Cost of F9/FH stage 2?

[Ludus]

...and some more detail

[Klebiano]

...and some more detail

Seems like they already have a pretty good estimate of where the stage will fall, probably very little control is needed and the size of the landing area is easy to cross with Mr. Steven 2.0.

[john smith 19]

Launch cost = rocket cost + range cost + payload integration + launch campaign + insurance + propellant cost + a few other things.

Depending on accounting, you might want to include corporate overhead, asset depreciation, selling cost and even R&D.

Depends. Can you directly charge some (or all) of those costs to a specific launch?
However, as a customer I don't care about any of that.

It's the launch price that matters to me. Lowering launch costs is irrelevant to me.
They are internal to SX.
The only thing they affect is SX's profit margin, which (as a commercial customer) is also irrelevant to me, as long as it's high enough that they stay in business long enough to launch my payload.

WRT to the thread title let's see. Base price is about $63m. Assuming 20% gross profit margin that's $52.5m for all direct costs. It's been said S1 is about 70% of that so the rest is $15.75m. However Musk has said the fairing is about $6m. In hindsight it's obvious if you wanted low hanging fruit the fairing is the next easiest candidate to go for. So depending on where you assign launch costs a returned US could save up to $9.75m, which is profit to SX.

If refurb cost $1.75m and only got you a 2nd flight and you did this from the first F9 launch that's an extra  $8m every 2 flights, or about $216m to date.

[Bananas_on_Mars]

With obvious implications on the urgency of BFR, as well as its funding.
I don't recall anything else being said about S2, or Mvac costs.

I remember having read something about 800-900 k$ per Merlin M1D and 2.4 Mio $ for a Merlin MVac, but i can't definitely say where i saw those numbers. But my gut feeling says they shouldn't be off by a lot.

[john smith 19]

I remember having read something about 800-900 k$ per Merlin M1D and 2.4 Mio $ for a Merlin MVac, but i can't definitely say where i saw those numbers. But my gut feeling says they shouldn't be off by a lot.

which means either
a) That extra big nozzle extension is very expensive in materials and labor.
b) There's a shed load more difference between a Merlin Vac and a regular 1D.

[Rabidpanda]

I remember having read something about 800-900 k$ per Merlin M1D and 2.4 Mio $ for a Merlin MVac, but i can't definitely say where i saw those numbers. But my gut feeling says they shouldn't be off by a lot.

which means either
a) That extra big nozzle extension is very expensive in materials and labor.
b) There's a shed load more difference between a Merlin Vac and a regular 1D.

Or just that the MVac is different enough to require a lot of its own tooling and assembly line and therefore doesn't benefit from the 9x economies of scale of the regular 1D.

[Bananas_on_Mars]

When doing a search where those numbers come from, i stumbled across a post of a former SpaceXer who used to assemble Mvac engines. He said there's about 90 percent difference in parts. M1Ds are assembled in an assembly line, while MVac engines are assembled by small dedicated teams (island assembly?). There's also a lot more documentation, additional checks etc.

Falcon 9 has engine-out capability on the first stage, but only one engine on the second stage!

[niwax]

I remember having read something about 800-900 k$ per Merlin M1D and 2.4 Mio $ for a Merlin MVac, but i can't definitely say where i saw those numbers. But my gut feeling says they shouldn't be off by a lot.

which means either
a) That extra big nozzle extension is very expensive in materials and labor.
b) There's a shed load more difference between a Merlin Vac and a regular 1D.

Or just that the MVac is different enough to require a lot of its own tooling and assembly line and therefore doesn't benefit from the 9x economies of scale of the regular 1D.

That would mean interesting knock-on effects from S1 reuse with increased S2 production if they can reduce upper stage cost by another million just by making more.

[john smith 19]

I remember having read something about 800-900 k$ per Merlin M1D and 2.4 Mio $ for a Merlin MVac, but i can't definitely say where i saw those numbers. But my gut feeling says they shouldn't be off by a lot.

which means either
a) That extra big nozzle extension is very expensive in materials and labor.
b) There's a shed load more difference between a Merlin Vac and a regular 1D.

Or just that the MVac is different enough to require a lot of its own tooling and assembly line and therefore doesn't benefit from the 9x economies of scale of the regular 1D.

That would mean interesting knock-on effects from S1 reuse with increased S2 production if they can reduce upper stage cost by another million just by making more.

OTOH US reuse would actually raise costs as they would not have the practice of building even this number of Merlin Vacs.

[Robotbeat]

I remember having read something about 800-900 k$ per Merlin M1D and 2.4 Mio $ for a Merlin MVac, but i can't definitely say where i saw those numbers. But my gut feeling says they shouldn't be off by a lot.

which means either
a) That extra big nozzle extension is very expensive in materials and labor.
b) There's a shed load more difference between a Merlin Vac and a regular 1D.

Or just that the MVac is different enough to require a lot of its own tooling and assembly line and therefore doesn't benefit from the 9x economies of scale of the regular 1D.

That would mean interesting knock-on effects from S1 reuse with increased S2 production if they can reduce upper stage cost by another million just by making more.

