"Greg (Strider) Moore" wrote in message
...


In my reply below, replace Blue Horizon with Blue Origin.


"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
...

In article ,
says...

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/0...p-in-half.html
Some positive news.

Though I suspect launch PRICES won't drop much and rather profit margins
will increase for SpaceX.

True. But they're still by far the cheapest launch provider, so there
is no incentive to lower prices any further. When the competition
starts lowering their prices (which won't happen anytime soon), then
SpaceX will lower theirs.

Right that's my piont the entire comment about "could launch for $20M" is
not going to happen, at least not away.

And of course by the time someone starts putting that pressure on them,
they'll have found other ways to cut their costs.

Market driven pricing.

But it does mean it'll be harder for ULA and others to compete unless
they
can really cut costs.

Yep. And so far ULA has only paid lip service to reuse (their so called
"smart reuse" is dumb since it only recovers the engines of the first
stage. By the time this is perfected, SpaceX might very well be flying
BFR/BFS which will be fully reusable.

Yeah, the ULA "solution" seems like what I'd expect from a traditional
vendor.

I mean they're right, physically the engines are the most expensive
components. And I'm not surprised their reaction is, "Let's work on the
most expensive HARDWARE" and not really look at it from an entire systems
POV like SpaceX and Blue Horizon has, which is the entire system.
Sure, you get the engines back... but you need an expensive aircraft for
every recovery. SpaceX only needs a drone ship for some of their
recoveries. I'd be curious to see which is cheaper to operate. The
helicopter only needs to be in flight for a couple of hours, but aircraft
hours are very expensive. The drone ships are probably very cheap to
operate on an hourly basis, but need to be in operation for more hours.

But then once you get back the engines vs. booster, you've got more
stacking operations. I can't see that being cheap. Touch labor gets
expensive and it SpaceX seems to be well aware of that (e.g. I bet the
titanium fin-grates are more expensive upfront, but if you don't have to
touch them for 10 flights, you've reduced your touch costs and probably
saved money.)

I think ULA is going to win this fight. At least with Vulcan.
Blue Horizon is still an unknown quantity.


Jeff


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