Posted on 12/28/2015 3:09:13 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Explanation: The booster has landed. Spaceflight took a step toward the less expensive last week when the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket set down on a landing pad not far from its Florida launch. Previously, most rocket stages remained unrecovered -- with the significant exception of the Space Shuttles landing on a runway and their solid rocket boosters being fished back from the sea. The landing occurred while the Falcon 9 second stage continued up to launch several communications satellites into low Earth orbit. The controlled landing, produced by SpaceX, was the first of its kind, but followed a booster landing last month by Blue Origin that did not involve launching satellites. Boeing and SpaceX were selected last year by NASA to launch future astronauts to the International Space Station. The pictured rocket booster will be analyzed for wear and reusability, but then is scheduled to be retired.
(Excerpt) Read more at 129.164.179.22 ...
[Video Credit: SpaceX]
This changes everything...
thx
agreed
So let me get this straight: We load up the first stage with an extra 10,000 lbs of propellant to save a $20,000,000 booster while saying “no” to a paying customer, who wanted to give you $100,000,000 to launch his satellite. Trading launch mass from paying customers to “saving” the first booster makes no sense.
This makes no sense. Why would I offload a satellite payload from a customer who would pay me $100,000,000 in exchange for saving a $20,000,000 booster?
POC ... proof of concept .... cool your jets, Bobby
Right now the cost to send a satellite into space aboard a Falcon 9 is about $61.2 million.
“while saying ‘no’ to a paying customer,”
Who did SpaceX say, ‘no,’ to? And the context to that decision?
SpaceX can make a decision to either fill up the tanks and recover the booster (save $20m) or offload the tanks and launch another payload for a paying customer (make $60m).
The likely answer is time between launches. It is likely, though I don’t have the data, that it takes far less time to refurbish and relaunch using the recovered booster then the amount of time it would take to fabricate a new one from scratch.
As such with limited capital you can earn more over a shorter period of time through added launches due to the shorter turn around time between launches. So the second payload still gets launched, just at a different time. Now you’ve made both of the 100M launches and also saved 40M in booster cost. In addition, the two payloads didn’t need to make any compromises between payloads for location requests, altitudes, weight tradeoffs, etc.
I would love to see a business plan for reusable boosters. I have been searching but havn’t seen one. Commercial launch companies like Boeing, United, Lockheed, etc. have been launching satellites for decades and I am sure would have already developed reusable vehicles if they could make a profit doing it.
Or have discarded it based on old data. Bias is a destroyer long term.
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