Lockheed, SpaceX Trade Barbs 215
Lockheed Martin and Boeing have been getting all government launch contracts for the past six years. That is, until SpaceX demonstrated they could reach the International Space Station successfully this year. Asked about the new competition brought by SpaceX, Lockheed CEO Robert Stevens made light of the younger company's success. "I’m hugely pleased with 66 in a row from [the Boeing-Lockheed alliance], and I don’t know the record of SpaceX yet," he said. "Two in a row?" When he was asked about the skyrocketing price of launching his sky rockets, he said, "You can thrift on cost. You can take cost out of a rocket. But I will guarantee you, in my experience, when you start pulling a lot of costs out of a rocket, your quality and your probability of success in delivering a payload to orbit diminishes." SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was blunt about the source of the price difference between the companies: "The fundamental reason SpaceX’s rockets are lower cost and more powerful is that our technology is significantly more advanced than that of the Lockheed-Boeing rockets, which were designed last century." The Delta IV and Atlas V rockets of Lockheed-Boeing average about $464 million per launch, while SpaceX's Falcon 9 launches for $54 million. Its upcoming Falcon Heavy will go up for $80-125 million.
Progress! (Score:5, Insightful)
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
- some baldie
Re:Progress! (Score:5, Insightful)
SpaceX is blowing the competition away. Even the Chinese have said they can't match SpaceX's prices. ULA will continue building Deltas and Atlases for a while yet, but once their current launch manifests are cleared, they'll have a tough time selling any more. Their only hope of survival is if SpaceX can't ramp up production fast enough to devour the entire market. In the meantime, other "NewSpace" vendors are getting into the game, making life even tougher for the "legacy" crowd. I just wonder how long it will take before SLS gets canceled.
Re:Progress! (Score:5, Insightful)
Their only hope of survival is ...
... market segmentation between commercial and dotmil.
In ye olden days: "Hmm we've got experience building cost is no object ICBMs, and there's a budding, although small and price sensitive commercial market... lets hit it while we can". Worked OK until real commercial competitors arrived.
They can go back to the glory days of ICBM building with the proper congressional bribes. Maybe ICBM launched drone strikes or whatever. They'll never sink as long as .mil is around.
If you demand a bad slashdot car analogy, if no one is building commuter cars, the guys who make Abrams tanks can make fat stacks of cash until Toyota arrives and kicks them out of the market... that doesn't mean the market for tanks is permanently gone or being given to Toyota. Just means the tank company is going back to building tanks, instead of econoboxes or tropical fish aquaria or monitor mounting arms or WTF they temporarily diversified into.
Now if spacex is all a scam to bootstrap into the lucrative ICBM market, then, at that time, we'll have the epic business battle of the century.
If you want another really bad analogy, I'm not sure whos on which side but its like trying to pick a fight between a 4 star restaurant and a fast food hovel. Technically you can stuff your piehole at either facility, but in practice its unlikely either will succeed in putting the other out of business.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Progress! (Score:5, Interesting)
> SpaceX would need to have solids, which they've quite deliberately eschewed.
ULA's Common Booster Core (CBC) is liquid-fueled only. Solids are indeed more storable for the long term, but if you need to vary the thrust for different orbital profiles and payloads, liquid is the only way to go.
I don't know that SpaceX is even interested in the ICBM market. Elon Musk is a space head who just wants to see people in the stars, and his company is a way to achieve his boyhood dream while making it pay for itself.
What I want to know is when someone is going to take on the jetliner market. Maybe a SpaceX-like company could come along and eat into that market a swell. Then Airbus will join Boeing and the others in complaining and sweating. :)
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Fundamentally what SpaceX seems to do is produce their systems in an integrated environment and not worry about a lot of the things the traditional players do. No clean rooms, production designed to scale, things like that. They use a startup mentality and ...more theatrical lighting truss than I would have thought practical. They buy things that make sense now with an eye to the future, but they don't keep idle capacity around.
Unfortunately, the jetliner parallel would need to eschew FAA certification.
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Really?
You would not drop in cost comparable to what we see in the summary for that risk?
I would in a heartbeat. I fly fairly often, and when I do it tends to be over one of the worlds large oceans or the other one. If I could get there for $200 instead of $2000 I would consider giving up some safety margin for that. The odds of dying in a plane crash are so low they are not even a thought I have.
