Good luck to 'em. But I don't know that I would have picked several never-flown techniques as the basis for my least-cost rocket. I count at least four: aerospike nozzle, methane fuel, autogenous pressurization (whatever they mean by that), and all-composite structure. That would seem to be a path to spending lots of time and money on research.
To be fair, composites and aerospikes are well-tested, and methane has some good qualities and no obvious problems as a rocket fuel. (I don't know what they intend for pressurization; perhaps they want to boil both fuel and oxidizer to create pressure? Seem like a non-standard technique anyway.) And it's not like you can buy rocket hardware OTS, so everything you do is a development project. But none has flown on a real vehicle. Picking one would be ambitious. Four just seems like compounded risk.
Scaled Composites has had plenty of trouble with their seemingly-simple hybrid engine. You may think a technology is researched enough or simple enough to use without much danger, but rocketry is an extreme environment and can hold lots of surprises at scale and in the margins.
SpaceX, on the other hand, has only done one really revolutionary thing: cost discipline. Mostly through simplicity. Which is a pretty important contribution to the world of rocketry. Much more important than any particular nozzle or engine improvement.
The Firefly Alpha should be a nifty rocket if they can get it flying without spending too much money--but the history of rocket development doesn't suggest that'll be easy.
Methane pressurization is easy, it's the same method used as with LOX. Getting rid of Helium simplifies the process enormously and is also the same route that SpaceX is going down, though at much larger scales.
Also, a lot of people called out Scaled Composites on their choice of engine for Space Ship 1/2 as being a risk. Hybrids seem easy on paper and at small scale, but they have a lot of special difficulties once you scale up. The engines they're building out to be fairly simple, and lots of companies have built engines that size and actually with greater complexity without having prior experience.
Methane is simpler in some ways -- no helium, for example. The big question marks here are composites and aerospike.
Aerospikes have been tested but have not (as far as I know) flown. Composites haven't flown at this scale as far as I know.
So yeah they have their work cut out for them!
BTW: SpaceX has done some revolutionary things around reusability, but I mostly agree -- other than their reusability efforts everything else they've done is good old fashioned rocket science + cost control.
> autogenous pressurization (whatever they mean by that)
From their Vehicle page:
"Firely's engines are actually self-pressurized (AKA autogenously pressurized), so that the fuel itself is used to provide the working pressure for the engine. This simplifies the design and saves weight."
Probably I'm hung up on "Firely's engines are actually self-pressurized". If they actually mean that, it's some sort of novel system. If they actually mean self-pressurizing tanks then that's a bit more normal--though I still would want to know if it's a blowdown system or if they are using some sort of gas generator (perhaps using heat from the cooling system) for regulated pressure. Either one requires a reasonably strong tank, but maybe that's not a problem for a small rocket due to minimum gauge issues.
It's a nice cheap way to go, but still somewhat unusual in launch systems. More common in upper stages and manuevering thrusters.
I'm very skeptical of the market they're targeting. SpaceX used to cover that same payload capacity with the Falcon 1 [0] rocket, but discontinued it since no one bought any. Maybe things have changed in the past few years, but I seriously doubt it. The aerospike engine is interesting since none have been used commercially before, but if there isn't a market it might as well run on fairy dust.
Still, I wish them the best. We need more innovation in the space sector, and I would love to see those engines become more commonplace.
Came here to make a similar comment. This isn't really a competitor to SpaceX, as they're target a market that SpaceX abandoned. Frankly, while I'm a supporter of everything space, I'm a little underwhelmed by a plan throw sub-500 kilo packages to LEO. That's hardly the next step, and I think is a market that can be more efficiently served by secondary payloads on bigger platforms. Even if the "lets clutter LEO with everybody's hobby projects" market matures, a joint launch of several small payloads on a larger platform will likely prove more efficient, reliable and versatile. And, frankly, the name seems to be some pretty obvious pandering to sci-fi fanboys. I'd be more impressed by a focus on solid engineering and business planning instead of baiting kickstarter.
Right now, SpaceX can (and does) have access to that limited market by selling off payload on current launches. It's cheaper to just bootstrap on to an existing flight than dedicating an entire rocket to a small mission. If and when the Falcon rockets become reusable, it's very difficult to imagine this series ever being competitive. SpaceX aims for launch costs of $5-7 million when they achieve reusability, putting the per-kilo cost somewhere between $540-700. At that price, these rockets will have to have a total cost of only $350k to match what SpaceX offers.
These people must either believe that SpaceX won't achieve reusability, or their rockets will. Maybe a combination of both?
Falcon 1 had several customers, but it wasn't really cost competitive and they ended up with enough investments to develop the Falcon 9, which would be far more lucrative for them. How commercially viable the Firefly will be is utterly dependent on the cost. Given the simplicity of the design and the alleged ability to mass produce them, they might be able to get the price point low enough to be commercially viable.
Given that the satellites they are proposing to fly are built on budgets in the single millions of dollars, I think they are aware of what their costs need to be and wouldn't be doing this unless they thought they could hit those cost figures.
Can't help but feel like we're on the cusp of a new age of mankind. How long will it be until space travel really takes off? I feel like we're getting closer and closer.
