It is really interesting to see that this is a very 'ordinary' commercial geostationary launch customer, and not a government funded research satellite. This is oversimplified, but traditionally, rockets that are in beta test mode are tested like:
1) static pad tests/firings of engines
2) all-up launch of the full rocket, carrying a boilerplate satellite with some instrumentation, maybe some cubesats or low cost small R&D satellites tagging along
3) one or two launches of government science payloads, or government-funded weather satellites, something like that
Not contradicting anything you've said seeing as the first few launches of the falcon 9 followed your rough outline, but SES was SpaceX's first GTO launch so they've clearly got an appetite for a bit of risk.
Also I read elsewhere that SES is in a "unique" situation here.
They are still building up their fleet of satellites, so if they lose one now it's not like it is some kind of company ending setback or will allow a competitor to launch ahead of them.
I guess its ok for SES as they say the insurance premiums didn't go up at all for using the reusable rocket. So they are just saving money with the same risk for SES in both cases.
I think the only reason it would make sense to do (3) before (4) is that the government paid for your development and wants to be the first to use it. Because they're more typically unique government payloads are typically much more expensive to lose in the case of a failure than another couple of commsats going into a constellation.
There is a bigger question which was asked in the Economist this week (http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-25-08/spa...), which is can SpaceX create a big enough market where they can realize the savings of reusability? Right now satellites cost more than the price of the rocket, so if you shave off $10 million on a launch that's pretty much a drop in the bucket compared to the overall price.
This isn't to take anything away from SpaceX. It's absolutely amazing what they've done. I only hope that they can open up the market enough for things like asteroid mining and space tourism.
Mansa Musa can be considered the wealthiest man in history. On a pilgrimage to Mecca he gave gold to the poor everywhere along the way and traded great values of it too. He inadvertently destroyed many economies for a long time with the influx of capital.
Asteroid mining is going to do much the same thing, but the changes will be permanent.
It's not a matter of "if" but "when". Lots of sophisticated technology needs to be developed and the up-front cost is going to be in the billions... but once it's done and regular, lots of economies for materials are going to be shattered.
Satellite programs cost so much _because_ rockets cost so much. You can't justify putting a cheap satellite on an expensive rocket, but as the launch cost goes down, you get to being able to launch cheaper and cheaper satellites.
If SpaceX fails, someone else will succeed. The cat is out of the bag.
Building many identical satellites in an assembly-line like fashion cuts down on costs significantly. Large geostationary satellites are currently based on standard buses (like the Boeing 702 and its variants), but each satellite is generally a bespoke product. Larger quantities of the same thing like the second generation Iridium network and the o3b MEO satellites are very interesting from a per-unit cost perspective.
Right. It definitely looks like we could be in for a shakeup in the industry. The question still remains though; what is the total size of the market for all of those satellites? How many could we place in MEO/GEO/GSO before the market is completely saturated? I honestly have no idea. I would think the LEO satellite market will eventually be dominated by less powerful vehicles, although if SpaceX can survive long enough to open up other markets (like Mars tourism and mining), maybe those smaller rockets get cannibalized by payloads being co-launched on larger vehicles.
Reduced launch costs can compel emergence of entirely new kind of customers. Quite like the relatively affordable New England minicomputers of 1970s propelled whole new markets, branches of CS and eventual personal computing revolution.
The US gov't is working with contractors to make use of cubesats built from commercial off the shelf products to be able to produce cheap constellations of satellites for a fraction of the cost (hundreds of thousands per satellite instead of hundreds of millions) of what they've been paying. These satellites also will have significantly shorter lifespans (1-2 years) so they'll need more frequent launches to replenish the fleets, but the advantage is they can keep upgrading with the latest technology without being locked into a 10 or 20 year old machine. SpaceX dropping the cost of launches fits right into this.
If you can lower the cost for launching, you should also open up the market for cheaper satellites. Possibly not built the same rigorous way that a 100M satellite goes through.
This should also put pressure on the satellite manufacturers to lower costs.
We've gone from "holy ish, sci-fi reusable rockets and we's living la vita future!" to qualified approval..?
