Sources of economic growth for SpaceX, reusable rockets

[ArbitraryConstant]

Wouldn't a LEO constellation be able to provide continuous communication between any satellite and the ground and vise versa?  IP for ISS, Bigelow, Dragon?  Once you have full coverage of the planet and the complex control system to hand off traffic, all airliners, ships, trains, buses, cars, trekers, etc. will have wifi (won't that be fun).

Yeah, it's not out of the question that good internet connectivity for trans-oceanic flights are a billion dollar business. This would have to be part of the evaluation.

My goal isn't to dismiss the idea, just express the trades.

[Avron]

if we are to track in realtime every aircraft re: MH 370 and maybe every means of transport we are going to need a few more sats , thinking realtime comms 

[sghill]

The big three launch types (telecommunications, science, and reconnaissance) are not the justification for large-scale reusability.  This talk about medium orbit telcom sats is a distraction.  Launch costs are a small portion of the overall costs of these types of payloads.

The payload has to be something much MUCH simpler.  Focus on that.

The payload has to be "dumber" to the point where the launch costs are a much higher percentage of the total than the value of the payload.  Whatever "it" is.  For example, it would have made no economic sense to launch payloads of water and food on the space shuttle if Orbital and SpaceX had been available while STS was still flying.  We'd have used STS for nodes and trusses, and not bulk materials (which we started to do towards the end).

For me, I'm thinking bulk materials or construction materials.  Something that is a simpler component of something far more complicated (like a space station). 

Even launches of repair equipment for older broken satellites to a hypothetical orbiting space tug will be more profitable if boosting hydrazine and new solar panels is an order of magnitude cheaper using a reusable booster.

[AncientU]

fuel

[sghill]

fuel

Bingo.


A different reusable "tanker" for each bulk type you need to send up there (one for fuel, one for O2, one for hydrogen, one for hydrazine, one for spam, one for lumber, etc.).

Come home, refill it, go up again. Repeat.

[AncientU]

fuel

Bingo.


A different reusable "tanker" for each bulk type you need to send up there (one for fuel, one for O2, one for hydrogen, one for hydrozine, one for foodstuffs, one for lumber, etc.).

Come home, refill it, go up again. Repeat.

If 70-80% of the mass we need on orbit is fuel alone, bulk needs (including people?) could possibly constitute 80-90%. At < $1M/mT, possibilities that have been suppressed by the current price of > $20M/mT may begin to emerge.

[oldAtlas_Eguy]

fuel

Bingo.


A different reusable "tanker" for each bulk type you need to send up there (one for fuel, one for O2, one for hydrogen, one for hydrozine, one for foodstuffs, one for lumber, etc.).

Come home, refill it, go up again. Repeat.

If 70-80% of the mass we need on orbit is fuel alone, bulk needs (including people?) could possibly constitute 80-90%. At < $1M/mT, possibilities that have been suppressed by the current price of > $20M/mT may begin to emerge.

Yes.

A reusable FH and a reusable tanker able to do ~ 25-30mt @ ~ $2M/mt per delivery of bulk liquids to LEO is a possibility in the near future (2018-2020).  But a depot by that time is questionable even though the hardware to deliver could be available by then.

[AncientU]

fuel

Bingo.


A different reusable "tanker" for each bulk type you need to send up there (one for fuel, one for O2, one for hydrogen, one for hydrozine, one for foodstuffs, one for lumber, etc.).

Come home, refill it, go up again. Repeat.

If 70-80% of the mass we need on orbit is fuel alone, bulk needs (including people?) could possibly constitute 80-90%. At < $1M/mT, possibilities that have been suppressed by the current price of > $20M/mT may begin to emerge.

Yes.

A reusable FH and a reusable tanker able to do ~ 25-30mt @ ~ $2M/mt per delivery of bulk liquids to LEO is a possibility in the near future (2018-2020).  But a depot by that time is questionable even though the hardware to deliver could be available by then.

Is a meth/LOX depot so difficult? ZBO Hydro/LOX is much tougher.

The missing/questionable 'component' in this bulk cargo hauling scenario is something needs to be going on in space to create the need for bulk anything.

[Oli]

The payload has to be something much MUCH simpler.  Focus on that.

Humans. The actual payload is only meat.

[groundbound]

Yes.

A reusable FH and a reusable tanker able to do ~ 25-30mt @ ~ $2M/mt per delivery of bulk liquids to LEO is a possibility in the near future (2018-2020).  But a depot by that time is questionable even though the hardware to deliver could be available by then.

What is the market for fuel in LEO in the next 5 years?