OTOH US reuse would actually raise costs as they would not have the practice of building even this number of Merlin Vacs.

i think you’re perhaps right that keeping Merlin Vac production open while doing reuse could make them even more expensive, but that’s only if they aren’t launching many Falcons. If they just stock pile a bunch, shut down production, and stretch out the supply using reuse, then it makes sense.

[Bananas_on_Mars]

Reuse of the upper stage will not work for all trajectories (for Falcon 9). The use case would be LEO deployment with a lot of spare capacity. How many missions of that kind do they have once all iridium satellites are launched?

There's not a lot of economies of scale for between 20 and say 50 Mvac engines per year. For economies of scale to have a serious impact, it's orders of magnitude, not doubling or tripling your production.

SpaceX has said in several occasions that reuse allows them to have more launch capacity with only a small rise in investions (without r&d efforts of course) and workforce. So those (possible) efforts for upper stage reuse point more into the direction "we want to launch a lot more" than simply "we want to save money".

[rst]

Reuse of the upper stage will not work for all trajectories (for Falcon 9). The use case would be LEO deployment with a lot of spare capacity. How many missions of that kind do they have once all iridium satellites are launched?

We're drifting here -- but the range of trajectories for which it works will depend on the mass of the ballute (or whatever it is), and associated support hardware. (And also payload mass, which trades off against recovery hardware one to one.) And one advantage of the ballute-guided-onto-bouncy-house recovery scheme over a hard heat shield plus landing thrusters (as in ye olde concepte videoe) is significantly lower mass. A bit more, including possibly relevant citations, over on the S2 recovery thread, here:

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=42637.660

[Bananas_on_Mars]

Reuse of the upper stage will not work for all trajectories (for Falcon 9). The use case would be LEO deployment with a lot of spare capacity. How many missions of that kind do they have once all iridium satellites are launched?

We're drifting here -- but the range of trajectories for which it works will depend on the mass of the ballute (or whatever it is), and associated support hardware. (And also payload mass, which trades off against recovery hardware one to one.) And one advantage of the ballute-guided-onto-bouncy-house recovery scheme over a hard heat shield plus landing thrusters (as in ye olde concepte videoe) is significantly lower mass. A bit more, including possibly relevant citations, over on the S2 recovery thread, here:

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=42637.660

Recovery of an upper stage from a GTO orbit will need quite some longevity (onboard power) from the stage.

With chemical GSO insertion on the satellite, i think they time the GTO insertion so that the drift time to the GSO slot of the satellite is reduced, which can put your perigee on about any longitude.

They are currently not doing a deorbit burn at apogee because of lack of longevity and to not endanger the satellite.

What's missing is that, for a successful recovery, you do not only need to bring the stage through the athmosphere unharmed and land it some way, you also need to have control over time and place of the deorbit (unless you go the way where you attach a card to your giant party balloon and ask the finder to notify you where it came down).

[rst]

Recovery of an upper stage from a GTO orbit will need quite some longevity (onboard power) from the stage.

With chemical GSO insertion on the satellite, i think they time the GTO insertion so that the drift time to the GSO slot of the satellite is reduced, which can put your perigee on about any longitude.

They are currently not doing a deorbit burn at apogee because of lack of longevity and to not endanger the satellite.

That certainly is a constraint. FWIW, they have demonstrated 6 hours longevity on the Falcon Heavy demo launch, which I think gets you to apogee on a typical GTO, but puts severe constraints on where you wind up. (And extra propellant could relax those constraints, but at an obvious cost to the payload.) But LEO is certainly easier.

[john smith 19]

Recovery of an upper stage from a GTO orbit will need quite some longevity (onboard power) from the stage.

With chemical GSO insertion on the satellite, i think they time the GTO insertion so that the drift time to the GSO slot of the satellite is reduced, which can put your perigee on about any longitude.

They are currently not doing a deorbit burn at apogee because of lack of longevity and to not endanger the satellite.

I wonder how many people have remembered for US that's 1: trade stage for payload mass? The other factor that makes US reuse hard.

[TrueBlueWitt]

Reuse of the upper stage will not work for all trajectories (for Falcon 9). The use case would be LEO deployment with a lot of spare capacity. How many missions of that kind do they have once all iridium satellites are launched?

What about that huge LEO internet constellation? 
Could save a lot of money, and increase flight rate, if you're trying to launch before BFR is available.

[Bananas_on_Mars]

Reuse of the upper stage will not work for all trajectories (for Falcon 9). The use case would be LEO deployment with a lot of spare capacity. How many missions of that kind do they have once all iridium satellites are launched?

What about that huge LEO internet constellation? 
Could save a lot of money, and increase flight rate, if you're trying to launch before BFR is available.

Seems that thread here made a gravity turn and is now running in parallel to this thread.

But yes, i think them looking into F9 S2 recovery is related to Starlink or simply because they can in my opinion.

[guckyfan]

But yes, i think them looking into F9 S2 recovery is related to Starlink or simply because they can in my opinion.

A combination of the two, I think.

They have learned a lot from their fairing recovery efforts which makes an attempt of doing the second stage this way promising. Remember Elon making a statement that this could work for second stages which was pretty much dismissed back then.

Plus the large number of LEO launches for Starlink that makes it economically promising. Given their present launch manifest going for only LEO recovery it is not worth it probably.