No. No. This is not about satellites. This is about the primary cost component for transporting a colony to Mars. And it's already destroying the competition pricewise, and this will widen that gap enormously.
Did the Spanish Govt say, well, that's nice and all, but spices are still pretty pricey? Maybe we don't go back? No. They didn't. They said, "Awesome, lock that ish down. We want a monopoly. And bring us more funny trinkets to show off to our landlocked friends to make us giggle and feel superior."
Previous generations remember where they were for the Moon landing, just as I'll always remember where I was for the first successful Falcon 9 first stage return.
That is the essential question, of course assuming this flight goes off without a hitch they will have new data about what it took to this this booster back to flight ready status, and then they can see what they did that they could do better, what tools they should make to improve efficiency and what tweaks to the design will lower the time to cycle it through.
There are interesting precedents in the tooling jigs that Thiokol built to refurbish SRBs and the Rockwell folks used to do tile repair for the Shuttle.
When the first booster was recovered, Elon said something along the line of that they're a bit like the dog that chases a car and now they've caught one they have to figure out what to do with it. That's what's great about Elon, he just tells it like it is. I'm sure they did have some plans for what to do, but as you say it's a whole new process they need to do a lot of work on improving.
CRS-8 was launched on the 8th of April this year, so given that the launch of SES-10 is slated for Q4 2016, that means there's like, 6/7/8 months for the turnaround.
But I'm hopeful that we'll see an assembly line of rockets landing, being inspected, and being launched, sometime in the future :)
The delay between landing and relaunch has less to do with refurb on this particular booster, than with the series of tests that they're doing on other returned boosters to convince both the customers and their insurance companies that they generally come back in re-flyable condition, which have been happening on and off for months. Among other things, a different booster has been put through at least three full-length test-fires at their proving ground in Texas.
It isn't clear how much refurb will be required generally, beyond replacing some of the surface thermal protection that came back visibly dinged up. (Well, at this point, SpaceX knows what it took to refurbish one, but I'm not aware of any public statements about it yet.) But they're certainly acting like the propulsion systems don't need much -- the very first returned booster (the one now on permanent display outside the SpaceX factory) was re-fired on the launch pad within weeks of return, without having ever left the Cape, just to prove that they could.
They would have launched sooner, but public opinion is swayed too much by failure. Engineers and money men don't really care, failure is interesting and valuable. Unfortunately, so is public opinion and support... and every perceived failure has a million armchair rocket scientists shitting on SpaceX because people loove to do that sort of thing... so they have to be unduly careful about it.
If that would be the case, SpaceX wouldn't tweet explosion videos on every failure or have live streams of their launches. They would take the approach of Blue Origin that only publishes carefully edited marketing footage where everything always seems to go perfectly.
This is really not about public opinion. SES insisted a lot with SpaceX to get the first re-used booster at a considerable discount. They were also the very first customer to fly on SpaceX.
The delay in launching it comes from two reasons: a) because they had to do quite a lot of extra testing on the recovered booster to certify it again for flight and b) because SpaceX is actually overloaded with launches as they have the most cramped launch schedule of any other company.
Considering the very deep nature of the three-way relationship between a commercial satellite customer (SES), a launch vendor (SpaceX) and an insurer (many companies), I wonder if they negotiated an agreement to essentially embed a thoroughly vetted employee of the insurance company inside SpaceX, working alongside and observing the team that is doing the returned rocket testing and qualifications, teardowns, test firings, etc. I would not be surprised if this is the case.
The first rocket launch cost a total of $63 million or so, IIRC. This one, I've read, is being done for about $15-20 million less. Still tens of millions of dollars, but quite a bit of savings, especially for the first time SpaceX has done this (considering the risk involved).
Even if they saved money on this one particular booster the costs of the technology and all the landing attempts/ successful landings will probably mean it takes some time to come out ahead overall.
I think I've read that the cost of an empty Falcon 9 first stage is somewhere $10 million. They would have to spend a lot on inspections in order to not save a lot of money. IMHO, a lot of the skepticism I've previously read about SpaceX's reusability program is just inherited from the Space Shuttle program. I.e. ""if the US government can't do it, how can a small-ish private company do it"?