We're a part of history, we were the children of the dawn of the digital age, pushing mankind towards the stars. A hundred years from now, people will look back and read about us and think how primitive we were to be pushing for space but how almost nobody actually went to space.
I think the key missing element is a clear commercial driver.
Say we found a fuel source on mars that was so energy rich it could undercut oil... then yeah that would lead to a radical revolution in human space exploration.
What we have now as far as i am aware is very little commercial incentive to really explore space, in this scenario space flight will probably advance very slowly.
I'd argue that commercial incentive is the biggest limiting factor of the human race. Yes, it costs money to do things but I'm really surprised that we don't aggressively pursue space travel just on the basis of knowing why we're here. There's more than enough wealth on the planet to do it, but we're too concentrated on politics/hoarding.
There's this strange fixation with the ground (I usually attribute this to fear masquerading as a budget) and what's happening here, but I feel like there's a lot more out there if we seriously start looking. The kind of stuff that would eliminate the need for commercial incentive that we can't necessarily see now.
there's a lot more out there if we seriously start looking
Not within individual limits of time and scale. The Moon is a couple days away, but for all we've looked at it seems it's little more than a dead atmosphere-free rock. The next nearest place to walk is a couple years away. Both will require hauling an oppressive amount of stuff along to stay there long enough to achieve anything resembling self-sufficiency. The sheer scale of time & effort - balanced against payoff of any kind - is vast beyond human comprehension. "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..." [Douglas Adams] Travel time gets a lot longer the farther the destination. Between Mars and the next place we have any hope of surviving on is a very, very long distance. I remember when Voyager I was launched: decades later, we're arguing over whether it actually left the solar system yet. Yeah there's interesting things out there...but don't underestimate how very, very, very, very, very far away they are.
Oh sure, look hard enough and we'll find "something interesting", and perhaps come to grok "why we're here" - but at enormous cost to those who don't get to go. Sure you'll find a few people actually willing & capable to make the trip (stark raving boring as most of it will be, even with a Morale Officer), but those "orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude" more people needed to make it happen don't get enough out of their contribution to bother contributing, and ultimately it's their paychecks that will be "redistributed" to fund the effort. Firefly Alpha will cost (optimistically!) about US$10M to launch 1 ton into low orbit, with that cargo assured to return at least $10M revenue; if not for that payoff, those involved have compelling reasons to elsewhere route money which provides a good life for some 400 people ... how much then the human cost of sending a handful of people on a trip which, beyond a couple nearby rocks, would take a lifetime or far more?
TL;DR - very little of space is close enough and interesting enough to get to before you're dead.
There are a lot of not only interesting but also commercially viable things right here in our solar system. We have several huge balls of fuel, each of which has many orders of magnitude more energy that humanity has harnessed in our entire history.
There are planets that we can build on and adapt to, or potentially adapt to us.
There are millions of floating gold mines with more mineral riches than than exist in the entirety of earth.
Regarding the distances, I don't think they are as big as you are putting them out to be. If you look at the ratio of how far we need to travel to get somewhere interesting(moon, mars, comet, etc) over how fast we can travel( 36,000 MPH+) and compare that to the ratio of the European wind powered ships speed vs a trip to the new world, you'd see that the solar system is not at all outside of our reach and there are many precedents to speak to humanities willingness to make sure trips.
I was responding to a post explicitly discounting "commercially viable" motivations, contending that discovery alone was enough. So, I ignored the commercial aspects and observed the logical conclusions of "because it's there" motivations.
If you can make the trip financially profitable, go for it.
I think the biggest fallacy of our age is that we think we know how to assess ROI on efforts beyond a very few, very narrow conditions. And the great tragedy is that we routinely act on those estimates as if they are far more accurate than they turn out to be.
Keep in a mind that only a century ago did people begin to have the free time to even dream about what exists in the heavens. Science fiction was radical because it was asking the "What if?" questions.
It will probably be a few more generations before the human race starts to come around to the idea of figuring out why we're here.
There is and will be a fair amount of demand for launching satellites into orbit. [1] Lowering cost and more advanced micro satellites will probably increase demand.
I think the real economic driver in the future will be mining resources from asteroids. Could be a trillion dollar market in the future.
Seems like the costs of dealing with low orbit would make high endurance balloons and solar-powered aircraft, such as Google is experimenting with, a more viable option.
There are also obvious barriers. We still have an issue with radiation during lengthy space travels. Plus the type of ships you would want to use in long term or large scale trips would need to be constructed IN space (or at least orbit). Otherwise the craft would be too heavy and too energy intensive to be worth while or even feasible.
We need an orbiting dry dock :)
On a side note,I think one of the simplest (but skillful and dangerous) jobs here on Earth that I would want in the age of space construction would be space welder.
Yeah, if only we knew how to get it back to Earth cheaply and fuse it with itself we might have another 500 years of fossil fuels delivered by destroying the surface of the Moon.
The future economy in space is so much larger than the future economy on Earth, that it doesn't make much sense to ship non-rare materials back to the surface.
