to Mars and back

In article ,
says...

"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
...

In article om,
says...

On 15-02-23 08:31, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:

As for cost, we're getting there. SpaceX is really changing the
environment.


Is SpaceX *really* changing the environment, or just making the USA
competitive again for launches compared to bloated and expensive
Nasa/Boeing ?

In other words, compared to Russians and even ESA, is SpaceX
significantly lower cost per kg of payload or just "competitively
priced" but in same ballpark ?

They're currently half the cost of the cheapest of the international
competition, and that's fully expending both of Falcon 9's stages. When
they start reusing the first stage of Falcon 9, and especially the first
three stages on Falcon Heavy, no other launch provider will be able to
come close on cost.

So, yea, SpaceX really is disrupting the entire industry.


To be fair, we only know the PRICE of foreign launchers (especially Russian
ones) we don't know the cost.
It could be the Russians are way overpaying.

It could be, but the Russians have their own problems. They finally
started launching Angara from their own launch facilities in Russia.
This has been "in the works" since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Remember that? Ronald Reagan and "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!".
It's been a long time coming.

So, it's hard to tell what the reliability will be, especially because
we're talking about the Russians. Even their "old reliable" Proton
launch vehicle hasn't been as reliable as it should have been during the
last couple of decades.

That said, I suspect even on cost they're still coming out far ahead.

And agree, even with partial reusability they'll change the market.

My only fear would be as an investor that they end up like the Wright
Company and end up bankrupt.

For that to happen, other companies would need to build vehicles like
theirs which are optimized for low cost, not "performance". And if
SpaceX is successful with reuse, they'd need to do that too. I really
don't see the likes of the dino-space companies doing this and being
competitive on price. It might just be possible for investors to fund
other start-ups to compete with SpaceX. But, they'd need strong
business and engineering leadership to be successful. In other words,
they'd need another Elon Musk, or someone pretty damn close.

However from the perspective of opening up space, that's fine. Today we
have Boeing, even if we don't have the Wright Company.

Maybe, but SpaceX is disrupting an established industry, so the parallel
with heavier than air craft isn't quite there.

Sometimes simply showing something can be done is enough to open up an
entirely new market.

True, but part of the reason the dino-space companies are expensive is
their size, business practices, and quite frankly their internal
culture. It would be damn hard for one of them to start acting like a
new-space start-up.

That said, I think they'll fair better than the Wright Company did. (which,
googling around looks like it's still around in a very different form as
Curtiss-Wright, which I wasn't aware of.)

If I remember right, part of what did the Wright Company in was World
War I. The US Government decided that it needed to end the (then
ongoing) patent disputes between the Wright Company and the emerging
competition. The US Government decided that it needed the cooperation
of those companies right away, and forced an end to the patent wars in
the US aircraft industry. If that war hadn't happened, it may have
taken years or even decades of lawsuits for the industry to straighten
itself out.

So again, the parallels can't quite be made, because the launch industry
is already technologically mature and full of existing patents and we,
hopefully, won't be engaged in another World War big enough for the
draft, rationing of goods for civilians, and etc.

It's hard to tell what's going to happen with the industry long term,
but in the short term it's clear that Elon Musk and SpaceX are being
quite disruptive.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

In article om,
says...

On 15-02-27 06:04, Jeff Findley wrote:

True, but part of the reason the dino-space companies are expensive is
their size, business practices, and quite frankly their internal
culture.

I would say that they have historically been built on pork with money
flowing for government and no competition.

Remember that competition from Russia is relatively recent in terms of
commercial launches. I suspect ESA's pricing was not very disruptive to
Boeing/Lockheed.

There are similarities with airlines and telcos, both of which focused
originally on high margin business customers and not on low margin
residential/coach customers. And they set their offering in a way that
the affordable services lack one or 2 key features needed by business
services to ensure that residential services do not cannabalise high
profit business services.