When SpaceX and SES were negotiating in press releases, SpaceX said that eventually they'd offer a 30% discount for a re-used first stage. That's $20mm. The first stage has to cost significantly more than that.
So knowing nothing about this subject, why do they pursue landing rockets, or at least landing them vertically? It seems like the hardest possible way to handle this problem, as opposed to for example what the shuttles did. Can anyone explain the reasoning behind this?
The experience of the Shuttle program demonstrated that taking off like a rocket and landing like a plane has a lot of problems that make it not as great as you might think. The wings, heat shield, etc are all pretty heavy - notice that the shuttle required two whole extra rockets and a disposable fuel tank to make it to orbit - and the heat shield required for landing like a plane turned out to be a huge problem (see: The Columbia Disaster).
Plus, it turns out that landing a rocket vertically is now possible. I'm not clear on if it's now possible thanks to advances in technology (particularly in automation) or if it's just that no one had tried it until now.
Even at the far slower speed the first stage would still be damaged from re-entry. That's why they do a re-entry burn to slow the stage down before the atmosphere gets too dense. There's apparently also some interesting physics on the engine firing dissipating the bow shock which helps keep temperatures down.
Why land? Fuel makes up a very small percent of the launch cost of a rocket. Landing also allows a much better experience for cargo and crew return, and it makes it possible to bring equipment to other planets or moons.
Why vertical? Vertical landing is much more flexible. You can land on a barge at sea. You can land on the launchpad itself. You can land on a planet or moon with no atmosphere.
> You can land on a planet or moon with no atmosphere.
IE: Mars, the ultimate SpaceX goal, which has just enough atmosphere to be annoying but not nearly enough to make parachutes work, so they had to find another way to land a big enough payload to transport 100 tons of stuff there
The advantage to powered landings is they work well for delicate stuff like people. Or in space X's case they are landing a really light shell and have a really powerful engine already attached.
I feel like there is a [Citation Needed] for that Wikipedia quote.
All existing landers used an aeroshell and parachute sequence, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to land with just Rockets. The aeroshell/parachute method is used because it allows landers to come straight in from a Hoffman transfer orbit, bleed off all that extra speed and land with the least amount of fuel required. But it's way to risky for a manned lander, as the landing date (and location) are locked in months ahead of time with no option for an abort or delay.
A manned lander is likely to aerobreak into a stabke Mars parking orbit first. Allowing the crew can check the lander, check the weather at the landing site and detach from a reusable transfer module. From low Mars orbit, they are going much slower and need to disperse much less energy.
You could just throw Rockets and fuel at the problem. Or wings might be far more attractive than a parachute for slowing down in the upper atmosphere (though, any wings would have to be massive to actually glide all the way down to the lower atmosphere or land)
In either case they use heat shields so the post heat shield second stage will be at the same velocity. Mars has ~0.6% of earths atmosphere, and ~40% the gravity so a heat shields going to hit terminal velocity at ~66 times earths terminal velocity. This only get's worse as you scale up due to mass vs surface area issues. Parachute can bleed off 80+% of that speed for little additional weight unlike wings which would need to survive supersonic retry heating making parachutes a no brainier. http://pics-about-space.com/re-entry-nasa-mars-landers?p=3#i... 1km/sec = 2,236.94 MPH.
Starting from a circular Mars orbit rather than Hoffman transfer would put their initial entry speed closer to 7000mph.
> Parachute can bleed off 80+% of that speed for little additional weight unlike wings which would need to survive supersonic retry heating making parachutes a no brainier.
Sure, Parachutes make a lot of sense for a one way trip.
But Parachutes are a consumable, one which would be really hard to manufacture on Mars (compared to rocket fuel, which just requires water, carbon dioxide and electricity). Also the size of the parachute gets ridiculously large for larger spacecraft.
If you are planning to make a rocket which shuttles people or cargo (or fuel) between Mars' surface and low Mars orbit, then it makes a whole lot more sense to just manufacture the extra fuel on Mars rather than trying to manufacture parachutes on Mars or shipping extra parachutes to Mars.