There are some where I think it will, for the foreseeable future, just because they're so rare in the Earth's crust and so plentiful in asteroids, but long-term, microgravity assembly plants are how things will go.
Not necessarily. There's already many billions of dollars a year being spent on space, both by governments and by private entities. Lowering the cost of access to space would greatly increase what can be done with those funds, even assuming they wouldn't grow.
I don't know if there is commercial incentive to explore space, but there is enormous commercial incentive to make spaceflight cheaper. Gather everyone on hacker news into a warehouse and throw a water balloon into the air. Chances are very high that when it lands it will splash multiple people who'd be willing to pay to fall around the earth at 200 miles high a few times.
The world is going to change drastically in the next 10-20 years. Side discussion related to the article: what to focus on? Will web development still be a thing (I'm doubtful)? If so, what does web development look like in 2024? 2034?
It seems like a lot of engineering energy will go into the design and manufacturing of the systems that will manage human life in space.
The web is still an early platform, and there are still thousands of opportunities to make significant profits with relatively little startup cost. I think the web is a great place to make your first big chunk of money, and then in 10-20 years you can invest it in more capital-intensive, "world-changing" startups. Or maybe that's just what Elon Musk did. ;)
The joy of the web is in its ease of access, and whether it will still exist depends heavily on your definition of the web.
The "internet-of-things" is only just now starting to happen (outside of anything but the main tech centres), and it'll likely take those 10-20 years until everything we live and breath globally is connected.
There's a hell of a lot of "disrupting" to be done between now and then, so it's going to remain an exciting focus for many.
That said, if HN is anything to go by in general, there are one hell of a lot of extremely smart people currently working to engineer the future of the web, and I can see their focus turning more and more towards the likes of space travel as the next exciting thing to concentrate on.
>'The world is going to change drastically in the next 10-20 years. Side discussion related to the article: what to focus on? Will web development still be a thing (I'm doubtful)? If so, what does web development look like in 2024? 2034?'
People were lamenting the death of web development since the introduction of Front Page. There will surely be new tools and abstractions and probably some consolidation of jobs, but I see no reason to think the profession will disappear or become unrecognizable.
>'It seems like a lot of engineering energy will go into the design and manufacturing of the systems that will manage human life in space.'
Eventually perhaps, but I believe that's incredibly far away. There's plenty left to extract, fight over and profit from using traditional methods which are many orders of magnitude cheaper right here.
I recall a quote to the effect of 'The price we put on natural resources is equal to the price of procuring the very next ton of it.'
I think that's apt.
Long before we spend money and apply our technology to mining asteroids we'll spend it on tech to herd [1] and eventually supplant the terrestrial workforce.
>Will web development still be a thing (I'm doubtful)? If so, what does web development look like in 2024? 2034?
Even today, the 'web' is simply a general-purpose software platform (or atleast should be thought of one). It might be helpful to rephrase your question as "will general-purpose software development be as important/exciting/profitable (etc). in 10 to 20 years?".
I think there are two major, related and in some respects "opposing" trends.
One is using software to make hardware obsolete (virtual reality, augmented reality, telecommuting and converting physical solutions to non-physical solutions).
On the hardware front, production of physical products is becoming more and more algorithmic and software-defined. There are also opportunities to decrease manufacturing costs by orders of magnitude (mainly nanotechnology). If we get there, then the utility of simulating reality becomes less and less interesting, if we can just do what we want in reality for sufficiently cheaply.
It would be really nice if we were about to get the future as seen from 1965 (space-wise), but I think that's still unlikely. Even if there are as many as TEN "low cost" orbital rocket companies doing launches by 2024[1], I'm skeptical that the US will have the legal and organizational flexibility to allow the level of launches that would make this non-niche. The main obstacles to the growth of space travel are not technical or economic, but governmental.
I suppose one odd result of 9/11, though, was showing everyone that the thousands of plane flights every day already have essentially the same potential issues as allowing unlimited orbital rocket launches.
[1] ...and right now there's, uh, one, doing a few launches per year, I think.
Web development will still be a thing, but perhaps it will be different than what it looks like today. There's always going to be lots of money in the work of connecting people to one another (either in the fulfillment of social ends or business ends). There will just be that many more ways for people to do so in the future than today, not fewer.
Quite a cool design, if I understood it correctly it switches the big classical cone-shaped nozzle into a lot of small nozzles nestled against a central spike, with the surrounding air forming the other half of the (now virtual) nozzle. Weird and almost magical, what's not to like? :)
What's not to like is that it's weird and almost magical.
First, let me say that I really hope they succeed. I want to see more people doing cool stuff in this area.
However, it seems like the opposite of SpaceX and on a similar path as the great spaceflight failures of the past few decades. Firefly is pushing the envelope with composite construction, an unconventional fuel, and an engine design that's never flown to space before.
SpaceX's main innovation is that they're boring. They have boring engines and boring rocket designs and they aim for cheapness and known quantities. Even their unprecedented first-stage reusability program is mainly innovative in how boring it is. Instead of screwing around with lifting bodies or jet engines or delta wings or anything like that, they're just taking a regular first stage rocket, slapping some legs on it, filling it with extra fuel, and giving it some fancy software.
