Posted on 12/07/2014 9:58:28 AM PST by Jack Hydrazine
Except that he won't be throwing away several thousands of pounds of aerospace hardware with every launch. Which do you think is more expensive, a pound of missile or a pound of fuel? By your logic it would be cheaper to by a new plane than load the fuel to taxi back to the gate.
If he can get the recycling down cheap enough to amortize the costs of the rocket — which will still wear out — over more than one launch, he’ll save some there. The cost of the payload per pound is what he’s trying to reduce, and he WILL have to use more fuel — and build a larger rocket — to get the same amount of payload into orbit as his competitors do. SpaceX has cut the cost of building the rockets and the price per pound to orbit, but has thrown away the rockets, just like everyone else.
The history of space flight has shown that there are no savings from recycling. The Shuttle in the middle of its run ate up over a half billion dollars to recover SRBs and rebuild/refuel them, service the liquid fueled main engines and refuel them, and the price was higher and higher as it reached the end of its years of service (and two of the orbiters were of course destroyed).
I’d prefer to have Musk running NASA, which he’d probably never agree to do. But it isn’t about who’s paying, it’s about chemistry and physics.
If you read the history of the development of the shuttle, it is clear the requirements the air force brought to the table killed any chance for the shuttle to be a viable reusable system. It didn’t help that Nixon was strangling the shuttle development budget to pay for Johnson’s great society boondoggle. To make matters even worse, NASA was far more concerned with performance than system availability.
Even discounting that the shuttle is one data point.
By far the single biggest cost in a launch is the vehicle that gets thrown away.
And yet, LBJ had already thrown his own Great Society programs to the dogs to pay for Vietnam according to the press back at that time. Reusability was the ONLY priority for building the Shuttle; the argument in favor was exactly the one you’re making now; the Shuttle remains the only reusable system that has ever made it to operational status; discounting the ONLY one as “one data point” is absurd; and of course, blaming the Air Force and Nixon for the Shuttle’s problems — problems which are directly attributable to the singleminded pursuit of reusability — is something a Demwit would do.
Have you ever read the history of shuttle development? Nasa got little of what they asked for and ultimately built the vehicle the air force wanted.
In no other area of transportation are expendable vehicles considered viable. They were only used for launchers because it was easier to use the ammunition that was available than developing a new system from scratch.
From the beginning, von Braun and others envisioned reusable vehicles and planned to develop them at the first opportunity.
Congress cut NASA’s budget. NASA’s response should have been to dump the plans for a quasi-reusable vehicle, but of course it didn’t, it pushed even harder for it, and dumped every other proposed project. The Air Force wasn’t interested in it without an increase in payload capacity, which meant a larger vehicle, which meant SRBs.
The interesting thing about the SRBs, which are often complained about by, well, idiots, is that they are reusable components, and in terms of bang for the buck, they actually make the most sense. In the upcoming SLS enhanced versions will make their return to man-rated vehicles.
As disposables.
Four of the existing-design SRBs could send a manned lunar mission into direct ascent trajectory to the Moon — no shuttle, no liquid fuel first stage engines, just light and go. That could be designed in a couple of years, and launched to the Moon by 2020. A single SRB costs about $50 million new, the estimated cost of recycling that I’ve seen is $18 million per SRB per launch. IOW, even if the four-segment SRBs used on the Shuttle were put together for a lunar mission, and thrown away, it would only run about $200 million for the first stage; if recovered, the cost for subsequent missions would drop below $60 million for the first stage.
Von Braun never worried about reusability, he understood the tyranny of the mass budget. He wanted to use the Saturn V boosters to assemble Mars missions in orbit. His vision would have led to twelve Saturn V launches to assemble a single manned mission to Mars.
The shuttle was a quasi-reusable vehicle. NASA failed to focus on optimizing the availability of the system because they were desperately trying to get something past Nixon’s idiot bean counters.
And it is simply false to say Von Braun did not care about reusability. He didn’t have time to develop it in Kennedy’s schedule. He envisioned a stepwise approach that would have developed a reusable spacecraft and space station as infrastructure for getting to the moon.
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