As for wings, you don't really want to use them for the subsonic phase. I'm not really sure how viable the idea is, but you want to use them to prolong your trip through the upper atmosphere, where the atmosphere is thinner. This allows you to stretch out all that supersonic atmospheric heating over a much longer time period, at a much slower rate than what your heat shield can dissipate.
Retractable or reconfigurable wings might be needed so you can maximize lift in the upper atmosphere then minimise drag through the supersonic to subsonic transition.
If you are sending stuff back up then parachutes are reusable, but heat shields are not. There might be an argument if you where landing thousands of rockets a day and had giant city's on mars. But, by that point you can just make more.
Depends on the heat shield. The Space Shuttle's heat shield was designed for reuse (though in practice the tiles were so fragile that they needed extensive checks and occasional replacement before each reentry).
I notice that Spacex have designed their ablative heat shield to which can withstand hundreds of reentries to Earth without any replacement or refurbishment. Still technically a consumable, but I really doubt anyone is happy with re-packing and re-using the same reentry parachutes hundreds of times.
And that's reentries to Earth, where the entry velocity is 17,000mph and the atmosphere is 100 times thicker. Such a heatsheild can probably withstand thousands of Mars reentries at just 7000mph before replacement.
Well, they're landing a really light shell with a really powerful engine for now, on Earth.
Mars is gonna be a different story, considering the Red Dragon mission in 2018 (with already existing infrastructure, since the Red Dragon will basically be a Dragon 2 capsule and the S1 for the mission will be a Falcon Heavy) is gonna have the heaviest payload ever landed on mars with a semi-empty Dragon 2, and all the missions after that will probably try to land at least one MCT, which would be heavier of a Dragon 2 by itself, with some cargo...
Luckily the MCT will have an even more powerful engine, and Mars's lighter gravity will probably help!
No, but the cool thing is, SpaceX is using their first stage landings to do research that will advance their goals on Mars.
In order to land large payloads on Mars, SpaceX is going to have to do something that, up until recently, has never been done before. They're going to have to fire a rocket engine 'backwards' in an atmosphere (albeit a thin one) while travelling at supersonic speeds. This will be necessary in order to slow down enough to actually land (parachutes don't buy you much on Mars).
This 'supersonic retropropulsion' is something that has been modeled a lot, but is really hard to actually test. You would need to get a rocket up to supersonic speeds, in the thin upper stages of Earth's atmosphere (where the conditions are close to that of Mars) and have it fire its engines backwards. As luck would have it, that's exactly what the Falcon 9 first stage does during its reentry burn. The data they are collecting now will be invaluable in designing their Mars bound spacecraft.
No it won't, but they're definitely gonna reuse the tech they're developing to land the S1 on Earth to land the MCT on Mars
And to land the BFR S1 on Earth, which I'd guess would be a bit too much for parachutes even with Earth's relatively thick atmosphere, if what people have been saying on Reddit is right
> So knowing nothing about this subject, why do they pursue landing rockets, or at least landing them vertically? It seems like the hardest possible way to handle this problem, as opposed to for example what the shuttles did. Can anyone explain the reasoning behind this?
It's actually the least complex way to do it. You've already got the engines to slow descent and steer the vehicle. At the highest concept level, all you need is to add more fuel and have very high-performance control system for guidance. Oh, and bolt on some landing legs, and some grid fins. That's not to say it's easy, but the added hardware is way less complex than adding wings, using a runway, etc... But if you watch their landings now they make it look easy and to suggest adding a bunch of other hardware complexity to get the rocket back seems silly in hindsight.
The challenge is to take someones simplistic idea "just have the rocket land itself" and look at it objectively even though nobody does it that way. My own preconceived ideas told me it would require way too much fuel to be practical. Turns out that's wrong. I also thought things would get too hot on re-entry. Turns out that's wrong too. But from a hardware complexity standpoint, it does seem kind of obvious doesn't it? I mean Bugs Bunny landed a rocket on mars right? Why NOT do it like that? http://www.cartoonsonnet.com/bugs-bunny-mad-as-a-mars-hare.h...
