Today’s launch also marks SpaceX’s 50th in 2022.
That.
Sure, there’s fun with landing the boosters so they can be used again and all that. Building the Heavy. But the really big difference is they can do this once a week.
Volume production, it works.
And… If the bureaucrats don’t throw spanners in …
December will see the first full Starhip stack launch..
The reuse of the boosters is way more than fun; it’s how they get the volume to launch so often.
That might be the how but it’s not the it.
The reuse is what makes the operation cost effective in both materials and time; it’s the core of the business. Sure, you could go Soviet and produce the same volume of engines / fuel systems and throw them away each time, but you couldn’t afford to sustain it.
Sure. I’m the guy Musk once asked for advice on rocket making alloys, recall?
Still my point stands. It may well be that reuse is the method. But it is still the method, not the thing – which is volume.
The problem though is that even at 1 a week, it’s nowhere near the capacity he needs to get his “million tonnes to Mars” anytime soon and needs to switch that up to something like 3 a day (so from 50 a year to >1,000 a year), he’s hoping the rapid reusability of SpaceX Starship will give him that level of reuse, but it’s a big ask.
As for the bureaucratic (especially if you’re not a “friend of the establishment”), we’ve seen how bureaucratic intransigence can delay things with the FAA’s environmental impact impositions at Boca Chica. Moving launches to an offshore platform might address some of those concerns, but you’ve also then got the overhead of shipping rockets out to the offshore platforms for launch and all the associated weather issues that arise from seaboard launching.
So, yes. Amazing achievements so far but still a long way from where he needs it to be to fulfil his own dreams of colonising Mars.
But it is still the method, not the thing – which is volume.
Tractor production has increased yet again, comrade.
You’re constantly telling us that it’s productivity that counts towards making us richer; how the Soviet Union produced tons of shit but essentially never got better at doing it and expanded only by expanding resource use.
SpaceX has tremendous productivity compared to United Launch Alliance – and that comes from reuse. Sure, SpaceX is now a big concern and thus also benefits from economies of scale, but it’s still reuse that is the “thing” at its core.
Volume by itself doesn’t count for much, otherwise British Leyland would still be a thing.
The majority of those 50 launches are for their own Starlink communications cluster. The really clever bit is that they have got be around the inelastic nature of the launch services market by conjuring up a new concept that need lots and lots of launches that are only economically viable because booster re-use makes those launches cheap.
NASA reused shuttles. Didn’t lead to the volume nor the productivity increase. It’s not, therefore, just reuse which leads to the volume nor productivity increase. We might say – if we wished – that getting reuse right has done so. Which is fine. But that still leaves me able to say that the thing that SpaceX has got right is the volume and thereby productivity increase, not the reuse itself.
Indeed, what is produced is basically more important than how it is produced. If SpaceX produced only one re-usable rocket a year, it would still be cheaper to fly over its operational life than the equivalent number of disposables. And that’s why production volume is scalable. Infinitely scalable if you like. It’s producing the right product.
To reference another recent thread, unlike words for internet articles. Doesn’t matter how many words are produced their market value can be barely more than production costs & since they’re essentially hand made, there’s no way to reduce costs by automation. Yet. One needs to either reduce the unit cost of labour or increase the market value of the words. The first is the developing world route the second the western. Some writers do get paid a lot for their words. They’re producing the right product
The Shuttle was never a viable system. It was a vanity product. And a pork product. No doubt we will end up with a reusable hypersonic orbiter. But it won’t be done the way of the Shuttle & it won’t be built by a politically dependent organisation like NASA. Wrong product by the wrong people.
One of those little oddities. The *right* in the sense of best currently known material to use for the heat resistant tiles on a space plane that flies back down through the atmosphere is scandium aluminide (no, not scandium aluminium). Actually had an agreement to provide some to NASA at one point. But over the weekend that they were preparing the purchase order summat happened to one coming down – the entire programme, including that research, then scrapped.
NASA has 17,330 employees. SpaceX has 12,000. I wonder if that has anything to do with productivity.
I’m going with SpaceX on this.
https://www.spacex.com/mission/
“SpaceX believes a fully and rapidly reusable rocket is the pivotal breakthrough needed to substantially reduce the cost of space access.”
