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Consolidating all their effort behind a single vehicle makes sense, but is there a large risk of the same thing that happened to the A380? Could the BFR end up
by zaroth 9y ago
Consolidating all their effort behind a single vehicle makes sense, but is there a large risk of the same thing that happened to the A380? Could the BFR end up being too big for servicing the existing market? Or does the existing market end up as 1/1000 the new market opened up by having the BFR?
- Robotbeat 9y ago"Too big" isn't a thing. "Too expensive per flight" is. In aircraft, cost per flight is roughly proportional to aircraft size, so "too big" can be indirectly a problem. With rockets, the difference between fully/rapidly reusable and expendable (or even partially reusable) is so vast that "too big" is basically irrelevant. In his presentation, Musk showed the expected per-flight costs. BFR would be cheaper /per flight/ than Falcon1. ...and if you dig into last year's presentation, the projected per-flight costs are lower even than Rocketlab's Electron. PER FLIGHT.
- erikb 9y agoWell, as the presentation shows he's also increasing the market, attacking traditional public air transportation, as well as increasing the amount of space missions by a margin. And in the end if the repeated flight is cheaper than a traditional rocket it will still pay off, as long as it flies enough missions to refinance its initial investment.