I'd love to see major innovations succeed in space, but I think SpaceX has the right approach. Don't be fancy, just do stuff that obviously works, get it to the point where you can fly it regularly, and then iterate. There have been so many past attempts to revolutionize spaceflight through fancy new technologies and they've all failed miserably. I hope this one doesn't, but I'm not terribly optimistic.
Well, if they work hard on that design, get a half-assed rocket somewhat working and then still fail, while of course a sad moment for them, it would be still of great benefit to humanity. SpaceX or someone else could buy their research and experience and iterate further on that. So good luck to Firefly folks, but no matter how it ends, I think their work will still be a net gain for mankind.
Yup, pretty much. The traditional engine nozzle can only be optimized for maximum thrust at one altitude, while the aerospike maintains thrust efficiency at many altitudes, using as much as 30% less fuel at lower altitudes. Also, for the aerospike design, it doesn't have to be a series of small nozzles. The combustion gases can escape the combustion chamber via a ring. It's more difficult to cool this type of system and adds some weight, but it is an efficient alternative to the traditional engine nozzle for SSTO (single-stage-to-orbit) vehicles.
IIRC, the VentureStar was going to use a linear aerospike. With at least one combustion chamber on each side, it seems an easier design than a ring.
Their design seem to indicate they may want to pump air through the spike body to either cool it or as to use it as "bypass" volume in an inverted turbofan-like design. It's intriguing.
Note that this is a 400 kg class launch vehicle, so much smaller than a 10 tonne level Falcon 9. Even smaller than a Falcon 1.
Beal Aerospace also tried to bring pressure fed composite launchers in the nineties, though he used hydrogen peroxide and kerosene:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beal_Aerospace
While methane has the advantage of self-pressurization, it is also about half the density of kerosene, meaning there will be double the volume for the same mass, and the pressure vessel will be double the mass. Pressure vessel mass is proportional to volume and pressure. That's why Beal used very dense fuels, even when they have less exhaust velocity.
The heavy tank is a worse problem for sea-level launched rockets that need high engine pressures to reach passable engine exhaust velocities.
The rocket equation shows that exhaust velocity is important to reach high rocket velocities:
delta v = v_exhaust * ln(m_full / m_empty)
In a pressure fed rocket the engine pressure is the tank pressure (minus some pressure loss in the injector). If you air launched, it might be a bit easier, since ambient pressure is only a quarter of sea level at 10 km. Airlaunch LLC tried to use these synergistic technologies some years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirLaunch
Basically in the atmosphere you exhaust at ambient pressure (or not very far from it). If your chamber pressure is low, then you can't expand much before you're at ambient at sea level. Thus the nozzle can't produce much thrust for the propellant flow. The upshot is that low pressure rockets suck at low altitudes.
But for relatively small rockets it might work well: apparently because of some minimum-gauge issues, they need to have pretty thick walls anyway so going to pressure fed is not such a huge overhead. Also equipment like turbopumps does not scale well at the low end. (I haven't studies this in detail though.)
Armadillo Aerospace has tested oxygen-methane self pressurized rockets years ago and they are simple and work well. They can also be controlled precisely. NASA bought one from them and flies it occasionally. I think it is a blow down pressurized version though (helium is filled directly to the main propellant tank head spaces for pressurization):
http://morpheuslander.jsc.nasa.gov/
So auto-pressurization is nothing fancy, in fact it can be seen as a simpler version of blowdown pressurization, which is simpler than regulated pressurization.
If I had to create an orbital launcher with minimum capital, this is a reasonable design, though I'm skeptical about the aerospike.
To convince me, they need to first fly some sounding rockets.
There's been many rocket startups in the recent decades, with little flying hardware, and even that has been no guarantee of going further.
Everything you said is true, but high tensile strength carbon composites have come a long way since the 90s. High pressure tanks might be a lot lighter than they were 20 years ago.
Didn't Musk say that he's thinking about using methane-powered rockets on Mars in the long term, because one can get the fuel there to take off? Maybe this company is, or in the end will become, a side-project for SpaceX to speed up their plans of going to the Mars and back?
I'm just a rocket enthusiast, my day job (or jobs) are unrelated to the field. I've been following and participating in the Newspace movement for about ten years. The scene was really vibrant around 2004-2010 with multiple vertical hovering rocket companies / teams. I've learned a lot about discussions on various lists, newsgroups and forums. Besides of course just knowing the basic physics from college.
There have been lots of old space enthusiasts and professionals who have been patiently teaching others. You can get a small taste here:
http://yarchive.net/space/index.html
If you corrected Henry Spencer on a technical matter, rumor is you got a T-shirt.
Unfortunately those small companies did not scale up as envisioned, at least have not so far. Masten Space flew their Xaero vehicle 110 times, always landing vertically, before it crashed on the 111th flight. They know their stuff. (They continue flying other vehicles and are building new ones.) It's just hard to make money with that.
But then SpaceX took the torch and started taking reusability seriously (at the start they were talking about recovering and refurbishing stages from the ocean, not a good strategy), and we might finally see some real VTVL first stages on orbital rockets. It's at least one dream come true. Rockets landing on their tail, on a pillar of flames, "like God and Heinlein intended".
