's orbit first, ahead of the probe, though 200 million kilometers away from the planet. To actually reach Pluto in a flyby, New Horizons had to do a series of course correction burns that the Star 48B couldn't do. The Star 45B will continue to travel unguided through space for probably millions until it comes in contact with a planetary body, an asteroid, or a star.

Another example, about 20 years ago, astronomers thought they had spotted a new Near Earth asteroid. It was actually a S-IVB upper stage of a Saturn V, used as part of Apollo 12. It was discarded after the translunar injection burn and in a complex and unstable Earth-sun cyclical orbit. There was considerable excitement for a moment because it would have been surprising that Earth's Sun-Moon relationship could keep an asteroid or even a tiny moon in a stable orbit for long periods of time. When it turned out to be space junk in an unstable orbit, it moved from exciting to interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J002E3

Are SpaceX looking into a solution for this? Doesn't seem feasible long term to keep leaving upper stage rockets up there. Seems like the kind of thing they would be doing also given their recover as much as possible mantra. Though I don't expect actually recovering an upper stage to be possible any time soon, I don't think leaving it up there is good either.

[Osmeric]

They successfully recovered both payload fairing halves too, and are going to reuse them.

[Skroe]

Are SpaceX looking into a solution for this? Doesn't seem feasible long term to keep leaving upper stage rockets up there. Seems like the kind of thing they would be doing also given their recover as much as possible mantra. Though I don't expect actually recovering an upper stage to be possible any time soon, I don't think leaving it up there is good either.

They considered it. Landing the upper stage would have required it to carry more fuel for the return trip (it would have to stop burning detach from it's payload, flip, and do a reverse burn), and would only be useful for certain types of orbits. Unlike landing legs on the first stage (which is an approach that is theoretically possible for the upper stage too), landing the second stage would have probably involved some kind of inflatable structure to basically turn it into a kind of glider. Since the real money is in Geostationary Transfer Orbit launches, and not LEO, and a second stage would need to be prohibitively big to return to earth for a mission of that nature (mass penalty), the entire idea was abandoned. Instead, they focused on making the second stage as cheap as possible. At $7 million, it's one quarter the price of it's competitor, the more capable Centaur upper stage used on the Atlas V, which costs $30 million.

One of the driving motivations behind the entire Starship + Superheavy approach is to basically sidestep this by having a fully reusable two stage to orbit vehicle, because in this new model, the upper stage is integral to the payload carrying vessel. In that way, Starship is almost more like the Space Shuttle than it is the Falcon 9 upper stage.

As a whole though, SpaceX is basically done with the entire Falcon 9 family of technologies and is investing fully in Starship+Superheavy development now.




Being fully reusable, it'll allow the US to put very, very, very big things into orbit.

[Voidwielder]

So how does the future look like @Skroe, who lives, who dies? There will F9, Vulcan, OmegAaaaaaa, SLS - a bit crowded for medum-heavy lift market?

It'd be deeply sad and ironic if in 15 years SpaceX is a victim of the revolution and change it caused.

[Beazy]

Check this shit out. Look at that fire. Looks like Ragnarok.

https://i.redd.it/3821uuynuvr21.jpg

One day, I will see one of these in the flesh.

[Masark]

So how does the future look like @Skroe, who lives, who dies? There will F9, Vulcan, OmegAaaaaaa, SLS - a bit crowded for medum-heavy lift market?

It'd be deeply sad and ironic if in 15 years SpaceX is a victim of the revolution and change it caused.

You forgot about New Glenn.

Skroe has previously opined that Vulcan is DOA. Its lack of any kind of reusability makes it uncompetitive and obsolete.

[Skroe]

So how does the future look like @Skroe, who lives, who dies? There will F9, Vulcan, OmegAaaaaaa, SLS - a bit crowded for medum-heavy lift market?

It'd be deeply sad and ironic if in 15 years SpaceX is a victim of the revolution and change it caused.

