Quote from: whitelancer64 on 05/02/2017 07:18 pmElon Musk has said they spent about a billion dollars developing recovery and reuse. So that needs to be recovered before they are making money with reuse. How long that takes depends on how much they discount the rockets for launch and how much it costs to refurbish them for the next launch. The issue boils down to the question - when do they make more money by reusing rockets than they spent on making them reusable?An additional facet of this is "how much of your capabilities have you intentionally sacrificed to make your rocket reusable?" which is what ULA has been asking.Which is a bogus question.Payload has a fixed mass. You get paid for orbiting this payload. Any extra performance you have over this weight on this flight would not earn you a single extra dollar.If you can orbit the payload of this fixed mass and land the stage, you "sacrificed" nothing for reusing this state.If you can orbit the payload of this fixed mass only by expending the stage, you are no worse than your competitors who do not have reuse option at all.ULA are not stupid, they know this too. They are just not yet resigned to accept the new reality.
Elon Musk has said they spent about a billion dollars developing recovery and reuse. So that needs to be recovered before they are making money with reuse. How long that takes depends on how much they discount the rockets for launch and how much it costs to refurbish them for the next launch. The issue boils down to the question - when do they make more money by reusing rockets than they spent on making them reusable?An additional facet of this is "how much of your capabilities have you intentionally sacrificed to make your rocket reusable?" which is what ULA has been asking.
Quote from: Lar on 04/25/2017 11:44 amI think 2M for refurb costs is high if you're talking 24 hour turnarounds. Airliners are at similar price points (within an order of magnitude) for initial cost of the vehicle and don't spend nearly that much getting ready for their next flight. Maybe when they have scheduled overhauls and have to replace an engineYou may say that SpaceX can't achieve these turnaround times and costs but that's their goal. They may not make it... but I'm thinking a crew of 500 spending 2M in small parts? no. I could see the average cost being 1M IF you include the once every 10 flights heavy overhaul that might include some engine changeouts if an engine was found to be marginal.... but even that seems high.For general aviation passenger services the rule of thumb has been that total costs per flight were 3x the fuel costs. Given Musk has said F9 costs about $200K in propellant that would be about about $600-800K. However since unless the US is fully recoverable that will have to be written off and that's around $17m.
I think 2M for refurb costs is high if you're talking 24 hour turnarounds. Airliners are at similar price points (within an order of magnitude) for initial cost of the vehicle and don't spend nearly that much getting ready for their next flight. Maybe when they have scheduled overhauls and have to replace an engineYou may say that SpaceX can't achieve these turnaround times and costs but that's their goal. They may not make it... but I'm thinking a crew of 500 spending 2M in small parts? no. I could see the average cost being 1M IF you include the once every 10 flights heavy overhaul that might include some engine changeouts if an engine was found to be marginal.... but even that seems high.
I'm interested in people's spitballs on what fairing refurb will cost. I am thinking you don't want to just keep painting over old logos as that increases the weight of the fairing each time.
I don't see why the expectation is that SpaceX will substantially reduce prices in accordance with their reusability cost savings. Musk said that they first want to recover the $1B reusability investment. But why stop even there?I saw the calculations upthread showing 4 years required for recovery of the $1B investment. But what stops SpaceX from dropping their current launch price by just a marginal amount - from $62m to say $55m, and making a $30m gross profit per F9 launch for the foreseeable future?At $62m they are already cheaper than any of their competitors. Going down another $7m would undercut everyone else even further, while still giving SpaceX massive profits per launch.With a 70 launch manifest, at $30m profit per launch they could recover their $1B investment in just over 30 launches - possibly the number of flights they will do in one year in 2018. And still have a massive and growing manifest ahead.And even after that, why not continue charging say $50m per launch until someone else can do it for $49m? Even at current prices they are charging towards 30 launches per year, so its not like demand isn't there.30 launches at $30m profit per launch is better than 50 launches at only $10m profit per launch.
Quote from: M.E.T. on 05/04/2017 08:44 amI don't see why the expectation is that SpaceX will substantially reduce prices in accordance with their reusability cost savings. Musk said that they first want to recover the $1B reusability investment. But why stop even there?I saw the calculations upthread showing 4 years required for recovery of the $1B investment. But what stops SpaceX from dropping their current launch price by just a marginal amount - from $62m to say $55m, and making a $30m gross profit per F9 launch for the foreseeable future?At $62m they are already cheaper than any of their competitors. Going down another $7m would undercut everyone else even further, while still giving SpaceX massive profits per launch.With a 70 launch manifest, at $30m profit per launch they could recover their $1B investment in just over 30 launches - possibly the number of flights they will do in one year in 2018. And still have a massive and growing manifest ahead.And even after that, why not continue charging say $50m per launch until someone else can do it for $49m? Even at current prices they are charging towards 30 launches per year, so its not like demand isn't there.30 launches at $30m profit per launch is better than 50 launches at only $10m profit per launch.Entirely agree. All they have the ensure is that they are cheaper than the competition and at least as reliable. I suspect they are almost there with both of those - still a few reused boosters to try to get some decent reliability figures.
