I find this statement from Elon really interesting[1]:
> We just completed the post-landing inspection and all systems look good. Ready to fly again.
While Elon Musk is known for being a bit optimistic with his predictions from time to time, it really points to where SpaceX wants to be: instant reusability. That's when we really reach a new space age, when rockets are as reusable as airplanes, and SpaceX is working on it. What a time to be alive.
> We just completed the post-landing inspection and all systems look good. Ready to fly again.
It makes me wonder if they should literally do that. Fuel up the stage, send it off and recover it again. Maybe fit it out with a dummy upper stage. They have a handful of first stages now, so why not? It would reassure insurers and customers that the process is reliable, provide opportunities to trial out and streamline the refit process and provide valuable info on stage wear and tear.
They're need to get flight approvals and so on, it would certainly cost a lot more than just the fuel so might not be worth the trouble.
Once they've done a lot more landings, yes. Until then, I'd wager their focus is on testing materials after re-entry for annealing, heat and stress fractures, ablation, and so forth.
From this they'll be able to optimise their design (more so than already) to be more resilient to these forces, and will end up with standardised check-lists for re-flight. They're also working heavily on autonomy, so the current ground crews of hundreds could diminish to the same kind of numbers one has for commercial flight. If you launch 200 times a day, which is where they are headed, it becomes routine space traffic control with inexpensive ground crews following procedural manuals.
So, I wouldn't expect any rapid turnarounds soon, but give it ten years and they could be turning them around in hours or days, which would absolutely change the economics of space flight. I don't think Musk is into demand driven pricing - he wants his eutopia to be for all - so we may see spaceflight costs rapidly trend down to the same order of magnitude as current commercial flight, perhaps by the 2030s, perhaps sooner. So far they've maintained fantastic momentum.
SpaceX was founded 14 years ago. In another 10 years, they'll likely have what you describe on their Mars base. The velocity of this company is simply unprecedented. SpaceX was founded in July of 2002 and the first F9 (I'm purposefully ignoring the Falcon 1 program) went up in July of 2010.
For reference, the Space Shuttle Program was formally created by President Nixon in 1972. The first Space Shuttle launch, STS-1, happened on April 12th, 1981.
To be fair, Apollo ran from '61-'72, developed the Saturn series of rockets, associated technology, landed six missions on the moon, and cost somewhere around $100-200B* (USD$2010).
That's 8 years for F9, and 9 years for the Shuttle.
I wouldn't call 1 year faster unprecedented. The Apollo program was unprecedented. It took only 8 years to put a man on the moon, from putting a man in space.
9 years for an agency with lots of space and rocket experience vs 8 years for a company with no space or rocket experience at all. There is no comparison between the two.
SpaceX is staffed by some of the brightest aerospace engineers and scientists with decades of aerospace industry experience. Tom Mueller and Gwynne Shotwell had over 3 decades of experience between them in the aerospace industry before they joined SpaceX. To say they had not space or rocket experience is absurd.
Additionally SpaceX has received tremendous support from NASA both financially and technically. SpaceX has received close to half a billion dollars in "seed money" from NASA and has contracts for almost three billion dollars from them. NASA provides an extraordinary amount of technical oversight and guidance to SpaceX.
That's not to say SpaceX hasn't made significant advancements, Boeing has considerably more experience and received similar amounts of funding from NASA but has failed to achieve nearly what SpaceX has.
Sorry should have specific, otherwise I'll get downvoted into oblivion. In lack of experience, I meant supply chain / logistics, manufacturing, etc.
They had to spin up a factory from scratch with, as a company, having never done it before. Sure NASA had to do some of that, but they largely had much of these bits in place from past projects or could re-use contracts from existing manufacturers. A huge part of this is simply negotiating with other companies that supply parts.