Your odds of dying in car crash per year, over a lifetime or per mile are hundreds of times more likely, yet no
Re:Progress! (Score:5, Informative)
According to a federal report [nhtsa.gov], you are paying $839 and adding 125 pounds for a much safer car than you had 25 years ago, so yes. People are willing to pay more for safety.
I don't think ULA prices being 10X have anything to do with more safety, I think its mostly more overhead and lack of competition.
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So we are paying about a 6% premium on the cheapest cars for safety. That seems pretty acceptable to me. I think I would accept that level of cost for safety.
I am not saying people are not willing to pay for safety, I am suggesting people are not willing to pay 10X for a very small increase in safety. If the cheapest cars were suddenly $150k instead of $15k, people would feel differently.
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Was this your attempt to be as vague as possible?
Other than more fuel being burned from increased weight, what are you trying to say?
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RWD has little impact on fun to drive, and I am not sure what road conditions benefit from it. Surely not Snow and Ice, AWD or FWD are much preferred then.
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The spacex vs ULA to some upstart vs. Boeing/Airbus analogy is pretty weak.
Commercial air transport is already an aggressively competitive business. Many other companies try to compete with Boeing and Airbus in the single-aisle jetliner market and struggle to compete on price, weight and fuel efficiency, to say nothing of attempting to compete in the wide-body airliner market. Look up how China is doing attempting to build a 100% national airliner with Comac. They are years behind and overweight, still rely
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You left out the elderly.
So far no teenagers have driven into a restaurant killed a waitress and made a child an orphan. The old bat then tried to drive off. She is only losing her license. If a teenager did that they would be going to prison. In my part of the state there have been 3 similar accidents in recent months.
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I think benjfowler is pointing out the fact that for ICBMs you really want the storage flexibility of solid fuel boosters. You can argue all you want about the pros and cons of solids in a non military application but for bombs you want to be able to create Armageddon at the drop of the hat.
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3...2...1...Lunch! (Score:2)
Which is why the the continual Luddite refrain that the Apollo program was just a way to build a better ICBM is so nonsensical. Even a Saturn I would have been a horrible ICBM...
Ignoring the ad-hominem attack which does nothing to support your claim, your statement is overlooking something. You claim that the various rockets would have been poor weapon platforms, but your thesis statement is that the Apollo program wasn't tied to ICBM development. You are correct that the Saturn rockets would be lousy weapons, but you overlook that there were a lot of things probably learned in the civilian rocket programs that got applied to ICBM development. A lot of times studying field 'A' wi
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By the time the Mariner missions were finished the military had everything they needed for the ICBM program. Face it, throwing half a ton of something into a ballistic orbit and making sure it lands within half a kilometer of your target isn't that hard, not even with 1960's tech. The really revolutionary advance that the Pentagram got from the Apollo program was 'zero defect manufacturing', nothing like it had ever been done outside small craftsman shops
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Perhaps you've noticed in the West the utter lack of liquid fueled ICBM's - and in the rest of the world, liquids are being steadily phased out in favor of solids. There's a reason for that.
Not to mention that
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Boeing and Airbus actually compete on jetliners. Embraer et. al. would jump in if they slacked off.
Boeing and Lockheed-Martin got the federal government to fund the development of two separate EELV rockets, so there would be competition, then spun their rocket businesses off into United Launch Alliance and got rid of the competition between them. Amaze anyone that costs are now half a billion to orbit?
Spacex can crush them.
andy
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I disagree with your last point. Both Boeing and Airbus have had such events occur. Such events will occur at some rate no matter how much money is spent. At some point diminishing returns makes it entirely pointless to continue with such spending.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_accidents_and_incidents_caused_by_design_or_manufacturing_errors [wikipedia.org]
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Solid+Liquid can be the best way to go performance-wise, although there's that cost penalty from heterogeneity.
The problem with solid fuel rockets is, you can't turn it off and back on once you light it. With the proper engineering, you can with a liquid fueled rocket.
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That's not the case with a hybrid. In that setup, you have a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. By varying the oxidizer feed you can control the thrust.
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That's not the case with a hybrid. In that setup, you have a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. By varying the oxidizer feed you can control the thrust.
They're notoriously tempermental.
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Everything launched during war time. You think they plan out patriot missile launches?
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SpaceX is blowing the competition away. Even the Chinese have said they can't match SpaceX's prices.