Falcon 9 will eventually be replaced by a new rocket that is derived from Starship technologies. SpaceX says Starship will replace everything. Due to its size and launch costs, I doubt it. They'd be ceding their dominance of the commercial and government medium lift launch market, which pays their bills. It be like saying "we're not going to fly C-130s anymore, because we're only flying C-5 Galaxy's now". Yeah the C-5 Galaxy is a beast that is irreplacable for some tasks, but for more routine things, the C-130 is ideal, which is why it'll probably fly 100 years before it is fully replaced.

So I'd anticipate something like the Falcon 9, but with Raptor Engines instead of of Merlin 1-Ds, and with internal tooling that is common to Starship. Fact is, there is a huge market right now for 11 ton to 24 ton launches (and most of that is 11 tons to 15 tons), and no market yet for regular 100+ ton launches.

Vulcan may fly a few time, but it's a dead end and so is ULA as we know it. It's partial reusability - its engine - will arrive one day. In truth, it's just a replacement for the first stage of the Atlas V because of the lack of RD-180 engines, and ULA admitting they don't want to spend money to be more than a government-subsidized launch company. They've figured out that even with the Falcon 9, the US government will (wisely) want two independent ways to access space in case on rocket gets grounded, and that ULA's track record with the government will assure them that second spot, even if SpaceX is dominant.

Basically their business plan is "second place by default".

The thing is, I think it's a con job by the board on investors and US taxpayers. Because Blue Origin with the New Glenn, or OmegA from Northrop, will both be cheaper and more capable than the Vulcan-Centaur, which is a frankenstein's monster of a rocket.

I'd expect ULA to exit the first stage market next decade and focus on upper stages and subcontracting. Maybe even Space Tug like things. But they fucked themselves by relying on the Atlas V without innovation for so long.

OmegA will work out, because Northrop just dropped a lot of money for Orbital ATK specifically to get in on launch services. So it will fly. The US government also has a strategic interest in making sure Northrop (ATK) stays in the solid rocket fuel business. OmegA is cheap too. Not Falcon 9 cheap, but cheap. It won't be reusable, but the first stage, which is basically a modified Spce Shuttle SRB design, are super easy (once you know how) and comparatively cheap to build.

Blue Origin... we'll see. I think they'll do stuff. They're so low key it's hard to say. Their BE-4 is evidently really good. But a lot of everything else is hype compared to SpaceX. Blue Origin _is_ doing the right thing by developing its own technology base, like SpaceX did, in order to sustain business / flight operations in an enduring manner and not be dependent on licensed or bought hardware. They are basically replicating Space's Bottom-up approach, starting with engines, then going to ever bigger rockets, that can do more. The difference is, SpaceX had no money and had to fly while doing it, in order to finance further development of its technological roadmap, while Blue Origin has Jeff Bezos' ATM Card and hasn't had to fly anything.

I think Blue Origin will thrive and be SpaceX's most legitimate successor. The question is really "when", because it's 2020, and they're late.

Which brings us to the SLS.

The SLS will fly and it will offer unparalleled capability. It will fly because it is politically protected and too many stakeholders are invested. It will also fly before Starship.

The question is, will it fly after Starship?

That's a tough one, and a lot of it has to do with the Grim Reaper. What do I mean by that? In the late 1960s and 1970s, the largest reason NASA didn't go to Mars by the early 1980s, fly NERVA and do a big post-Apollo program was because powerful Senators and Congressman who protected NASA from Nixonian Republicans and New Deal Democrats (who didn't love space spending) got old and died or left office and died within a few years of each other.

Many of the SLS's most significant defenders are also Septugenarians now. They'll be Octegenarians by the time the most capable SLS appears, the Block II.

I could see the SLS flying as a Block IB, and an improved Block IB, until the late 2020s when Starship or something else commercial replaces it. I don't see Block II happening anymore. The work on the upper-stage that makes Block II what it is has been paused, and the work on the new boosters hasn't even begun (and would need to in the next 2 years). This will be painful for Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, which will see a lot of really excellent space sector jobs lost. But it'll be good for NASA in the long term, as it will allow them to focus on payloads, and buy launch as a service from providers. They'll be able to do more within their budget by not having to pay for the SLS.