Danielle: I'm reminded by your quote that went roughly as follows: what Lightsail is trying to do with energy storage could have been done hundreds of years ago as the technology is not that complicated.
It feels like that with rocketry as well. There are no fundamental physical barriers to cheaper reusable rockets, as the components have existed since the late sixties. It's just that there have been no coherent, funded, methodical attempts. Until now. It is of course vastly easier now than in the seventies, because of carbon fiber, GPS, fiber gyros, computers, CFD and CNC.
There's a need for a SpaceX competitor. And there's probably room in the market. The DC-8 to the 707. And just in case something happens. It looks like the old players, "Dinospace", (ULA, Arianespace, Russian companies, China, Japan, India) are not even trying.
The Newspace scene has had very coherent visions and great spirit. Move fast and break things. Lots of iterations, at small scale. Competitors sharing knowledge. Many of those people have moved on from rocket building to consulting, to satellites, government work for future asteroid missions, or to completely other sectors. I hope they can influence the space sector in their part.
I am very hopeful that NASA can adjust and reach new heights if the space launch prices drop a lot. Their deputy administrator Lori Garver "gets" Newspace. If there's something great that you can get off the shelf cheaply - use it!
I care about these things as well, and have dedicated a few cycles to new concepts in propulsion. If you are ever around the bay area, it would be good to chat. I could give you a tour of LightSail and we could get tea.
If the engines are auto-pressurized, I am assuming that they don't produce anywhere near the same pressure as turbo pumps would. Does that mean the pressure in the combustion chamber has to be relatively low?
Edit: To clarify, this "auto-pressurized engines" is just another form of pressure fed operation. The tank has to be at (least at) chamber pressure.
Yes, the pressure must be low because otherwise the tanks would be too heavy. Especially with such fluffy fuel. (Or then they have some new supermaterials. In theory just the engine pressurization type does not limit pressure. If you could make a rocket tank out of pure graphene, then why not pressurize it very high?)
Saturn V's F-1 or Falcon 9's Merlin are moderate gas generator turbopump designs pressures around 7 MPa. This is probably closer to 3 MPa, I'm just guessing here though.
I wonder about their suspiciously high sea level specific impulse, 305 s. They probably have some aerospike extra there.
That said, I don't know what they have really built. I see their California office is a few hundred meters down the street from SpaceX.
The propellants are such a small part of launch costs that they can practically be ignored.
Helium probably costs more than all the other stuff combined, and they might be able to forgo that here though, or at least significantly limit usage if they only use it for pressurizing the oxygen tank.
Propellant, in the form of liquid oxygen and kerosene, is about as expensive as milk. For a vehicle with 2% mass fraction, and assuming that the entire vehicle is fuel in order to place an upper bound on fuel costs, that's 49 parts fuel to 1 part payload, by mass. If fuel and oxidizer are roughly the density of water, then each gallon weighs less than 8 lbs. (Closer to 5 or 6 for kerosene, and about 9 or 10 for oxygen.) This gives us about 6 gallons of propellant for each pound of mass, for a cost of about $22.
The fuel cost to launch something into orbit is about $22/lb. The rest of the $1e3 to $1e4 per pound is engineering and paperwork. A typical aerospace part that has, for example, $700-$800 worth of actual materials and labor will have a verification and paper trail that costs about $30e3 to produce, due to the mission-critical nature of all the highly stressed and low-factor-of-safety parts. (Car parts have an FS in excess of 2.5, for example, and aerospace parts are typically 1.1-1.2.)
Many people have suggested as much. The issue then is finding a large enough volume of customers / missions to make use of frequent flights. I've also heard (tho I don't have a link ready) that past 50 - 100 flights per year on a given vehicle, some more exotic methods of flight into orbit (that have been impractical to date) become cost effective compared to expendables. Not a few studies have suggested reusable chemical rockets are cheaper than expendables, if you can fit at least 50 flights a year on them. I once read that number as around 70 a year for the Shuttle (possibly from Antonio Elias, maybe someone else). If you can manage hundreds, some of the really nifty / whacky launch concepts might become viable, like cannon launch, laser launch etc. etc.
(I think Antonio Elias, on NSF made the argument that Kistler's now defunct K1 (COTS contract, along side SpaceX) rocket would have been viable at nearly the lowest possible launch rate for a reuseable, far sooner than the Shuttle.)
The biggest cost is the machine. High precision and exotic materials are usually involved, and they're usually hand-crafted in small numbers, and require gigantic tooling and facilities. And there's lots of testing and QA: since you don't get it back, you can't really test fly it.
Imagine if you were flying people to China via airliner. One way. The majority of your ticket cost would not be in fuel. (A 747 is about $350M; fuel across the Pacific is on the order of $100K.)
Note that reusing your vehicle solves a lot of those problems. But it's hard to do. Imagine that your 747 can just barely make it all the way to China, even if it's only carrying First Class, and there's no gas stations there.
Volume solves the rest of the problem--but that means we need to figure out a lot to do in space that's worth the cost.