I'd like to have some reliable sources for that, because SpaceX said that the launch cost for a Falcon 9 was $35-55 million, than they revised it to $50-56 million, than they published the estimated launch cost ($54 million) for the still non-existent Falcon 9 v1.1 and stopped publishing the costs for the actual Falcon 9 v1.0. The only commercial launch so far was CRS-1: it's a Falcon 9 + Dragon mission that NASA paid approx. $133 million ($1.6 billion for 12 launches) and it carried just 15% of the adverti
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You need to cite a source for those numbers, the linked article says 464M$ average launch price for ULA (Atlas V/Delta IV). SpaceX costs look like all up, 125M$ for AtlasV looks like launch vehicle itself, maybe, no integration or launch costs or sustainment or etc. additional costs. What does ULA get, total, from the Federal and State Govt, for how many launches?
Proton M looks same, vehicle only.
Not criticizing, but would love to see the source of that data.
andy
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I think they insure those launches. If you can save $400 million per launch having to launch two $100M satellites to get one in orbit is fine. You still come out $200 Million to the good.
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Insurances premiums still would not exceed the cost of launch and cargo. Which means insurance will not more than double launch cost. Which is still not half what the competitors want. You can insure for that as well, either with additional insurance or just build two of everything and sell any leftover units. Still cheaper than the other provider. At some point cost savings of this magnitude change the market that much.
If launch + cargo cost $150million, then you can take three attempts and still break eve
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In a blockbuster deal ... (Score:4, Funny)
Lockheed traded Barb Williams to SpaceX in return Barb McIntosh and a sum of $3 million. No word yet on what that will do for their chances of winning the Goddard Trophy, the long-time rocketry championship, but the expectation is that this will allow Lockheed to unload an unfavorable contract while making SpaceX more competitive in the playoffs.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oldspace got fat and lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, Lockheed is a very big, very old company with layers of bereaucracy. The bigger the organization, the more bureaucracy is needed, and the more expensive their wares become. Spaxe-X is still young and lean.
Re:Oldspace got fat and lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
> bureaucracy
This, this and this again.
I guess the day will come (I suspect that it'll be long after Musk has assumed room temp) when SpaceX is a giant, ossified fossil that can't adapt to changing markets. It seems to be inevitable.
My brother is the business guru in our family, and one of his favorite stories involves pizza chains. There's a TON of profit in pizza. Ergo, big chains like Pizza Hut were able to build these fancy restaurants with beautiful decor ... and then along came discounters like Little Caesars to eat away at their market share.
Smaller, leaner retailers like Dollar General are giving Wal Mart a run for the money nowadays, too.
Call the Economic Circle of Life. You're born, you go through a rapid growth phase, then you become hidebound and eventually just fade away.
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"I guess the day will come (I suspect that it'll be long after Musk has assumed room temp) when SpaceX is a giant, ossified fossil that can't adapt to changing markets. It seems to be inevitable."
No guessing involved. In fact, several Sci-Fi authors predicted as much, decades ago. When we mud-dwellers finally get our fingers out of our asses, and build a colony, that will be almost the end of our innovation and contribution to space exploration. We'll see migration to the colony, just as fast and massive
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I sure wish. I'm getting old, I got no money, no one's going to offer me a free ride - I guess I'll just die a worn-out old mud-dweller. Maybe my kids, though!! I can cough up some cash to help some of my DNA get up there!
Still on IRC? I should come visit the old gang . . .
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Your brother needs to brush off on his study cases, Little Caesar's and Pizza Hut were founded almost concurrently.
Why spoil the fact 99% of the comments praising SpaceX are based solely upon fallacies and not even knowing their heads from their rear end on the total processes and limitations of either manufacturer. They're praising a start up who in Lockheed's position will gladly extort the government and any potential client if it becomes the predominant player. These libertarian twinkies will never admit their free market is a pipe dream and will roar with delight the next private space transport start up hoping the
Re:Oldspace got fat and lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, Lockheed is a very big, very old company with layers of bereaucracy. The bigger the organization, the more bureaucracy is needed, and the more expensive their wares become. Spaxe-X is still young and lean.
Not only that, but their engineering processes are terrible. I had the misfortune of working with them on the replacement for the Alvin submarine [wikipedia.org]. Instead of looking for things which could be purchased off the shelf, they seemed to go out of their way to design completely new parts and write completely new software when an ideally-suited commercial package would have been more functional than the programming garbage they produced. Maybe this is coming from higher up to inflate costs and chargeback to the customer. I certainly found it ridiculous though.