As for other Space programs, the Russian Space program is basically dying. It will fly Soyuzs and Protons on mostly government missions to show the flag. It will keep talking about new space vehicles and stations it'll never actually build. But it's going to be doing nothing of note.

China will be doing its own thing, as always.

In Europe, the Arianne 5 is being retired, and the Arianne 6, which will eventually have landing capability, will allow it to capture a segement of the market - mostly European and Arab - to keep those Eurospace jobs in tact, with help from a friendly EU subsidy. But much as it is now, Arianespace will be a 3rd place participant in a two player market.

Fact is, America and China launch more than anybody, both commercially and for government.

So yeah SpaceX's future is very bright. But until the entire space launch sector becomes far far far larger, it'll never be a company with $50 billion in annual revenues. Space is important, but 20 launches a year at $60 million just produces a far smaller number than millions upon millions of iPhones at $750 to $1000.

So kids, if you want to get rich, invent something small that everyone can buy, not something big and expensive, that only a few companies and governments can.

- - - Updated - - -

You forgot about New Glenn.

Skroe has previously opined that Vulcan is DOA. Its lack of any kind of reusability makes it uncompetitive and obsolete.

Vulcan is basically a troll with a lot of propaganda.




Let me translate what you're seeing.

-The two BE-4s aren't enough to get it off the ground, and the core stage isn't large enough, so they had to strap 6 solid rocket boosters (from another space vehicle on) to even get it off the ground. They are not reusable.

- The Centaur upper stage is the exact same as the one that's been flying for decades, so no new money spent there. Still, at $30 million for it, it's nearly as expensive as the entire production costs of a Falcon 9 rocket. However what is actually pictured here, despite being labeled Centaur, is ACES, the proposed Centaur replacement. ACES is not being funded.

-Stars and Stripes paint job as +20% to hooking congressional suckers to pay for this thing.


Reusability. Will happen one day. So they say. Like the flying car. In truth, will never be paid for by ULA. It'll be cheaper for them to just keep charging the government to build new engines rather than develop the entire SMART reuse.



Vulcan is a really bad rocket and ULA is a really bad company.

[Endus]

Being fully reusable, it'll allow the US to put very, very, very big things into orbit.

Long-term, things get even more exciting, since once SpaceX gets this stuff worked out and in production, they can refocus.

This stuff is great for manned flights, for exploratory missions to the Moon and Mars, and for scientific exploration/testing. We can lift a bunch more, and that's great. But the next big step, after this one, will be establishing a permanent foothold. And I don't mean upgrading the ISS. I mean a proper space station.

The amount of mass required is insane; you're talking about a framework that has to support dozens if not hundreds to thousands of people, in a permanent sense, which means you don't want to be shipping oxygen and food and such from the ground, not after you get it established. It's just too expensive to justify doing so; that's why we've never made the effort.

There is a way around this, though. We can refine and process ore to produce metals in situ. We don't have a source, but with these rockets, we can get it.

You fly some engines with drill attachments on the nose out to an asteroid. You'd need a bunch for attitude control and the like, and possibly a bunch for the main thrust vector. With the tech SpaceX is showing, we don't need to man any of this. We fly them out, they attach themselves to the rock, and then you nudge it back to Earth space. It's probably easiest to grab a near-Earth object, but this also lets us clean up our planet's orbit, which is a secondary benefit. Once it's in a stable orbit (not terribly close; it doesn't need to be in a nearby orbit, just somewhere in the range between here and the Moon), you move the industrial systems in, mine it to pieces, refine it in space, and transport from that site to the build site costs absolute peanuts; you need to nudge it in the right direction, and unless you're in a rush, you can let it drift there at whatever speed is desirable.