There's development costs (which can be substantial). There's manufacturing costs. There's fixed recurring operational costs (which get averaged over the flight rate). There's incremental operational costs. And then way down in the noise is the fuel cost.
For most rockets manufacturing and fixed recurring operational costs are the biggies. There's only so small you can shrink a production line and an operations team, and there's only so high you can push your flight rate, the combination dictates your per flight costs to a substantial degree.
For a vehicle like the Shuttle which was quasi-reusable the fixed recurring operations costs were dominant. It cost several billion dollars a year just to maintain the standing army of engineers and technicians plus the facilities needed to keep the Shuttle operating. And because the Shuttle's couldn't fly more than once or twice a year per orbiter due to the long processing time between flights that resulted in a very high per flight cost even though manufacturing and fuel costs were low.
For Oribital's Pegasus, about 25% (solid fuel) engines, and 25% support labour [1].
http://www.mitre.org/sites/default/files/pdf/kane_mls.pdf Page 7 (Rest of that paper is also an awesome read about the problem space. Although it was from relatively early in Falcon 1 development... Pegasus has gone from alone in its class, to having competition, back to being alone).
Operations and infrastructure are not cheap either. If you require a massive pad, buildings, cranes, transporters, cryogenic infractructure, clean rooms for payloads, areas for hazardous fuel filling... And lots of people on the workforce with very specific skillsets.
And the kicker: launch only a handful of times per year so all that cost must be put into those launches.
Look at a modern airfield gate, all the activity when the plane rolls to it. See all those special vehicles, all the personnel. Some are putting the wheel chocks, some are waving guiding lights, someone connects the electricity line and then come the baggage handlers, the cleaners and the food people. The airplane requires more care on land than things like buses or trains for example. Or look at the people operating the security infrastructure. And the huge buildings out in the distance with the maintenance infrastructure and the workforce.
Think if there was just one flight per day per gate, what would the ticket cost be? Or one per month?
Actually flying used to be more infrastructure and labor intensive like that, and few people could afford it.
The amount of work per passenger mile has to be small for traveling to be possible for the masses. Otherwise we are in an old class society, since only a small elite can be served by a large amount people.
It was only with more efficient streamlined mass operations (as well as more efficient and more reliable aircraft) that flying became available to the common people, and finally even cheap. It's grown about 20 to 100 fold since 1950. Fuel cost is a significant portion of airline expenses by the way...
With rockets we are at an even worse starting point, since they cost roughly as much as an airliner (about a hundred million), yet are used only once.
That is the first point. But like demonstrated, solving the first problem is not enough. If the rocket must be "refurbished" after every flight and thus flies only a few times per year, nothing is gained, since all the other costs make the cost per flight so high that launches stay at their almost unusable price.
Hence real transformational reusable launch vehicles must also be cheap to operate per kilogram to orbit.
We don't yet really know how to do all that.
Well, I wasn't thinking just on price but from a strategical viewpoint.
If the point is making launches affordable and routine, you want predictable price and steady supply. The future of oil is grim, while organic waste for methane has a steady supply. It would be cleaner and net carbon credits. Apparently it's safer to store and handle too. Maybe that all adds up to significant savings, specially in the long term, when margins get thinner as more competitors enter the market? Haven't done any math though.
Never thought propellant was such a small fraction of the price though. Learn something new everyday.
I don't think the PSLV actually falls in their market. It has a payload almost 10x what the Firefly alpha would offer, and it has a $15 million price tag. Frankly, if the Firefly alpha is offered at anything other than single digit millions of dollars per launch it will not be commercially viable. I think the company is aware of that and that has driven the design of the rocket. The Firefly alpha is an enormously simple rocket, and is theoretically designed for ease of manufacture. It also uses incredibly inexpensive fuels which are easy to store.
ISRO was/is developing a smaller variant of PSLV called PSLV-3S. It is a three stage variant of the regular four stage PSLV (they removed 2nd stage, and strap-on boosters). PSLV-3S payload capacity is 550KG to LEO. However, I don't know about latest developments on it.
If Firefly can get their weight down by use of better materials and a more efficient engine then they could get a significantly lower cost to orbit. That's a big if, but I say it's worth the attempt.
Their own press release [1] says that "this efficient, brand new vehicle is capable of carrying 400kg into low earth orbit [...] for [...] around $8 or 9 million".
Wikipedia [2] says that the PSLV can lift 3250 kg into low earth orbit, for $15 million.
The Firefly Alpha costs 20,000 USD/kg. The PSLV costs 4615 USD/kg. It's four times more expensive. How much would they have to bring the weight down to be as cheap as the PSLV?
My first thought was to enumerate the red flags I see (since there have been a fair number of investor-bait non-serious "space startups"):
The team comprises CEO, CFO, COO, and VP-BizDev…no engineers, at least in the leadership. To be fair, the COO does have a BS in Physics and almost got a PhD in AE.
No photographs of any facilities, testing equipment, or anything short of 3D mockups. The name is based on a sci-fi TV show and the splash page is also a sci-fi quote.