The more reusable a rocket system is, the fewer of them you have to produce. It’s rather the point.
Okay, let’s take that at face value then. What’s really the key here is turnaround time of the launch platform, because that’s what the US military really got pissed about with NASA and the shuttle and why they essentially undermined it during both the Challenger and Colombia shuttle inquiries.
They wanted to be able to do launches both on a tight deadline and ad hoc when required and the turnaround time of the shuttle didn’t allow that, because after every return the shuttle had to be partially disassembled to allow safety checks to take place, which undermined the original project goal of 150 flights over a 15 year period (essentially once per month).
SpaceX is currently running in multiple configurations from multiple launch locations with launch preparation and recovery running parallel.
To achieve comparable results with the shuttle would have required a fleet of perhaps 25 – 30 shuttles, even if the solid rocket boosters and external tanks could be produced at the necessary rate (which is not a give).
– No doubt we will end up with a reusable hypersonic orbiter.
Work is afoot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)
Of course, the more efficient and proven SpaceX becomes, the less attractive new ventures are.
I think Elons ethos is similar to that of Google – “Move fast and break things” or fail fast, fail early and fail often.
Not something you would usually associate with rocket science, as failures very much have real world consequences.
However SpaceX sounds to me a lot like a small startup akin to Apple when Steve Jobs was around. Absolutely top tier talent totally focussed on the task at hand, in stark contrast to the bureaucratic hell that NASA has been wallowing in for decades.
Btw SpaceX has its own fascinating website covering all the stats for launches;
https://www.spacexstats.xyz/
SpaceX alone dwarfs all other systems by a very large margin for both number of launches and mass to orbit.
It makes Elon pretty much untouchable as long as the US DoD needs his launch capacity.
John Galt – I don’t know why Elon Musk wants to go to Mars.
Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it’s cold as hell.
But beyond that, it has 1/3 Earth gravity (hello, crippling and deforming bone abnormalities!), no magnetosphere (hello, blistering solar radiation!), almost no atmosphere, almost no water (?), uncertain mineral extraction prospects, and you’d be living in tinfoil tents, drinking recycled piss, for long, boring, Martian years. Any children you might successfully produce assuming the solar radiation didn’t fry your gametes first would likely be ugly mutants who’d hate you and wreak a terrible, monstrous revenge on you in the end, no doubt by ironic decapitation via your own vinyl copy of Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds.
No, Mars is bollocks.
Why not think bigger?
Let the thankless work of planetary terraforming be done by bots and AI. In the meantime, humans should look to build space habitats.
O’Neill cylinders spun up to 1G and equipped with a paradise of ecology under perfect weather conditions, forever. It’s the next great leap from building mere cities. We should build countries, nations, entire worlds in space. A mini-civilisation for everybody. A new epoch of Man who builds his own shelters now, out in the big boy desert of pitiless vacuum, preferably in pursuit of some kind of Gothic Catholic Space Nazi ideal, fighting Cockney Space Orks and whatnot.
It’s a little bit scary if you ask me, but so is the idea of the entire human race staying on one planet forever. Elon Musk is certainly right about that, even if his desire to commit planetary scale genocide against all worlds found to harbour the Tyranids has yet to be established.
O’Neill cylinders spun up to 1G
If you calculate how big they have to be to get 1G without undue Coriolis effects for the inhabitants you’ll see the problems with that. A much smaller dish shaped & domed habitat’s far more practical. Then put it one end of a suitable length cable, a counterweight at the other & spin up. Counterweight could be another habitat.
Solar radiation shielding’s the big problem though. Maybe stick it at a solar/planetary L2 point so it always has the planet’s mass between it & the sun’s the answer.
Must admit when they were building the shuttle, I did wonder why were still using non-reusable boosters. I naturally thought those cool winged first stages I’d seen pictures of in scifi mags were the way to go.
Musk’s approach was much simpler and more direct. And he was obviously right and I was wrong.
In the meantime, humans should look to build space habitats.