If you need to refuel the boosters, we could pretty easily do so, mid-flight.

Once we can produce literally tons of metal structural components in orbit without lifting it, building massive orbital frameworks becomes FAR less expensive. There's a significant investment to GET there, and it's an investment with a long-term payoff (years), but the long-term gains are immense. This is why proposals for this are already being made.

[Osmeric]

Starship should be cheap enough that space disposal of spent nuclear fuel becomes thinkable.

[Skroe]

Long-term, things get even more exciting, since once SpaceX gets this stuff worked out and in production, they can refocus.

This stuff is great for manned flights, for exploratory missions to the Moon and Mars, and for scientific exploration/testing. We can lift a bunch more, and that's great. But the next big step, after this one, will be establishing a permanent foothold. And I don't mean upgrading the ISS. I mean a proper space station.

The amount of mass required is insane; you're talking about a framework that has to support dozens if not hundreds to thousands of people, in a permanent sense, which means you don't want to be shipping oxygen and food and such from the ground, not after you get it established. It's just too expensive to justify doing so; that's why we've never made the effort.

There is a way around this, though. We can refine and process ore to produce metals in situ. We don't have a source, but with these rockets, we can get it.

You fly some engines with drill attachments on the nose out to an asteroid. You'd need a bunch for attitude control and the like, and possibly a bunch for the main thrust vector. With the tech SpaceX is showing, we don't need to man any of this. We fly them out, they attach themselves to the rock, and then you nudge it back to Earth space. It's probably easiest to grab a near-Earth object, but this also lets us clean up our planet's orbit, which is a secondary benefit. Once it's in a stable orbit (not terribly close; it doesn't need to be in a nearby orbit, just somewhere in the range between here and the Moon), you move the industrial systems in, mine it to pieces, refine it in space, and transport from that site to the build site costs absolute peanuts; you need to nudge it in the right direction, and unless you're in a rush, you can let it drift there at whatever speed is desirable.

If you need to refuel the boosters, we could pretty easily do so, mid-flight.

Once we can produce literally tons of metal structural components in orbit without lifting it, building massive orbital frameworks becomes FAR less expensive. There's a significant investment to GET there, and it's an investment with a long-term payoff (years), but the long-term gains are immense. This is why proposals for this are already being made.

For orbital operations, absolutely. And for the Moon, or even places like Ganymede with low gravity and negligible atmosphere. Orbital fabrication would be reasonable to get to the surface.

For Mars surface infrastructure creation though, it would be it's own thing, because landing big things on Mars is hard. We'd have to build an entire surface-based industrial infrastructure to support expanding whatever we wanted to do there.

A good starting place for all of this though is to look at the US Amundsen-Scott base at the South Pole. The modern one, that opened in the last 10 years. It replaced a military-built one form the 1970s that was much smaller and more austere. And before that, nobody visited the South Pole in 50 years after the first expedition.

The base there now looks very much like what a mature base on the Mars, Moon or in orbit would look like. It's winter population is a few dozen people, but it can sustain several hundred during the summer. It was built through a combination of long duration vehicles covoys from McMurdo and landings by C-17s and C-130s. Everything had to be brought there. Nothing was fabricated there. But they can now fabricate things there, and could have, if they wanted to make a colony rather than a science lab, built fabrication facilities.

In terms of personel size, facility space, mass and complexity, the modern base is an excellent model. Considering the similarity between C-130s, C-5s and C-17s maximum capacity to the capacity of certain launch vehicles, it is worth considering how many flights of those would have been needed to build the base in leiu of any over-land convoys (which actually had much of the materials and vehicles required to do the job). It'd be considerable.

I see a "Soul Pole Base"-sized facility as something of a quantifiable goal for US-Canadian-EU space exploration this century. The goal should be something like "by 2100, we want to have a base on Mars of the rough dimension, manning and size as the one in the South Pole". That would drive clear requirements for what types of launch vehicles would be needed, and what types of technologies would be needed.