Looking deeper, however, it looks like they've recently hired their 25th employee (a Systems Engineer) and are building out their engineering team aggressively. Recently funded in January. So perhaps they are legitimately worth keeping an eye on.
> The team comprises CEO, CFO, COO, and VP-BizDev…no engineers, at least in the leadership.
Huh? The CEO has a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace engineering from Princeton and was a Principle Propulsion Engineer at SpaceX, Senior Systems Engineer at Blue Origin, and the VP of Propulsion at Virgin Galactic. Put another way, he's been a key engineer at all the major private space companies...
Tom Markusic (CEO) is a real propulsion engineer. He's had a major hand in at least two liquid engines (Merlin and Newton). Which may or may not be a good thing. The overly-ambitious design of their rocket seems like it might be a symptom of having a "bored engineer" in charge. Which could produce some spectacular sci-fi-pulp-like results--but which will more likely kill the company through development hell.
So what is the market for small satellites? Is it just the companies that have existing (big) satellites needing to replace them? And now with miniaturization, it's possible to replace them with smaller, cheaper-to-launch versions?
Or is this meant to provide alternatives for other sectors? If I wanted to build a new cell phone network, would it be potentially cheaper to launch a bunch of small satellites than build out the ground infrastructure (towers)? Even though a satellite in LEO is significantly farther away than the average cellphone tower, would it work because line-of-sight is improved?
Last time I checked (5 years ago), small satellites were a _booming_ industry, but also a very amateur / research oriented one. While a professional military or communications organization may launch a number of small satellites, they tend to go through the same process as when they're building a large one. As such, most of the small sat world is focused on amateurs launching small satellites of their own design, student organizations and startups launching 1U type boxes, and research efforts for which a tiny box is sufficient.
As for your second question, a few points:
1) yes, it is massively cheaper to give your nation cell coverage via satellite as opposed to via tower. There have been a number of success stories in Africa where a local government / business managed to put together the funds to buy a communications satellite, and overnight, the entire country has cell phones.
2) No, you wouldn't do this via a small sat, you'd need a real deal communications satellite to achieve this. One of the key features of small sats is that they are small enough that if you beg and plead enough to the powers that be, you might find room on a launch vehicle to launch your tiny satellite in some spare room. If this service can open that up to people who don't have governmental / educational connections, all the better.
3) There is research on creating swarms of small satellites that can communicate and act like one giant one. That's pretty cool. I worked with these guys http://www.spacecraftresearch.com/blog/?page_id=260 for a time, and they were working on setting up satellites that were so small, they couldn't even fit a real antenna on them, but figuring out basically a radio based encoding pattern so that you could pull their signal out from beneath the noise floor anyway.
That all said, the industry is dominated that way because of the difficulty of launching a satellite to begin with. If you can make it easier to launch sats of any type, then people will start building those too. Build it, and they will come.
> There have been a number of success stories in Africa where a local government / business managed to put together the funds to buy a communications satellite, and overnight, the entire country has cell phones.
Really? That doesn't seem likely at all. You can either put the satellites in LEO and you need a hugely expensive constellation, or in GEO and you need a dish not a mobile phone. The best use case for satellite is probably backhaul, rather than cell tower replacement.
> Even though a satellite in LEO is significantly farther away than the average cellphone tower, would it work because line-of-sight is improved?
No, because you need loads of the things. They don't just hover overhead a few hundred km up, they orbit once every couple of hours. And if you want one to remain within that distance, you need a bunch in completely different orbits, launched at different times, to maintain coverage. Iridium took almost 80 satellites at 800km up, for instance. The higher up you go, the less satellites you need, but the bigger the handset gets, and speed-of-light delay becomes an annoyance.
I sincerely hope these folks get customers & funding to pursue this as it will only help grow the nascent industry.
I'm perplexed by the economics, however. A Falcon 9 v1.1 can do 13K kilos to LEO for $56MM. A Firefly Alpha can do 400 kilos to LEO for $9MM.
That's $5,000/kilo to LEO for SpaceX and $22,000/kilo for Firefly.
Also worth noting SpaceX tried for a small launcher first (Falcon 1) but moved on to larger payloads due to the lack of a market for small payload launches.
That seems to match intuition - that there are large fixed costs involved in making a rocket of any size that can reach LEO, and that scaling up the payload wouldn't necessarily increase the R&D and other fixed costs proportionally.
Then again, with increased size potentially comes nonlinearly increasing complexity requirements - multiple stages, more exotic fuels/engines, more parts to coordinate, etc. But I'm guessing LEO with these sorts of payload sizes isn't demanding enough to cause the complexity to overwhelm the fixed costs.
Does anyone know how these things compare with the trusty old Russian Proton rocket (family). The only thing I can find, is that the proton can supposedly do 20000 kg to LEO, but I don't know at what cost. I'm guessing the problem is that they don't scale far enough down?
[edit: Also it looks like the Russian Luna probes/satellites from the 50s and 60s had a payload of around 360(?) kg -- but perhaps whatever lanuch vehicle/method was used hasn't been brought up to date?]