I get it that there is a market eventually, but right now there is a lack of market for paying end-use customers. If fuel is an intermediate product for currently undersupplied end use, shipping it to LEO is about as profitable as bulk shipping bagels because there will eventually be delicatessens in space.

(the context in which I ask this question is my perception that SpaceX can serve most of the current available market just by fully executing F9/FH plans for ramp-up and reuse.)

[zd4]

I just came across this talk by Elon at the AIAA, 2011:


Where he was asked exactly this question, how do the economics of re-usability pan out, where is the driver for more launches?
He said he didn't believe there is a need for too many satellites. He certainly doesn't believe mining anything in space would be economic.
He said the biggest drivers would be moving people and cargo to a base on the moon and Mars.

The issue I have with that answer is that it is too far out into the future. Lets say even that the first Mars landing is in the 2030's as NASA wants. It would still take a few more decades until Mars is a business case. Especially since there is a window for minimum energy orbit only once in two years.

If you rule out any significant increase in satellites, that only leaves you with new markets for space. I can think of two main drivers, in the "short" term (relatively speaking, compared to any Mars or even moon base) - tourism, and commercial R&D in space. Commercial space station maybe?

[RanulfC]

Where he was asked exactly this question, how do the economics of re-usability pan out, where is the driver for more launches?
He said he didn't believe there is a need for too many satellites. He certainly doesn't believe mining anything in space would be economic.
He said the biggest drivers would be moving people and cargo to a base on the moon and Mars.

The issue I have with that answer is that it is too far out into the future. Lets say even that the first Mars landing is in the 2030's as NASA wants. It would still take a few more decades until Mars is a business case. Especially since there is a window for minimum energy orbit only once in two years.

Well he did say the Moon as well which has "windows" every couple of weeks at the worst (Venus has "windows" every couple of months IIRC even though he didnt' mention it as a destination

If you rule out any significant increase in satellites, that only leaves you with new markets for space. I can think of two main drivers, in the "short" term (relatively speaking, compared to any Mars or even moon base) - tourism, and commercial R&D in space. Commercial space station maybe?

A Commercial Space Station (Orbital Tourism is often implied but not so much "in-the-open" as it was) has been the cornerstone "hope" behind commercial crew from the begining. Bigelow has stated that all he was ever waiting on was someone (who's NOT the "government") to have an available capability before he went ahead with his private space station plans. The general "feeling" if not the reality is that once there is a "commercial" space transportation option available there will be a small but growing market available to tap.
There are a lot of hopes planned on in-space industrial research as well, because there are a lot of "problems" with using the ISS.

Any of it "real," well that depends greatly on the amount of "proof" you need and your ability to "believe"

Guess we'll see

Randy

[bstrong]

round trip time = 2*(35863000)/299792458 =0.239 s

You can cut that number in half (and cut the total RTT, including ground-side latency, by much more than half) by putting servers in GEO, too.

I'm only half joking. It seems to me that the combination of tiny servers based on mobile processors, higher density solid-state storage and bigger satellites might actually make this possible soon. I would imagine that, for example, storing the entire iTunes content library on a large comsat is approaching being feasible today.

This would make the most sense with a hybrid architecture, with latency-sensitive traffic going over a lower-latency / lower-bandwidth (perhaps lower orbit?) channel and requests for big static files like videos and music going to GEO. Most internet services already offload serving of static files to CDNs, so they wouldn't need to be re-architected. You'd just be putting CDN edge locations in orbit.

So for me, the big question isn't whether the latency is too high, but whether the available downlink bandwidth is too low. I have no idea what the limits on bandwidth are (and how hard they are), but I would be very interested to know.

Edit: Sorry, bad math on my part. This strategy would give you the RTT suggested in the original post, which is half of the 478ms RTT that you'd would get to a terrestrial server using a GEO relay and is still low enough for purposes like streaming static content.

[RocketGoBoom]

This seems like a natural for Larry Page to hire his buddy Elon Musk to take care of this little delivery task for him...

Google plans to send 180 satellites into orbit to improve global Internet access
By Aaron Mamiit,    Tech Times | June 2, 10:56 PM

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/7873/20140602/google-plans-to-send-180-satellites-into-orbit-to-improve-global-internet-access.htm

Google is making plans to invest over $1 billion in a fleet of 180 satellites that the company will launch into space to provide Internet access to parts of the world that do not yet have connectivity.

The price of the fleet of small, high-capacity satellites will run between $1 billion to $3 billion. The satellites will be placed in orbit around the Earth at altitudes that are lower when compared with most satellites.