[Masark]

So I'd anticipate something like the Falcon 9, but with Raptor Engines instead of of Merlin 1-Ds, and with internal tooling that is common to Starship. Fact is, there is a huge market right now for 11 ton to 24 ton launches (and most of that is 11 tons to 15 tons), and no market yet for regular 100+ ton launches.

SpaceX's plan regarding Starship appears to be super ride sharing. Rather than do ten 11-tonne launches, they want to combine those into a single 110t launch. Basically going bigger on what they're going to be doing with the STP-2 launch, having enough in-space delta-v capability to hopscotch around to an arbitrary number of different orbits, dropping off satellites as they go before coming back down to do it again, allowing them to have complete soup to nuts reusability (and the presumed cost savings thereof) rather than throwing away second stages.

They think they're building an airliner rather than using a swarm of Cessnas.

[Skroe]

SpaceX's plan regarding Starship appears to be super ride sharing. Rather than do ten 11-tonne launches, they want to combine those into a single 110t launch. Basically going bigger on what they're going to be doing with the STP-2 launch, having enough in-space delta-v capability to hopscotch around to an arbitrary number of different orbits, dropping off satellites as they go before coming back down to do it again, allowing them to have complete soup to nuts reusability (and the presumed cost savings thereof) rather than throwing away second stages.

They think they're building an airliner rather than using a swarm of Cessna.

Yep. And the problem with that model is that at current launch market requirements, they'd launch twice a year.

I mean, SpaceX isn't a stupid company by any means, so I'm sure they know what they're doing with regards to their business model. Put pulling on my analogy earlier, right now they're basically Boeing, and Falcon 9 is their 737, which is the money maker that fulfills the most demanded market segement. They're basically saying "were not going to build 737s anymore, we're just going to build 747s, and fly everybody from 4 flights of 737s on one flight of the 747".

The problem is for airlines, the market demanded the exact opposite, and as a result the 747 is basically irrelevant to Boeing as a product nowdays, and Boeing's business became far more profitable selling a lot of 737s rather than a few 747s.

Space flight is of course, different than airlines, but it is not in that the airline/launch customer will buy according to their "payload need". A regional airline company won't buy a 747, and a company launching just medium mass payloads may find it overall cheaper to buy from someone selling a rocket at their needed payload, rather than "ride sharing" on Starship.

Or to put this more directly, for Starship ridesharing to be market competitive, it would have to be a cheaper option than buying from Northrop on an OmegA or Blue Origin on a NewGlenn. While NewGlenn is a big rocket, OmegA, while not reusable, is lean enough to potentially be be "cheap enough" to supersede re-usability for low-medium mass payloads.

The good news for SpaceX is with the rapidly increasing importance of Space due to New Cold War concerns, they'll have at their interest the customer of last resort, Uncle Sam, if nothing else. Building Space Based Missile defense or that kind of thing is going to be lavishly expensive and require hundreds of launches.

[PACOX]

SpaceX's plan regarding Starship appears to be super ride sharing. Rather than do ten 11-tonne launches, they want to combine those into a single 110t launch. Basically going bigger on what they're going to be doing with the STP-2 launch, having enough in-space delta-v capability to hopscotch around to an arbitrary number of different orbits, dropping off satellites as they go before coming back down to do it again, allowing them to have complete soup to nuts reusability (and the presumed cost savings thereof) rather than throwing away second stages.

They think they're building an airliner rather than using a swarm of Cessnas.

So an attempt at a cost effective shuttle? That model works if they are actually putting it to use. I'm skeptical in that it leaves them with the possibility of being undercut but a dedicated vehicle/not enough demand.

looks like Skroe put it way better than me.

[Easo]

I find it amazing that the second attempt was already delivering real payload to space.
P.S.
Someone in my local news comments pointed out that this is a nice... gift... to Russia in Cosmonautics Day xD

[Independent voter]

https://giant.gfycat.com/BigAdorableDikkops.webm


Looks like something out of a science fiction movie.