I don't think it is accurate to suggest that this company is competing with SpaceX. It is accurate that SpaceX is trying to provide lower-cost launch capability and it is accurate that SpaceX is trying to make parts of its launch vehicles and spacecraft reusable.
With that said, the addressable markets for the two companies are vastly different. Firefly is targeting the <1000kg payload market, with the hypothetical initial launch vehicle targeting <400kg. The Falcon 9 is designed for an order of magnitude more payload, with upcoming vehicles targeting an even greater capability.
So, at this stage there may be a small amount of talent competition (at ~25 employees) and hypothetically it could provide competition for secondary payload capabilities in the future if things work out.
Or they could scale up once they prove their ability to fly... just like SpaceX did with the Falcon 1. Which, granted, had more payload capacity that the Firefly Alpha is designed for. But they could follow a similar plan.
There may be some money in the small launch market. But physics is not kind to small rockets.
I'm not sure it makes sense to assume that all launch companies want to scale up and build vastly bigger rockets. SpaceX did it to go after the CRS launches, and now onto larger commercial/military payloads. Their endgame was never lightweight launch class.
Firefly is making it their business plan to go after a lucrative business, and one that is likely to grow dramatically in the coming years. They're competing with the capabilities currently offered to secondary payloads on larger launch vehicles or as primary payloads on e.g. Orbital's solid fuel vehicles. Orbital/ATK is the real competitor here, not SpaceX.
It’s great that this may help lower costs for putting smaller/personal satellites up, but I also worry that this will only exacerbate our current space debris problem =[
My first major was aerospace, then I switched. Starting to wonder if I made a mistake.
I was told back then (late 90s) that there were no jobs doing anything non-military, and that the only thing I could possibly do if I wanted to work on anything cutting-edge was to work on weapons systems.
I hope the roadmap for these guys includes controlled descent and landing for the rockets - otherwise they haven't got a snowballs chance against SpaceX. The aerospike dependence on aerodynamics implies it will be much less effective when running in reverse for the landing phase - better have a way around this. When you look at the breakdown of fuel cost vs vehicle cost, it's obvious that reusable rockets will win so resoundingly that everything else will probably fall by the wayside.
I'm not so sure the economics works so well for reusables. Flying a reuseable LV requires (as far as anybody's managed, we'll see with SpaceX) far more work than just fuel & go. Typically you'd need a lot of maintenance work and repairs between each flight, not to mention the added complexity to the vehicle required for recovery. That's largely why the Shuttle wound up pushing a billion per launch, instead of the $10 million initially targeted, or the $110 million marginal cost of a launch.
It depends heavily on the level of refurbishment required between flights; agreed. I don't think there's enough examples to say "typically". The shuttle didn't come close to targets, but SpaceX seem to be progressing pretty well.
At the very least, a new orbital launch venture which is existentially dependent on SpaceX failing to achieve something that they're very well on track to achieving seems pretty commercially risky... and that's in the already highly commercially risky domain of space launch in general :-)
> Firefly is an American space western drama television series [...] The series is set in the year 2517, after the arrival of humans in a new star system, and follows the adventures of the renegade crew of Serenity, a "Firefly-class" spaceship.
I'm shocked that their lawyers even let them call their space company "Firefly". It's probably a sufficiently different field that they could win a trademark case at trial, but I'm not sure it's 100% cut-and-dry. I think naming a ship "Serenity" without securing some sort of licensing rights might be inviting trouble.
You shouldn't be. There are 185 trademarks for "Firefly" in the USPTO database [1]. Fox don't own any of them, but even if they did it would only apply to specific goods or services such as publishing fiction and merchandise, not launching rockets.
That said, I doubt one could call such a company "Harry Potter's Wizardly Rockets" without receiving a lawsuit, but I suspect such claims would be based on copyright.
Obviously. My point was that a show about a spaceship and a company that launches spaceships are close enough that you could imagine it was some kind of marketing tie-in. It's just plausible enough that it wouldn't necessarily be thrown out as absurd, and that's usually enough to scare off most startups (since going to court over it would be much more detrimental to the small startup than to 20th Century Fox).
I can imagine they'd want to tread lightly and not name one of their spaceships after a spaceship on the show Firefly.
To be fair, composites and aerospikes are well-tested, and methane has some good qualities and no obvious problems as a rocket fuel. (I don't know what they intend for pressurization; perhaps they want to boil both fuel and oxidizer to create pressure? Seem like a non-standard technique anyway.) And it's not like you can buy rocket hardware OTS, so everything you do is a development project. But none has flown on a real vehicle. Picking one would be ambitious. Four just seems like compounded risk.
Scaled Composites has had plenty of trouble with their seemingly-simple hybrid engine. You may think a technology is researched enough or simple enough to use without much danger, but rocketry is an extreme environment and can hold lots of surprises at scale and in the margins.
SpaceX, on the other hand, has only done one really revolutionary thing: cost discipline. Mostly through simplicity. Which is a pretty important contribution to the world of rocketry. Much more important than any particular nozzle or engine improvement.
The Firefly Alpha should be a nifty rocket if they can get it flying without spending too much money--but the history of rocket development doesn't suggest that'll be easy.