Now for the other item. How long will it take for SpaceX to recover their $1B investment in reuse.
Quote from: JamesH65 on 05/04/2017 09:45 amQuote from: M.E.T. on 05/04/2017 08:44 amI don't see why the expectation is that SpaceX will substantially reduce prices in accordance with their reusability cost savings. Musk said that they first want to recover the $1B reusability investment. But why stop even there?I saw the calculations upthread showing 4 years required for recovery of the $1B investment. But what stops SpaceX from dropping their current launch price by just a marginal amount - from $62m to say $55m, and making a $30m gross profit per F9 launch for the foreseeable future?At $62m they are already cheaper than any of their competitors. Going down another $7m would undercut everyone else even further, while still giving SpaceX massive profits per launch.With a 70 launch manifest, at $30m profit per launch they could recover their $1B investment in just over 30 launches - possibly the number of flights they will do in one year in 2018. And still have a massive and growing manifest ahead.And even after that, why not continue charging say $50m per launch until someone else can do it for $49m? Even at current prices they are charging towards 30 launches per year, so its not like demand isn't there.30 launches at $30m profit per launch is better than 50 launches at only $10m profit per launch.Entirely agree. All they have the ensure is that they are cheaper than the competition and at least as reliable. I suspect they are almost there with both of those - still a few reused boosters to try to get some decent reliability figures.Not so fast... lowering the price is the forcing function for market expansion.Market expansion is essential for SpaceX to obtain needed revenue -- long term gain vs short term profits. This is why a private company is necessary for a while.
Quote from: RyanC on 05/03/2017 09:05 pmNow for the other item. How long will it take for SpaceX to recover their $1B investment in reuse.I think the $1B number Elon threw out is being misunderstood. I think that was more like the cost of all Falcon 9 development to date. Elon didn't explain what that estimate meant and I haven't seen any serious attempt to make sense of that number. SpaceX has spent a lot on launch pads, building rockets, Dragon, etc. Reuse would include the autonomous drone ships, Grasshopper and FR-Dev, Raptor, and lot of R&D. But $1 Billion? I don't buy it. Also, note that Raptor development and a good deal of Falcon 9 and Dragon development were paid for by the government, the Air Force and NASA respectively. So SpaceX isn't even out $1B net on the Falcon 9 development, I don't think. I'd be interested in other people's estimates of what Elon meant and what SpaceX's development expenses have been, and what funded it.
: I think just a little celebration is in order... If you just say, how much effort has SpaceX put into Falcon reusability, and nobody was paying us for reusability, so it had to be on our own dime, it's probably - at least a billion dollars that we spent developing this, so it'll take a while to pay that off. And then we need to get really efficient with the reuse of boosters and with the fairing. So I would expect the economics to start becoming sensible next year - so it's pretty close - and we expect the boosters to .. I mean, with no refurbishment, be capable of 10 flights, and with moderate refurbishment to be capable of 100 flights. So you can imagine that if the cost of the rocket is say 60 million dollars - really we're not re-using the whole thing, but - with the fairing, assuming fairing reuse works out, and as we optimize the cost of the reuse of the booster, really looking at maybe 3/4 of the rocket cost dropping by an order of magnitude, maybe more.
Six reflights this year, 24 next -- if 3/4ths of flights are reused, that is 32 flights next year (about what they are planning). If fraction reused takes longer to build up, maybe another year. Then they start launching the constellation, and the reusable launchers will repay the investment or more every year thereafter in the form of profit or reduced capital expenditure. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.By the way, NASA/DoD did not pay for the F9/FH.
I don't understand this $1B figure. Isn't most of this simply the cost of developing the Merlin engine and the F9 system, through its various iterations? The incremental cost of developing reusability, given the initial version of the F9, does not seem anything like a billion dollars to me. The flight tests were essentially free, since they were added to commercial and government flights paid for by commercial and government customers, and the extra hardware needed was minimal. The grid fins and upgraded 'non-sticky' servos, as far as I know. The rest was already designed and built for the expendable version of F9. Add the cost of Grasshopper, the 'drone ships', landing zones, etc., and it still does not seem close to a billion dollars.
Perhaps because you have a narrow view of what its about. Like perhaps direct/fixed costs.There's lots of other costs, including opportunity costs. Can easily see ways to find more than $2B in costs, so was surprised when he said just $1B. Think it is too low. Keep in mind the added cost of LOM's/RTF's brought on by the reuse agenda, as well as failed landings. If you don't use these as costs, you're cherry picking your numbers....
There's lots of other costs, including opportunity costs.
Keep in mind the added cost of LOM's/RTF's brought on by the reuse agenda
as well as failed landings.