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#40
by
ArbitraryConstant
on 20 Dec, 2021 00:39
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My question about plane change was really more generic, because it may affect the Starship's ability to compete with Neutron. If Starship really has a mission cost below $10 million, then it might be able to launch multiple small payloads into different orbits on one mission. Yes, plane changes clearly cost a lot of delta-V, but Starship has a high delta-V per dollar. In the case you mentioned, you can change planes across 28.5 degrees using one payload launch and two (probably cheaper) tanker launches. This can deliver more than 65 t across multiple planes.
That seems like it would eat into the competitiveness quite a bit. I think RL will be aiming for an upper stage cost well below that of Falcon 9 so to completely crush Neutron, SS will need very streamlined operations and be able to deliver a substantial part of the theoretical payload to useful orbits on every launch. Thinking about it, I think if they're going to do a plane change on orbit they will be better off using the ion propulsion built into the satellites. It will likely take quite a while, probably similar to the months required for orbit raising by electric GTO launches, but there's not really any limitation to the number of satellites they can have doing it simultaneously and the propellant mass fraction becomes much more reasonable with the higher ISP. If the bottleneck is launch, that seems like it gets the most satellites in place the soonest.
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#41
by
DanClemmensen
on 20 Dec, 2021 01:05
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My question about plane change was really more generic, because it may affect the Starship's ability to compete with Neutron. If Starship really has a mission cost below $10 million, then it might be able to launch multiple small payloads into different orbits on one mission. Yes, plane changes clearly cost a lot of delta-V, but Starship has a high delta-V per dollar. In the case you mentioned, you can change planes across 28.5 degrees using one payload launch and two (probably cheaper) tanker launches. This can deliver more than 65 t across multiple planes.
That seems like it would eat into the competitiveness quite a bit. I think RL will be aiming for an upper stage cost well below that of Falcon 9 so to completely crush Neutron, SS will need very streamlined operations and be able to deliver a substantial part of the theoretical payload to useful orbits on every launch. Thinking about it, I think if they're going to do a plane change on orbit they will be better off using the ion propulsion built into the satellites. It will likely take quite a while, probably similar to the months required for orbit raising by electric GTO launches, but there's not really any limitation to the number of satellites they can have doing it simultaneously and the propellant mass fraction becomes much more reasonable with the higher ISP. If the bottleneck is launch, that seems like it gets the most satellites in place the soonest.
I'm assuming the vast majority of the payloads will use the same techniques that are used today with F9, e.g. launch a blob of Starlinks into a low orbit in one plane and then raise them into different planes as the orbits precess. This discussion of brute-force plane change is intended to address cases that might fall into the "dedicated" payload space that RL seems to see as its niche. Frankly, I think Starship can compete head-to-head for these launches using Starship to launch a single small payload, but if it can also do plane changes in order to launch several "dedicated" payloads in one mission and drive the per-payload price down even further, then RL will need to make sure this does not endanger their business case.
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#42
by
Asteroza
on 20 Dec, 2021 01:31
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Reminder folks, plane changes is changing the angle of the orbit, not the relative position of said plane where it cross the equator.
SS may have the opportunity for aero-assisted plane changes as well, separate from the raw deltaV for a plane change, which means only reusable upper stages that can "fly" for a bit can perform an aeroassisted plane change. If you don't have the body (expendable), or can't take the heat (limited thermal profile), you can't pull that off.
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#43
by
su27k
on 20 Dec, 2021 02:18
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About two thirds through the interview.
Did anyone catch Beck insinuating that SpaceX are running below breakeven on their rideshare missions? Shades of Rogozin’s SpaceX criticisms there.
Clearly a lot of saltiness below the surface about SpaceX’s small-sat move.
If he thinks that's unfair, wait until SpaceX starting to sell Starship launches for ~$8M....
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#44
by
ArbitraryConstant
on 20 Dec, 2021 02:45
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From watching the everyday astronaut video, I think an item that's probably not getting the right attention is the elimination of things like the strongback etc. People say RL will be forced to do barge landings because SpaceX does them hence they will inevitably make sense for RL. The scenario where that wouldn't be true is with operational costs well below those of SpaceX; Beck talks about having a ship in port costing a few tens of thousands of dollars a day being prohibitive. It's not for SpaceX but if the RL Neutron cost structure provides big enough savings that decision might change.
I'm starting to think their operating costs won't be much different than Electron, maybe even better in some ways.
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#45
by
M.E.T.
on 20 Dec, 2021 02:55
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From watching the everyday astronaut video, I think an item that's probably not getting the right attention is the elimination of things like the strongback etc. People say RL will be forced to do barge landings because SpaceX does them hence they will inevitably make sense for RL. The scenario where that wouldn't be true is with operational costs well below those of SpaceX; Beck talks about having a ship in port costing a few tens of thousands of dollars a day being prohibitive. It's not for SpaceX but if the RL Neutron cost structure provides big enough savings that decision might change.
I'm starting to think their operating costs won't be much different than Electron, maybe even better in some ways.
I noted that in the NSF interview too. They worry about cost elements as minute as the size of the safety team required, the need for a strongback, etc.
To me this signifies a radically lower cadence ambition than SpaceX. If you’re launching 1000 times a year, those costs get diluted to insignificance compare to launching 50 times a year.