A couple years ago I had to obtain a TWIC [wikipedia.org] card. When I went to the office to have my biometrics done, all the equipment was branded "Lockheed". And none of it worked right, turning what should have been a 5 minute trip into a 1 hour ordeal. There was about 10 different devices on the clerk's desk, when 3 should have sufficed (scanner, fingerprint reader, camera). There are dozens of companies which make secure badging and identifying products. Lockheed's pile of garbage probably cost 100x as much and isn't as good.
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What you described sounds like a case of "not invented here." Large companies with a lot of inertia are notorious for this. "Nothing produced at any other company could possibly be as good, so let's just make everything ourselves, regardless of whether it's related to our core competency."
Smaller companies and startups can't really afford to roll everything themselves, so they will look for off-the-shelf solutions as much as possible.
Incidentally, this is how startups in the software industry smash the old
Re:Oldspace got fat and lazy (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there an argument in there? (Score:2)
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Re:Oldspace got fat and lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between many military grade (and grades within the us armed services) and consumer grade is the testing and validation done to make sure it works the first time. A composites supplier told me that if they produced 100 products, two would test to Air Force specs, 10 to Navy specs, 30 to Army specs, and the rest (save 2-3 units found to be defective) would be suitable for other customers. (Branches and exact numbers may be off, but orders of magnitude are right.)
If you need to make the 100 to get two that are up to spec, you are going to have higher costs. Hopefully not 50x cost, but in a well managed system it is at least 3x. The problem comes when everybody makes their specification higher than what they actually need, or when only the people with the highest spec are buying.
SpaceX's opportunity is in offering the value customer a better product designed and tested to meet their needs.
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There's a pretty good argument that the core difference between spacex and the defense contractors is spacex is giving up hope, at a very basic level, of selling ICBMs to dotmil. Once they give up on the dotmil market, certain engineering opportunities open, certain bureaucratic opportunities open... Otherwise the existing ICBM mfgr would simply copy spacex. Why not reduce your costs, increase your profits... if you can...
Example: Flattening your supply chain is a project killer if a congressman has an e
Re:Oldspace got fat and lazy (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a pretty good argument that the core difference between spacex and the defense contractors is spacex is giving up hope, at a very basic level, of selling ICBMs to dotmil.
I disagree. The US hasn't made any new missiles since the Peacekeeper. That's about twenty years of no selling of ICBMs. Lockheed doesn't even have a rocket at the moment (the Atlas V is operated by ULA, which Lockheed is a part owner of).
My take is that Lockheed's niche here is launch services. If you want your payload in space, at some point, you're going to have to put it on a rocket. That's a very specialized task. And the period from launch through to successful deployment in the right trajectory remains one of the riskiest parts of a mission.
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"Launch services" is certainly a niche for which a very fat profit can be extracted. Forget all that other expensive stuff that takes actual engineering and building something. That's risky. Just let us push the Big Red Button. And if something goes 'boom!' we just blame the subcontractors.
SpaceX has flattened the business model, taking on the responsibility for design, construction and launch. That allows them to do the systems analysis and eliminate redundancies that they won't need to do the launch job.
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My understanding of the SpaceX engine control system is that the launch portion is completely automated; once the vehicle is ignited, the only on-ground task is the safety control officer's in the event the vehicle becomes unstable and needs to be destroyed.
This is apparent during the latest launch to the ISS: a merlin engine was lost, and the onboard launch system safed the motor and increased burn time on the remaining motors to obtain orbit. While its true that the secondary mission failed due to a small
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And you think that with other systems, all kinds of split-second decisions are being made from ground control? Space-X is not fundamentally doing anything differently than anyone else. They've just been able to do it cheaper by starting with off-the-shelf components and decades-newer technology.
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cost? (Score:2, Funny)
IMHO (Score:3, Funny)
some truth (Score:5, Insightful)
There's some truth to it. SpaceX is built like an Internet startup - failure is always an option. The "old technology" is from an age when every launch was a national news event and failure was no option.
Read this:
http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff [fastcompany.com]
and then realize that while everything NASA seems to be luxury spending, their software development manages to have at least two orders of magnitude fewer bugs than any commercial software company.
If your life depends on it - would you rather fly a NASA Space Shuttle or a Microsoft Rocket ?
SpaceX deserves a lot of credit, no doubt. Among other things, they have revitalized the "space exploration is cool" meme. And with it the willingness to take risks.
But how about we talk about costs when they've had their first two or three explosions and resulting fallout in costs, publicity, etc.?