Additionally, they did a lot of entirely new ways of doing things. As far as I'm aware, SpaceX's method of friction welding is one of the best in the industry. Additionally, they 3d print some of the parts for the engines, the main oxidizer valve is one of note. Pretty sure they were also one of the first to do this.
So in summary, even with veterans of the industry, they are doing things in a way never done before in history, so that doesn't negate the fact that it was revolutionary what they've managed to do.
SpaceX isn't mass producing rockets, it's low volume to the point that each rocket is almost a one off custom development. There's no robot factory churning out rockets.
This is also where Musk comes into play, he isn't the rocket scientist behind SpaceX, he's everything else. Musk keeps his companies fairly interconnected and manages to effectively share resources between them.
Sure SpaceX has a lot of innovative technology but then so did the Space Shuttle. It certainly wasn't cobbled together from off the shelf technology. Almost everything about it was new and innovative. Additionally SpaceX has the advantage of advanced technologies that weren't available when the shuttle was designed. Additive manufacturing is one you alluded to but also advanced computer modelling, advanced alloys, and all of the advanced sensor technologies that simply didn't exist for the shuttle. All of this allows for a level of rapid prototyping not possible in the 70s.
Yup, I've read Musk's biography. Very familiar with his unusual style. But they've achieved something a private company has never done before. They were the first non-nation state space company to launch a liquid based rocket to orbit.
I guess we should politely agree to disagree. They're amazing however you look at it and the rest is just splitting hairs.
Not diminishing SpaceX's achievements, but like everything else they've been built on the back of a lot of basic science. One of NASA's primary goals is actually technology transfer (see: http://technology.nasa.gov/ ).
Why not? Because they can mate it to a 2nd stage that costs about $10-15 million and then sell a flight for $40+ million.
Not only is that a hefty profit margin, it's a full-scale, live-fire, "all up" test of reusability, all on someone else's dime.
This has been SpaceX's genius move since the start, they've been developing reusable rockets which normally would be a multi-billion dollar R&D effort. Except they've been able to fit that development program into a commercial launch business, so that the vast majority of the costs have been subsidized by their customers. Instead of being chumps who spend tens of millions of dollars per flight of their own money to test hardware, they get the same testing, or better, while turning a profit. And that's why Blue Origin is still working with incredibly small sub-orbital boosters that are not even in official service yet while SpaceX has been making money hand over fist for years and has also managed to pioneer reuse of orbital launcher stages (while at the same time doing R&D for manned capsules, next generation methalox rockets, Mars colonization, etc.)
Any launch to the ISS involves expending a second stage, and IIRC NASA requires the Dragons to be certified (as much for the safety of the ISS as anything else) in a way that currently requires a new one each time.
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)
> 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".
Would still involve an expended second stage, and would be unlikely to be usable. In-orbit assembly is still extremely expensive because spacewalk time is extremely expensive and self-assembly isn't quite there - it's usually cheaper to launch a vehicle in one piece (which AIUI is SpaceX's plan), even if you have to build a bigger rocket to do so.
there are several customers who've expressed interest in being the first to use a reused core. It's likely the first re launch will be a commercial customer.
Probably, though I doubt they will until the get more data. That's the real goldmine here, nobody has ever been in the position to really study a first stage that's been to orbit and back before SpaceX started doing this. I imagine that they will be developing tons of data on how many flights all the parts are rated for before they require rebuilding or inspection, etc.
I'm pretty confident they are well on their way towards pretty quick turnarounds though - the engines are the biggest hurdle and they seem to be remarkably robust as demonstrated by the number of times they light them before sending them up already, and the relight tests they have done on recovered cores.
> Fuel up the stage, send it off and recover it again.
For first stages that land on a barge, they are already planning on returning them to the mainland by partially refueling them and boosting them back under their own power.
[citation needed], please. I follow SpaceX pretty closely and to my knowledge this has never gone beyond random internet commenters' "what if?" speculation.