I recommend checking out episode 1313 of the podcast .Net Rocks. They do an awesome job explaining this subject even if you have no background knowledge on it.
The space shuttle was not retired because it was too easy to keep them in flight/orbit.
The space shuttle as a whole, with the boosters, external tank, wings, wheeled landing gear was also very complex and costly.
More complex than a SpaceX Falcon 9, dare I say.
All the extra weight from the Shuttle's aerodynamic surfaces would really cut into SpaceX's cargo capability too much. And remember that the part that landed was only a small fraction of whole launch system's bulk. SpaceX is hoping to eventually get a quick turnaround which means not throwing away lots of parts. And in the short term they can make incremental progress because what they're using to land isn't much more than what they needed to get to space in the first place.
Landing vertically is very similar to taking off vertically in terms of the physical requirements of the vehicle. If you want to land like a plane, you need a much more complex design, which is almost certainly worse at taking off.
So as long as you can work out how to control it reliably, vertical landing is a lot more efficient than horizontal landing.
Hopefully someone can support/refute this: my off the cuff guess why this happened is because the discount on the launch price is about equal to the cost of building the satellite. So if it works, everyone is happy. If it explodes, they can build another one and aren't out any money (but are out time), and the launch costs for the next one are covered by SpaceX or insurance - however they have it set up.
Are the opportunity costs of not having the satellite up there for the duration of however long it takes to build and launch a replacement insured as well?
My sense is that satellites range in price from $100 million or so for the sort of standard commsat that it's going to be launching this time to $10 billion for custom government spysats or top tier research satellites. But the really expensive ones usually go up on something like the Atlas V which is now at ~100 launches without a failure.
Better than "Certified Pre-Owned Rocket" :-) I agree with the folks who have tweeted they should start adding launch "check marks" to the paint but that assumes that they will launch it w/recovery and then do it again.
They'll definitely want to do extensive destructive testing on the first twice-used rocket if they can land it (or maybe put it in a museum and do that on the second)
There is a lot to learn about how the structure reacts to repeated launches (and undoubtedly engineering iterations to improve future models' reusability)
"Flight-proven" as opposed to those inferior non-flight-proven rockets we're so used to.
In a few years, perhaps flying your cargo on an un-flight-proven rocket will be the risky option. I applaud SES for being the early adopters, and SpaceX for always pushing the boundaries.
It'll take more than a few years for anyone other than SpaceX, and perhaps Blue Origin, to start recovering entire boosters -- it's a lot harder than you might think to retrofit on an existing rocket, and those two companies are the only ones to have designed rockets from scratch for it (though Blue is ... ahem ... a little while yet from even starting to actually build their orbital launcher).
Other launch providers are obviously watching, and the Indian space program, at least, is developing technology intended to feed into an eventual reusable design. But some of the others with announced plans still won't be trying to recover an intact stage, but only pieces, particularly the engines (detached in flight from the rest of the stage). That's the case both for Vulcan, the next-generation rocket from United Launch Alliance (the Pentagon's preferred provider), and for the Ariane-6 -- both of which won't initially launch with even that level of reuse, but only get it in follow-on work. (The reuse strategies for these are called SMART and Adeline, respectively, if you want to Google for them.)
I don't get the point, we know exactly what they're doing, so why do it?
I wish press releases didn't make me parse what they're really saying. I know "marketing" works, but if I was a satellite company, I would expect my audience to be smarter than that.
I think there are a lot of stories about companies that go "why do we need all this fake marketing crap anyway" and then proceed to lose a bunch of money :)
I wonder what the "real" cost of this is across the world?
You know, things like minting cent coins and transporting them around, and other things I wouldn't even imagine!
1) static pad tests/firings of engines
2) all-up launch of the full rocket, carrying a boilerplate satellite with some instrumentation, maybe some cubesats or low cost small R&D satellites tagging along
3) one or two launches of government science payloads, or government-funded weather satellites, something like that
4) commercial launches begin