I'd be mightily surprised if the learning wouldn't go two-way. Old tech learns from SpaceX how to cut costs while SpaceX learns from old tech which costs you shouldn't save on.
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Unfortunately - their users (primarily NASA and other US government entities ATM, but soon other old guard customers) don't agree with that philosophy. So if their philosophy starts putting regularly birds in the drink... the contracts are going to dry up pretty rapidly. So just like a 'net startup looking to grow, they can't flaky for long.
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Unfortunately - their users (primarily NASA and other US government entities ATM, but soon other old guard customers) don't agree with that philosophy.
Satellite customers consider 1-2% failure rates perfectly acceptable. NASA considers losing the vehicle and killing the crew one time in 70 to be 'man rated'.
So SpaceX have a pretty low bar to reach.
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0.o You have no clue what you're talking about.
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If your life depends on getting to the destination would you rather have a NASA rocket you cannot afford at all or a unit at a tenth the cost with a very minor increase in risk?
Risk is part of life, even the shuttle killed a crew every hundred launches and that thing cost a ridiculous amount. You could double that rate and kill two crew every hundred launches but get the cost down to a tenth it would surely be worth it. You would still have no problem finding qualified candidates for those missions.
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Read this: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff [fastcompany.com]
and then realize that while everything NASA seems to be luxury spending, their software development manages to have at least two orders of magnitude fewer bugs than any commercial software company.
Except that implicit in that is the idea that every bug is a disaster. SpaceX's approach is to have robust engineering rather than perfection. The idea is that small problems should not cascade into mission failures. That's how "real world" engineering works: for example, we don't use chains to hold up suspension bridges any more, because a single crack can cause a collapse. We use multi-strand cables, where cracks don't propagate from strand to strand. The fragile perfection of old-school aerospace is exp
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A logical counter (Score:3)
"You can thrift on cost. You can take cost out of a rocket. But I will guarantee you, in my experience, when you start pulling a lot of costs out of a rocket, your quality and your probability of success in delivering a payload to orbit diminishes."
Fishy argument. Most of the payload I gather is pretty cheap stuff to make astronauts' life on ISS possible.
In a way, price gauging of the launchers has resulted in the reactive price gauging of the payload. But if one can cheaply transport materials to the ISS, some stuff can be actually built and assembled right there - instead of creating the stuff on surface up to the very high standards, required for it to survive the lift off.
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In a way, price gauging of the launchers has resulted in the reactive price gauging of the payload. But if one can cheaply transport materials to the ISS, some stuff can be actually built and assembled right there - instead of creating the stuff on surface up to the very high standards, required for it to survive the lift off.
I don't see it. Manufacturing equipment is usually much heavier and often more delicate than the items manufactured.
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I wasn't taking about manufacturing specifically - more like building/assembling the stuff using off-the-shelf parts. I was also thinking about potential expansion of the ISS. Right now it is made of older space modules, what is rather expensive building material. But probably you are right anyway.
That was just an idea, follow up on the possibilities offered by cheaper transportation to the space. Just like the accessible infrastructure down here, possibilities expand greatly.
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ISS missions are a tiny piece of the pie. The real money is launching very expensive satellites. You really don't want to be blowing those up.
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I have used ISS as an example.
But I have looked it costs anyway. From what I can find, average satellite launch costs $10-20M while SpaceX launch costs around $5+M. The cost difference isn't big enough to drastically change anything :(
Otherwise, the point I was trying to make was that the satellites are so expensive in part because launches are so expensive. One attempts to pack into one expensive trip as much as possible - to make as few trips as possible. If price for launch was magnitude (or two) les
Better / Faster / Cheaper: Pick Two (Score:4, Insightful)
Having worked as a contractor for Goddard Space Flight Center years ago on a few projects, I can assure you that SpaceX's way of doing business is completely different than the old school space business. Coming from NASA, which trickles down to Boeing and Lockheed, the standard mentality is do everything at least twice, and usually triple checking all of that. New processes are frowned upon and twenty year old technology is still considered new, potentially even unproven. It is a frustrating way to work for a lot of people because it moves so slow. However, it is fairly safe and effective.
Now, enter SpaceX. I suspect they have a lot of the old NASA engineers, so they have the experience to cut corners. However, they've designed the thing intentionally to tolerate failures - they stuck 9 engines on the rocket. And you definitely want to tolerate failures, however, it does lead to mistakes. Look what happens though when one engine fails - the extra burn time meant the Orbcomm secondary payload on the last mission failed and never made it into orbit. That wasn't highly publicized, but it was a partial failure.