When a competitor arrives in the business market, this really hurts
those companies who have relied on very high business pricing to survive
and are unwilling to cannabalise that business with lower pricing
because that "comfy" zone was allowed to become bloated and inefficient
due to high profit margins over the decades.

If you look at Boeing commercial aircraft, they not only kept their
prices highs, but their products old, while Airbus built better/newer
aircraft and agressively went after customers. Boeing eventually woke
up and started to do the same, updating the 737, introducing 787,
upgrading the 777 and is winning back market share.

It is possible that SpaceX will do to Boeing aerospace what Airbus did
to Boeing commercial airplanes.


On the other hand, if government pork continues, Boeing may be perfectly
happy getting money for useless rockets to nowhere that NASA is
building. If that is a bigger business than commercial launches Boeing
may not be ready to cannabalize that pork to become lean and mean and
may cede that market to spaceX.

BUT, if/when pork ends, then Boeing Aerospace would likely turn around
within 5 years and get really agressive.

Extremely doubtful. ULA does launch vehicles. Boeing does pork. I'd
be more inclined to believe that ULA will get its $#!^ together long
before Boeing. But even that doesn't appear to be happening. ULA has a
lot of technical expertise, but is very large and I don't think they
have the management culture necessary to compete with a lean start-up.

One bit of current evidence is that ULA is still scrambling for a
replacement for the RD-180, but are only looking externally for that
replacement. They're not willing to commit their resources to the task.
In fact, I'm betting they're lobbying behind closed doors for USAF
funding for a new engine which would meet their requirements (in case
Blue Origin doesn't come through).

Vertical integration is one of the key reasons SpaceX is winning on
cost. ULA is demonstrating that it is not willing to do the same.
Boeing is also quite unlikely to do the same.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

On Monday, February 23, 2015 at 6:35:01 PM UTC-5, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
david.l.spain says...

On Sunday, February 22, 2015 at 10:48:08 PM UTC-5, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
pedro1492 says...
Seems rather optimistic speculation.

Not at all. What was optimistic was the assumption that NASA funding
would continue at the same level as it was during the height of
Apollo/Saturn development. That assumption was proven false.

We need rockets about 10 times as powerful, and about 1/000th the cost
of 20th century technology.

In terms of size, no, we don't. Saturn V would have been enough.
Falcon Heavy would be big enough too, given enough launches.


Most Mars mission profiles from the 70's I recall, envisioned a nuclear upper stage. In the Saturn V configuration we're talking the 3rd stage, I believe.
Such technology was very close at hand in the early 70's but as you point out the funding had been cut off much earlier. Jeff, do you recall if there were other, pure chemical configurations based on Saturn V (either via fuel depot and/or multiple launches)? I keep remembering the timeline of ~1986 being tossed around as a "realistic" deadline for the first Saturn V derivative Mars missions. Of course that was all before we got the Space Truck fever!

Note that even with a nuclear upper stage, you still needed a lot of LH2
to "fuel" it, so the cryogenic storage problem would still need to be
solved (at least to the point of "good enough") with nuclear.

When you look at those sorts of details, nuclear wasn't really "needed".
It was part of the "everything and the kitchen sink" R&D that came with
Apollo/Saturn's blank checks.

Either a nuclear upper stage or cryogenic fuel depots could have been
used with conventional LOX/LH2 engines (J-2 wasn't a bad engine for its
time and had upgrade potential, just as the F-1 was being upgraded to
the F-1A).


Sorry to revive an old thread, but upon reflection and re-reading this some time later I realize what I remembered was a configuration of "assembled-in-orbit" cluster of Saturn V 3rd stages all feeding their own nuclear engine. I suppose in this configuration the 3rd stage was significantly modified to hold only LH2 or mostly LH2 with significantly reduced O2 tanks for air and water (with H2+O fuel cell combination?) for the trans hab module that sat on top of the core this cluster.

Dave