4 ms·

Even before then. The launch business is lucrative enough the Russians and the Chinese and the Europeans aren't going to sit on their collective thumbs and let

by tsotha 14y ago

Even before then. The launch business is lucrative enough the Russians and the Chinese and the Europeans aren't going to sit on their collective thumbs and let SpaceX undercut them for very long. There's nothing revolutionary about the Falcon series in the sense that there are special gizmos hidden from potential competitors. If necessary the other players on the market will simply copy them.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
"There's nothing revolutionary about the Falcon series in the sense that there are special gizmos hidden from potential competitors." This is a common misunderstanding of launch vehicle design. There has long been the idea that "spaceflight is hard", that launch vehicles are inherently expensive, that the only way to progress is through revolutionary, bleeding-edge designs (aerospike engines, SSTO, composite fuel tanks, SCRAMJETs, what-have-you) or "special gizmos" that provide some sort of edge. This turns out to be exactly opposite from reality. The important thing is to have a clean, elegant, robust design which is streamlined for manufacturing. And that's what SpaceX has done. At its heart the Falcon 9 is basically a 6 decade old rocket design. Two stages, LOX/Kerosene. In some ways the Saturn-IB (first launched in 1966) was more advanced because it used a LOX/LH2 2nd stage. But SpaceX has concentrated on streamlining production and on making the rocket very robust (through greater damage tolerance in the engines, the ability to do on-pad aborts, etc.) And it's this concentration on manufacturing and on robustness that has led to SpaceX's low costs. This isn't something that you can simply bolt-on to an existing rocket design (such as Soyuz, Proton, Long March, etc.) It's a property of the organization, and of the entire rocket design as a whole. And it's also not something that is easy to copy because as much as anything it's about corporate culture and institutional policies and talent. I'd like to see more companies follow in SpaceX's footsteps but this is something that I think it's unlikely the established rocket makers will be able to do (because it would mean fundamentally reinventing themselves from the bottom up), but I do think it's possible that new companies will come on the scene that are able to match that level of pragmatism and efficiency.
- tsotha 14y ago
  Established rocket makers can do this. They've never had the incentive before, at least in the US, because the more you cut costs in a cost plus contract the less money you make. But they certainly have the engineering chops, and they can spin off a subsidiary if the organizational pressures are too unwieldy. The problem is they're in the same position AOL was in when people started to get high speed internet. There's no way they can make a cheaper rocket without gutting their own high-margin government business, so they'll pretend as long as they can.

by tsotha 14y ago

InclinedPlane 14y ago

"There's nothing revolutionary about the Falcon series in the sense that there are special gizmos hidden from potential competitors." This is a common misunderstanding of launch vehicle design. There has long been the idea that "spaceflight is hard", that launch vehicles are inherently expensive, that the only way to progress is through revolutionary, bleeding-edge designs (aerospike engines, SSTO, composite fuel tanks, SCRAMJETs, what-have-you) or "special gizmos" that provide some sort of edge. This turns out to be exactly opposite from reality. The important thing is to have a clean, elegant, robust design which is streamlined for manufacturing. And that's what SpaceX has done. At its heart the Falcon 9 is basically a 6 decade old rocket design. Two stages, LOX/Kerosene. In some ways the Saturn-IB (first launched in 1966) was more advanced because it used a LOX/LH2 2nd stage. But SpaceX has concentrated on streamlining production and on making the rocket very robust (through greater damage tolerance in the engines, the ability to do on-pad aborts, etc.) And it's this concentration on manufacturing and on robustness that has led to SpaceX's low costs. This isn't something that you can simply bolt-on to an existing rocket design (such as Soyuz, Proton, Long March, etc.) It's a property of the organization, and of the entire rocket design as a whole. And it's also not something that is easy to copy because as much as anything it's about corporate culture and institutional policies and talent. I'd like to see more companies follow in SpaceX's footsteps but this is something that I think it's unlikely the established rocket makers will be able to do (because it would mean fundamentally reinventing themselves from the bottom up), but I do think it's possible that new companies will come on the scene that are able to match that level of pragmatism and efficiency.

tsotha 14y ago
Established rocket makers can do this. They've never had the incentive before, at least in the US, because the more you cut costs in a cost plus contract the less money you make. But they certainly have the engineering chops, and they can spin off a subsidiary if the organizational pressures are too unwieldy. The problem is they're in the same position AOL was in when people started to get high speed internet. There's no way they can make a cheaper rocket without gutting their own high-margin government business, so they'll pretend as long as they can.