Now, what we're going to run into the standard cost/benefit of the extra work that goes into Boeing rockets. Is it worth it? Well, I suspect once you start sticking people on the top of the rockets the tolerance for failure goes down. Personally, I love what SpaceX is doing and I think a lot of the stuff is cutting edge. It is the direction we need to be headed, and I personally think the risks are worth it.
Better - Faster - Cheaper
You only get two.
Re:Better / Faster / Cheaper: Pick Two (Score:5, Informative)
That failure was based on NASAs protocol to not relight the engine, and it was a secondary payload priced on that possibility. More like designed-in risk.
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Re:Better / Faster / Cheaper: Pick Two (Score:5, Insightful)
We can have separate standards for manned vs unmanned.
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That's PR posturing - or "making lemonade out of lemons" to put it more politely.
In reality, big engines are complex and expensive to develop - so SpaceX uses smaller engines that are cheaper to develop and build, which does give fault tolerance... but at the cost of a more complex, heavier, and more expensive plumbing system and thrust structure.
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Better / Faster / Cheaper: Pick Two is an 'old saw' that pertains to
any one project. Over time it is obvious that we can have
all three. I think Musk/SpaceX is demonstrating that.
Do Boeing or Lockhead or ULA have a vehicle cleared for
carrying cargo to and from the ISS? Do they have a launch
system in production that they are trying to get certified to
carry people?
Better Engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
Musk once alluded to a better manufacturing process for actually building rockets. So, instead of saying that he's taking shortcuts and what not and doesn't have layers of bureacracy, what if he just has a cheaper way to build rockets that are better?
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Musk once alluded to a better manufacturing process for actually building rockets. So, instead of saying that he's taking shortcuts and what not and doesn't have layers of bureacracy, what if he just has a cheaper way to build rockets that are better?
Yes. From the Model T to the Pentium, we see the winning product is the one that has the best manufacturing process behind it. Often, the product itself isn't anything special compared to the competition.
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Re:CMMI (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think SpaceX has no repeatable processes, documentation, you are insane.
Re:Government goes with lowest cost (Score:5, Funny)
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And for the last 40 years Lockheed has been the world leader in jacking up costs once their "low bid" has been accepted. Now don't get me wrong, their work on the P-38, U2, SR-71 and F117 is the best of the best, but the F22 and F35 debacles are the biggest financial crimes against america ever.
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Worse than the Osprey?
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Re:Government goes with lowest cost (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really. NASA generally goes with what appears most "credible" to them within the cost cap. The most important factor in credibility is matching their detailed estimates of costs, created using "parametric" methods. These methods take historical costs into account and then allow for inflation. Imagine estimating the cost of a computer by scaling from an IBM 709, assuming every performance enhancement costs money, and multiplying by inflation. Then, you refuse to try anything cheaper, because it's "risky".
The result? The bidder must propose not only a high price, but must justify that price based on costs. You must demonstrate the ability to put together and manage very inefficient processes. It usually doesn't even help to have done similar jobs efficiently: the cost "experts" don't find actual experience in conflict with their databases to be "credible". Their databases are full of previous examples of projects approved and planned with the same methodology, so the reasoning is almost perfectly circular.
Historically, nobody has been able to develop an orbital launch vehicle without government subsidy, so this credibility problem has been an impenetrable barrier to exploiting real high tech methods, where deflation, not inflation is normal. But Musk has deep enough pockets, and a talent for PR that has made it impossible to dismiss the success of Falcon as an aberration.
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Well, he could always propose sending 1 rocket as the primary and 9 up as backups. Then he could match the price in the database while rationalizing every dollar spent as increased safety.
Nope, that wouldn't work, because the division of labor wouldn't correspond to the basis for the "independent" cost estimate, and the cost "experts" would therefore refuse to endorse it. Then there's the potential cost of lost payloads. In principle, the contractor could insure them, except NASA is forbidden by law to buy insurance.
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If you're talking about the DC-X, well it became a complete failure after NASA took it over. But prior to that, it was a complete success. It achieved all of its design goals and its mission purpose. Which were:
1. Build a working scale model of the proposed Delta Clipper ship. Fly it as an X program. (a real X program that flies stuff like the X-1, not a computer simulation only-deal like the X-33)
2. Demonstrate the feasibility of a vertical takeoff / vertical landing rocket. Done. Test SSTO (single stage