What I would really like to know is what the price for expendable flights at full capacity is?
Is that marked up with Spacex hoping to make up for pricing 1st flight recoverable cores at a loss? Cover development costs by pricing by mass, where the newly published full capacity comes at a premium?
The prices on the SpaceX website are for fully expendable launches. Max capability.
What I would really like to know is what the price for expendable flights at full capacity is? Is that marked up with Spacex hoping to make up for pricing 1st flight recoverable cores at a loss? Cover development costs by pricing by mass, where the newly published full capacity comes at a premium?
Dumb question that may have already been answered about the new performance numbers.Looking at Falcon Heavy, they state that the GTO performance in fully expendable mode is ~22.2mT, but the $90M price point is only for launches with less than 8mT to GTO.In the case of the latest single core Falcon 9, it says the $62M is for GTO launches of <5.5mT, when it says the max expendable GTO number is 8.3mT. Now, downrating from 8.3mT to 5.5mT to GTO for Falcon 9 to account for first stage recovery/reuse seems to make sense. That's about a 34% hit, which is right in the range I've heard people talking about for first stage landing/recovery.But downrating from 22.2mT to 8mT to GTO for FH for booster/first stage reuse seems kind of a steep penalty to me, or am I misunderstanding what their website is saying? If I'm not misunderstanding it, and reuse of all three first stages on FH is really that performance expensive, I wonder what the price would be if you only wanted to recover the two side boosters, but let the core booster be expended?~Jon
...But downrating from 22.2mT to 8mT to GTO for FH for booster/first stage reuse seems kind of a steep penalty to me, or am I misunderstanding what their website is saying? If I'm not misunderstanding it, and reuse of all three first stages on FH is really that performance expensive, I wonder what the price would be if you only wanted to recover the two side boosters, but let the core booster be expended?~Jon
10 posts about Crewed Dragon's name....it's Dragon 2. It was Dragon V2, but they dropped the V later on for obvious reasons. They dropped "Full Thrust" for another "awkward" reason. I got both of those from near the very top of SpaceX, enough for me to stop using both in articles. (Had to trim a bit as one member threw his toys out of the cot).We've moved on since, so let that mooooove on, as the Rocket Cows would say.
Quote from: jongoff on 05/03/2016 04:22 am...But downrating from 22.2mT to 8mT to GTO for FH for booster/first stage reuse seems kind of a steep penalty to me, or am I misunderstanding what their website is saying? If I'm not misunderstanding it, and reuse of all three first stages on FH is really that performance expensive, I wonder what the price would be if you only wanted to recover the two side boosters, but let the core booster be expended?~JonMy guess is that SpaceX is sandbagging the reuse Heavy's GTO payload number until they get some data on how the recovered cores is holding up structurally. Brand new cores should be able to do 22.2mT to GTO once. Not so sure reuse cores can do repeated 8mT+ to GTO. After all no one had any data on re-flown cores with many flights in their service life.
From my table before the new thrust levels were announced it looked like all 3 FH cores RTLS could loft 7t to GTO - I am guessing that $90M price tag is RTLS on all 3 cores for some reason even though we know that the 5.5 on F9 is ASDS recovery at $62M.Something I will point out is that the cost per kg to GTO is virtually the same if you are lofting 5.5t to GTO on an F9 or 8t on an FH, given the stated maximum on an expended F9 is stated at 8.3t I don't believe that this is consistent with S1 cores at the $20M - $25M price point to manufacture that many people here have settled on previously. Even if a brand new S1 costs $30M throwing away a core on an F9 should cost less than the $28M differential from an F9 to and FH recoverable, especially if the F9 launch was ASDS for its one core and the FH launch was RTLS for all 3.
I'd like to add some numbers to my opinions.From the previous pricing of the F9 v1.1 we have this: F9 v1.1 $61.2M for 4.85 mT to GTO =$12,600/kg . FH v1.1 $90M for 6.4mT to GTO = $14,100/kghttp://wayback.archive.org/web/20160104000832/http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilitiesNow we have:F9 v1.2 $62M for 5.5mT to GTO = $11,300/kg. FH v1.2 $90M for 8.0mT to GTO = $11,300/kgNice, 10% lower cost from what was previously advertised, also note the $/kg for FH and F9 at recoverable capacity is the same.Reused cores $40M for 5.5mT to GTO? = $7300/kg. A reused FH would be $58M at that $/kg rate.If the F9 V1.2 was truly selling expendable flights at only $62M that would work out to $7500/kg - not much incentive there to fly used.If instead that expendable rocket sold on a fixed $/kg price at the advertised $11,300/kg how much would it cost? $94M. Sounds like a good incentive for a customer to bump up to the FH and allow SpaceX to try for recovery of the whole lot with 3 core RTLS.What reason would SpaceX have to give away profitability on a $/kg basis on expendable flights when Elon's whole goal is to reduce costs through reuse?
What reason would SpaceX have to give away profitability on a $/kg basis on expendable flights when Elon's whole goal is to reduce costs through reuse?
I doubt they are sandbagged too much though, because FH gets most of its performance by flinging the center booster as high and fast as possible (because the upper stage is undersized) which makes full recovery very difficult for GTO payloads over 10t or so.I'd estimate that expending the center core gets 15 or even 18t to GTO but adds less 50% to the list price.
A good reason would be that current customers are not booking "kilograms" to orbit, they book a payload to orbit. Until a market evolves, such as propellant, water, etc., that has kilograms as the payload metric, & is scalable within a launch profile, it will remain the best path for SpaceX to price vehicles as they are. For a given flight profile, i.e DPL, or RTLS, the price will be set by the ammortization rate on the boosters, drone ships +crew, landing pads etc. Within the flight profile of each case, the costs will be treated as fixed.
SpaceX is patiently retraining everybody who thinks about and uses rockets. Does Delta airlines publish a price for a "fully expendable" Boeing 787? The vision is to get the world to the point where you wouldn't think of throwing out a perfectly good machine, just about booking or building a more capable one.Enjoy, Matthew