> Landing a core stage on the platform would be a major achievement. However, Mr. Musk appears to have yet more plans for the Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship. “Will allow (for) refuel and rocket flyback in future,” he added to the unveiling of the ship.
It seems pretty unlikely unless SpaceX builds a larger, permanent installation out in the ocean (think oil rig style).
The drone ships are relatively small. Storing cryogenic fuel on them would require a lot of infrastructure, which is costly and dangerous if you crash a booster. They have to return for fueling and maintenance, so a crane makes a lot more sense than incurring the wear, tear, and risk of a launch you could easily avoid.
None of this is that daunting if you're living in a world with the sort of high demand for low cost access to space that SpaceX (right or wrong) predicts and requires for all this to work. As SpaceX's competitors point out, reusable rockets don't make much economic sense unless the number of total flights goes up a lot. And if your barge is catching and returning 100 first stages per year, storing enough cryogenic fuel to get them back to land seems reasonable to me.
There's no real point to it, either, unless you don't have enough boosters to satisfy demand. It would be cheaper to build an extra booster (and possibly extra ADSs) and keep returning them by sea.
It shows all 5 burns, in one shot. From a /r/spacex comment [1], we have:
1 - The ascent burn of the 9 Merlin-1D engines: the long bright arc upwards,
2 - the single Merlin-1D-Vac second stage burn: the thin, short line starting after the short pause of MECO,
3 - the 3-engine 'boostback burn' of the first stage, the upwards arcing thin 'fish hook' part that is overlaid with the thin second stage arc - which sent the first stage on a return trajectory towards Landing Zone 1,
4 - the 3-engine 're-entry burn' of the first stage at an altitude of about 50 miles: the bright vertical line above the ascent arc,
5 - and the final 1-engine 'landing burn' of the first stage: the lowest bright vertical line ending at the landing pad!
Today was even better. On most drone ship landing the ship looses satellite connection because of the extreme vibration cause by approaching Merlin engines.
Great shot. I hadn't watched a night landing before, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Shoot, when I sat down and saw the 43 minute video time, I didn't think I would make it. Time flew ;D
> ... even if the host crew's acting was fairly poor.
I find the SpaceX reporters to be much more informative (and much less irritating) that the standard network morons. These are (mostly or all, AFAIK) actual SpaceX employees, with both genuine passion for the program and knowledge of the mission.
And if they are a little less polished than many TV journalists, they make up for it in enthusiasm, as well as just dorky adorableness.
Oh, I don't disagree with you. There is a depth of genuine emotion, and they inform without dumbing down what is actually going on. By watching several hosted webcasts, I've learned esoteric details I wouldn't have otherwise.
Sometimes it is a little too unpolished for me though - the guy running his pencil down a chart of mission activities was pretty weird. The whole time I was thinking: is the timeline for the next few activities not on your laptop screen?
>I find the SpaceX reporters to be much more informative (and much less irritating) that the standard network morons.
Jeez. Talk about a low bar.
The problem with most journalists is they don't really know anything, so they just repeat what people tell them. These folks have a huge advantage in that they're only covering a single subject, and they understand that subject very well.
Iirc the casters are engineering employees that are rotated with every launch.
They do selection mostly to make sure they are photogenic enough and can face a camera but they aren't professional reporters.
So far the success rate is better than even Elon was predicting, which is a really good sign. Biggest unknown now is the cost and reliability of doing a reflight on a used core.
Elon Musk: "We'll be successful, ironically, when it becomes boring."
Well, it's not boring yet, but it's definitely not on "First successful booster landing ever" hype levels, though probably the first few Falcon Heavy flights and the Mars announcement will be
> We just completed the post-landing inspection and all systems look good. Ready to fly again.
While Elon Musk is known for being a bit optimistic with his predictions from time to time, it really points to where SpaceX wants to be: instant reusability. That's when we really reach a new space age, when rockets are as reusable as airplanes, and SpaceX is working on it. What a time to be alive.
[1]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/754931091891453952