My prediction is that every “permanent” space habitat will fail. Technical failure or human failure. Eventually something will go wrong that can’t be fixed. Eventually one or more persons will go batshit and terminally sabotage the joint. If the place can’t be evacuated or rescued quickly, everyone’s dead.
Maybe it’s just a lack of imagination on my part, but I think permanent human settlements in environments that aren’t failsafe (some of the land on this planet) aren’t even going to be popular let alone possible. Here on Earth, naturally uninhabitable environments are for work or adventure and are temporary. There’s loads of permanent ice-field, Tundra or undersea continental shelf right here within easy reach of colonisation, but no-one’s interested. Places like the Falklands or northern Canada / Alaska are right on the edge of acceptability, and they’re only primitively and low density liveable without constant outside supply.
Life is difficult. Let’s hope we don’t find out this winter how tough things can be even on this fair isle.
Don’t talk sense PJF, the dreamers *know* that space is the answer. Even if they haven’t worked out the questions yet.
I’m loving how Musk has gone from darling of the nerd left (tech wizard, love of Tesla, appearing on Big Bang etc) to villain in almost no time. Yet he remains almost exactly the same as he ever was.
Musk will probably build a private country in the mid Atlantic to get the bureaucrats off his back.
BiFR, Presumably one with a volcano within its territory…
Steve, Mars is a target for several reasons. The Moon is “easier” to reach, but is a Harsh Mistress. And there is the rice-throwing issue..
Mars has more real estate, which is more likely to have spots with sedimentary rock suitable for going Troglodyte, which a permanent colony needs to do anyway. You want easy digging..
It’s also got an atmosphere that’s actually ideal for hydroponics = oxygen. The hard part will be to dilute the oxygen enough to not be a hazard…
And water.. There is water on Mars. To what level it’s useable remains to be seen, but that is what expeditionary forays are for either by robot or by nosy humans.
Who up to that point have to work with “recycled piss”, but then again, so would the peeps living in your fancy space habitats, doubly so even….
And really… what do you think the water on this here planet actually is after some 4.5 billion years?
Thanks Grikath. I looked it up and was surprised to see a small amount of free oxygen in the Martian atmosphere. I’d naturally assume it’s biologically produced.
As for where space colonies could go, I’d agree one on Mars could probably survive more human stupidity.
Still even on Earth, if we, for example, wrecked our supplies of plentiful, reliable and cheap energy, stopped producing chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and made sure all evil genetically modified organisms were eliminated and only good old Gaia’s pre-human products were available,the population density’d drop to that of pre-colonial Oz.
But naturally we’d never be silly enough to do that, would we???
@ Boganboy I did wonder why were still using non-reusable boosters.
Technically those shuttle boosters were re-usable. They parachuted down into the Atlantic and were recovered, refurbished, and often flown again. It is believed that this cost 3 times as much as making new ones.
The early shuttle concepts had a smaller shuttle sitting on a much bigger similar shaped space plane that was the booster. This ceased to be possible as more requirements were placed on the shuttle and it grew.
Exactly Andyf the original shuttle was based on a von Braun design for a craft that could bomb America from space. Under the USAF it became the X20 and under Nasa the Shuttle. Both the military and civilians kept on adding requirements and it became bigger and more expensive. Watch the beginning of the Six Million Dollar Man – that was what the X20 was supposed to be like.
Thanks AndyF!!
PS I thnk SpaceX is cool. Being brought up on 1950s and 60s sci fi films and Gerry Anderson on black and white tellies, the self landing rocket is what “it” should be all about
‘I thnk SpaceX is cool’
Yep!!!
I still think the funniest part is that Von Braun wrote “Marsprojekt”, a science fiction novel in German between 1948 and 1949 while stationed at the U.S. Army’s rocket research facility at Fort Bliss in New Mexico and in this science fiction novel the leader of the Martians was known as “The Elon”.
Perhaps we only have SpaceX because of nominative determinism?
@Boganboy The oxygen currently on Mars isn’t from a biological process, but a purely physical one: dissociation of water through irradiation.
The H2/H+ escapes Mars’ atmospere pretty rapidly due to its low gravity and the solar wind, and the O- radicals either recombine to oxygen, or bond(ed) to the iron in Mars’ surface rock.
