Proton's rate is shocking... customers will certainly notice this surcharge (as well as the basis for it) that wipes out the cost advantage of going with Proton -- 8% increase on a $500M satellite would be $40M of increased premium. On the other hand, the 'slightly higher' rates for Falcon 9 would be more than compensated by lower launch costs.
Quote from: AncientU on 04/11/2017 07:44 pmProton's rate is shocking... customers will certainly notice this surcharge (as well as the basis for it) that wipes out the cost advantage of going with Proton -- 8% increase on a $500M satellite would be $40M of increased premium. On the other hand, the 'slightly higher' rates for Falcon 9 would be more than compensated by lower launch costs.I'm curious why Falcon 9 is so low in that case, as they've had several of their own failures.Even if we ignore Amos 6 since it's a design flaw that can be addressed, I don't know how we can be so confident a this point that all such issues have been shaken out, and CRS-7 failed due to a material/process issue that seems like it shows them to be vulnerable to other failures of that type.
I don't know it this has been discussed in another thread already, but does lowering of launch cost have any effect on how the payloads are designed? If a launch costs $100M+, it doesn't help too much to build a cheaper satellite because your total cost is dominated by the launch cost. If launch cost is around $40M, does it make sense to make simpler satellites, but launch a few more. This seems to be the case for LEO constellations, but are GEO birds limited by orbital slots or some other constraint?
Quote from: J-V on 04/12/2017 06:00 amI don't know it this has been discussed in another thread already, but does lowering of launch cost have any effect on how the payloads are designed? If a launch costs $100M+, it doesn't help too much to build a cheaper satellite because your total cost is dominated by the launch cost. If launch cost is around $40M, does it make sense to make simpler satellites, but launch a few more. This seems to be the case for LEO constellations, but are GEO birds limited by orbital slots or some other constraint?I don't have the refs onhand, but I'd previously seen some work suggesting a very strong dependence on payload costs with launch costs. Shaving mass is very expensive (ex., the several-orders-magnitude difference in price between triple-junction and off-the-shelf solar cells), you can tolerate more risk in your design when launches are cheap (aka, if your design fails, you don't get stuck with a second ridiculously expensive launch), and the total market increases dramatically, which means that your component suppliers gain economies of scale.
"This is indeed a first," says Michele Franci, the chief technology officer of Inmarsat, a London company that runs a satellite network for tracking ships and planes. Inmarsat is a SpaceX customer, and Franci says if launch costs come down, companies like his could launch more satellites, more often, and build a better network.But he says that to really bring prices down, SpaceX will have to recycle each rocket more than just once."The question is how many times they can reuse each individual rocket, and how often they can do it," he says.
So in theory reusable flights being cheaper could start a positive spiral of cost reductions. Cheaper launches -> cheaper payloads -> more payloads -> more launches -> economics of scale -> cheaper launches. Of course there is more to the equation than just sats and LVs, but I could imagine that things such as GSE, launch sites, etc. are somewhat easier things to deal with than reusability.
A better airplane analogy would be chartering a cargo flight.
The implications from the Inmarsat's CTO comment is that with cheaper launch the inflection point where design life/costs of the sat makes more sense to have sats design life of significantly less than 15+ years so that the replacement rate is once every 7-10 years. This is an increase in launch rate of up to a factor of 2 without actually increasing the number of on-orbit active sats. They are just swapped out more often. It has to do with the business case in that a shorter life (cheaper sat) + cheaper launch, does that result in more profit?What the hint is that the answer could very well be yes to this question.The result for SpaceX would be instead of 10-15 GEOSAT launches /year they would in 5 years be doing 20-30 GEOSAT launches/yr.
I wonder if and when SpaceX will drop their "free relaunch if your launch fails" policy[1]? That may affect customer perception.
Quote from: Lar on 04/13/2017 01:48 pmI wonder if and when SpaceX will drop their "free relaunch if your launch fails" policy[1]? That may affect customer perception.Does it really affect customer perception as much as, say, insisting on four-leaf clovers on mission patches, despite losing two vehicles over a span of barely a year?
I was hesitant to introduce any speculation on this thread, but the original post did say "potential" customers. So I see this as a good place to ask about a couple of potential scenarios that I have not seen discussed elsewhere.1. If I were a customer who paid a premium for a brand new booster, I would consider that (to use the airplane analogy) I paid for not just the flight, but for the airplane itself. Therefore, the hardware "belongs" to me and SpaceX should buy it back or let me continue to use it.