And even then.. oxygen by itself is a tad too light to stay on Mars in any appreciable concentration, so it’ll bleed off over time if it doesn’t get bound to something, like carbon or iron.
It’s likely there was a period where there was life on Mars, but I very much doubt it got past the chemotrophic or anaerobic stage. Not enough time, not the right circumstances.
Even here on Earth the first “oxygen-shock” wasn’t biological, but physical: Irradiation of the ice sheets during the Snowball Earth stage. During which one set of critters figured out how to use the poison, and got really popular as a neighbour.
To the point that anything aerobic nowadays has the descendants of one of those critters as a symbiont integrated in their cells. Only nowadays we call them mytochondria.
Biological oxygen production took over somewhere during the Snowball Earth stage, but only after the initial oxygen shock killed off the competition from the chemotrophs and methanogens, and drove them, literally, to the depths.
Talking of refurbishment, I wonder how much is needed on SpaceX first stages. Most bits of a rocket are working in a high stress environment which normally means short lifetime. The fact that one of his boosters is now up to, I think, 14 launches suggests that the refurbishment operation is very slick and that he has largely solved the stress/lifetime conundrum in this domain.
Yes, the argument is that SpaceX rockets aren’t so much reuseable as refurbishable, but it’s still early days yet and this may have more to do with ensuring safety of early launchers and insurance concerns than anything else.
Fastest turnaround time on a reused rocket was 21 days, but more typically it’s about 50 days albeit reducing as time goes on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEEzAPGeUvs
Why does Musk want to colonise Mars? Maybe he knows something we don’t, for example that Covid was lab-created by a billionaire who wanted to solve the ageing population problem by wiping out most of the elderly using a disease which would look natural and not be noticed until it had done its work, but who overcooked the recipe slightly.
Eric Berger’s summary mentioned that this year SpaceX had acheived 50 launches and 51 landings. Nice.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/spacex-successfully-launches-its-first-falcon-heavy-in-40-months/
Or as David Gunson would say…”A good pilot is…”
Nah…
Thradition dictates that a self-respecting super-villain has a volcanic lair.
While other lesser villains mucked about with small pacific island jobs, Musk has set his eyes on Olympus Mons.
Seems to me that there may be a lot more water on Mars than we currently know about. At Mars temperatures, water’s a mineral not a liquid. So a lot of that dust & regolith maybe ice crystals. Which over billions of years has turned into sandstones with the water still in it. Raise the temperature of Mars, a lot of that water would come out as liquid, eventually. Mars swallowed its seas & may one day give them up again.
PJF – My prediction is that every “permanent” space habitat will fail. Technical failure or human failure. Eventually something will go wrong that can’t be fixed. Eventually one or more persons will go batshit and terminally sabotage the joint. If the place can’t be evacuated or rescued quickly, everyone’s dead.
You are absolutely right, but I think the risk/reward can be made worth it (almost free energy and unlimited raw materials in space), and I think the risk can be managed. Similar risks to planetary or lunar colonisation, tbf. What happens if your Mons Olympus hab suffers catastrophic mechanical or electrical failure?
Maybe it’s just a lack of imagination on my part, but I think permanent human settlements in environments that aren’t failsafe (some of the land on this planet) aren’t even going to be popular let alone possible. Here on Earth, naturally uninhabitable environments are for work or adventure and are temporary. There’s loads of permanent ice-field, Tundra or undersea continental shelf right here within easy reach of colonisation, but no-one’s interested. Places like the Falklands or northern Canada / Alaska are right on the edge of acceptability, and they’re only primitively and low density liveable without constant outside supply.
I’d love to colonise Antarctica, and Buckminster Fuller was right about that. But we already know the failure rate of life on Earth is about 99.9% of all species that have ever lived.
There is a doomsday asteroid out there with Planet Earth’s address on it. Failing that, an inconvenient supernova, another couple of million years of Iceball Earth or any number of terrestrial and extraterrestrial threats will eventually bring an end to complex vertebrate life on this planet. We need a Plan B. It won’t be a lot of fun living on other planets tho – nearly all of them are shit.
But a country in the sky? How can we not be swept up in the romance of such ambition? Homo Sapiens: world builders. Not a bad thing to put on the old CV. Bring back the optimism about the future, the faith in our own intelligence, that used to be the mainstay of Popular Mechanics and Tomorrow’s World.
Grikath – oxygen by itself is a tad too light to stay on Mars in any appreciable concentration, so it’ll bleed off over time if it doesn’t get bound to something, like carbon or iron.
Trying to fix up the place is pointless without a magnetosphere. We can build an artificial magnetosphere, but I’m guessing it’d be many centuries or millennia before that bears fruit.
But a fleet of self replicating von Neumann machines could turn Ceres into desirable real estate in that time.
And really… what do you think the water on this here planet actually is after some 4.5 billion years?
Maybe in London. Out here in the real Britain, our water is sweet and pure, and gently giggles in burbling brooks like a young Catherine Zeta Jones from the Darling Buds of May.
BiS – If you calculate how big they have to be to get 1G without undue Coriolis effects for the inhabitants you’ll see the problems with that
The problem is also a solution. Space is a Go Big or Go Home play, why bother playing with flimsy toys when we can bring man-sized plans to the party?
The Shuttle was a great example of this: huge amounts of wealth and know-how crammed into a flimsy little package powered by piddly chemical rockets. Chad scientists of the 1950’s had a much better plan to use atom bombs to get to space in style.
Chrome fins, wet bars, big comfy chairs and everything. If bespectacled pocket protected nerds using slide rules could be so bold, it should shame us that we are so timid.
Steve. O’Neil cylinders aren’t an answer. What I suggested is. One can extend that into a ring. That could be doable. Orbiting the billions of tons needed to build O’Neil cylinders might come later. A long while later. Extending a ring into a tube. But you can’t start with that. You need a route to it.
The idea I like is building a ring around the sun. Not the Niven ringworld but a tube. The tube rotates to produce 1g. Sounds impossible geometry, but the structure’s so large any particular arc of the ring’s effectively straight. Gets rid of the problem of the entire ring having to rotate to produce the g, which would require materials of improbable tensile strengths. Get the tube diameter & the rotation rate right for 1g, make half the tube diameter transparent & you get a 24h day/night cycle. No shadow squares required. Just like home.
Wonder why Niven didn’t think of that? Didn’t suit the plotlines?
– But a fleet of self replicating von Neumann machines could turn Ceres into desirable real estate in that time.
Collect Underpants – – – – > ? – – – – > Profit
– – – – – – – – – – – you are here ^
– Chrome fins, wet bars, big comfy chairs and everything.
The glossy brochure is easy. In reality, after just 22 hours on the surface, the Apollo 17 moonwalker’s spacesuits were fucked. They couldn’t have gone out again if they’d wanted to, and were lucky to get back alive.
– If bespectacled pocket protected nerds using slide rules could be so bold, it should shame us that we are so timid.
I’m all for it, even though our expeditions so far have been outrageously fascistic impositions on the tax payer. But making an energy system out of renewables is peanuts compared to the challenges of living “out there”.
@PJF
A good reason for colonising space is that there’s all that zero g, vacuum & energy going virtually for free. All things that are expensive or impossible to create on a planetary surface. And all things would benefit a lot of industrial processes.
As for leaving the bottom of one gravity well just to move to another… It is a bit difficult to see the why. Bearing in mind the problems of doing so are virtually the same, it’d probably be better to colonise asteroids rather than planets.
Bollocks, in the preview the up arrow was under the question mark.
See, all plans fail when they meet reality.
I do like your recommendation of Project Orion Steve.
I understand Zubrin proposed that a mixture of uranium salts in the propellant’d let you heat it up far more effectively than weak old chemical fuels. Of course the Greens would howl at Holy Mother Gaia being sprayed by immense quantities of radioactive fuel.
A much smaller dish shaped & domed habitat’s far more practical. Then put it one end of a suitable length cable, a counterweight at the other & spin up. Counterweight could be another habitat.
Nice idea, but doesn’t it also “require materials of improbable tensile strengths” for the cable?
Indeed, Chris. The same magical stuff that’s supposed to be used for the strut for the equally magical Space Elevator.