I suspect that what’s really going on is RL are not in the launch game for the long haul. They see it as a means to an end to get into in-space services. So they’re trying to do just enough to enable their own, reasonably competitive access to space as cheaply as possible, but intend to switch focus as soon as they can. This is already shown by the emphasis they place in their annual report on the growing share of their revenue generated by non-launch activities.
So industrial scale mass production of launch vehicles is probably not part of their long term master plan.
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#46
by
Lars-J
on 20 Dec, 2021 03:15
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Not having a strongback is a good idea for reducing infrastructure, but we’ll see how they can execute that - at least for the first versions of Neutron.
Keep in mind that SpaceX also intended to fuel the upper stage through the first stage, but abandoned that idea - for now.
A question - is there *any* operational vehicle (expendable or reusable) where the upper stage liquid propellant is fed through the lower stage(s), or would Neutron be the first? (If they do it)
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#47
by
sanman
on 20 Dec, 2021 03:19
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$/kg and/or $/m3 is probably going to be the deciding factor in constellation launches.
If you see Peter Beck's comment @45:11 in his latest interview with Tim Dodd, he feels very different on this. He says it's first about getting payload to a certain orbit in a certain timeframe, and then looking at cost/kg -- since all of these things affect total cost.
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#48
by
M.E.T.
on 20 Dec, 2021 03:22
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$/kg and/or $/m3 is probably going to be the deciding factor in constellation launches.
If you see Peter Beck's comment @45:11 in his latest interview with Tim Dodd, he feels very different on this. He says it's first about getting payload to a certain orbit in a certain timeframe, and then looking at cost/kg -- since all of these things affect total cost.
If there are 30 F9 boosters sitting around ready to launch by 2025, and Starship launches available weekly (daily?), (with at least 5 launch pads in use) that means SpaceX can get payload to a certain orbit in a certain timeframe much faster than Rocketlab who will have at most one operational Neutron by 2025.
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#49
by
trimeta
on 20 Dec, 2021 03:52
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From watching the everyday astronaut video, I think an item that's probably not getting the right attention is the elimination of things like the strongback etc. People say RL will be forced to do barge landings because SpaceX does them hence they will inevitably make sense for RL. The scenario where that wouldn't be true is with operational costs well below those of SpaceX; Beck talks about having a ship in port costing a few tens of thousands of dollars a day being prohibitive. It's not for SpaceX but if the RL Neutron cost structure provides big enough savings that decision might change.
I'm starting to think their operating costs won't be much different than Electron, maybe even better in some ways.
I noted that in the NSF interview too. They worry about cost elements as minute as the size of the safety team required, the need for a strongback, etc.
To me this signifies a radically lower cadence ambition than SpaceX. If you’re launching 1000 times a year, those costs get diluted to insignificance compare to launching 50 times a year.
I suspect that what’s really going on is RL are not in the launch game for the long haul. They see it as a means to an end to get into in-space services. So they’re trying to do just enough to enable their own, reasonably competitive access to space as cheaply as possible, but intend to switch focus as soon as they can. This is already shown by the emphasis they place in their annual report on the growing share of their revenue generated by non-launch activities.
So industrial scale mass production of launch vehicles is probably not part of their long term master plan.
I think it's fair to say that Rocket Lab isn't planning on launching 1,000 times a year, yeah -- for that matter, when Beck talks about even a daily cadence, it sounds more like "we set that requirement so if we miss it and only reach weekly cadence, that was our real goal all along, and by overshooting we reached the target despite inevitable setbacks." If you consider 50 launches a year to be penny ante stakes that demonstrate they're not serious about being in the launch industry long-term, that seems to me to be a rather rosy view of what Starship's launch cadence will be (personally, I doubt it'll be an order of magnitude more than 50 launches a year), but that's an irreconcilable difference of opinion.
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#50
by
M.E.T.
on 20 Dec, 2021 04:10
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From watching the everyday astronaut video, I think an item that's probably not getting the right attention is the elimination of things like the strongback etc. People say RL will be forced to do barge landings because SpaceX does them hence they will inevitably make sense for RL. The scenario where that wouldn't be true is with operational costs well below those of SpaceX; Beck talks about having a ship in port costing a few tens of thousands of dollars a day being prohibitive. It's not for SpaceX but if the RL Neutron cost structure provides big enough savings that decision might change.
I'm starting to think their operating costs won't be much different than Electron, maybe even better in some ways.
I noted that in the NSF interview too. They worry about cost elements as minute as the size of the safety team required, the need for a strongback, etc.
To me this signifies a radically lower cadence ambition than SpaceX. If you’re launching 1000 times a year, those costs get diluted to insignificance compare to launching 50 times a year.
I suspect that what’s really going on is RL are not in the launch game for the long haul. They see it as a means to an end to get into in-space services. So they’re trying to do just enough to enable their own, reasonably competitive access to space as cheaply as possible, but intend to switch focus as soon as they can. This is already shown by the emphasis they place in their annual report on the growing share of their revenue generated by non-launch activities.
So industrial scale mass production of launch vehicles is probably not part of their long term master plan.
I think it's fair to say that Rocket Lab isn't planning on launching 1,000 times a year, yeah -- for that matter, when Beck talks about even a daily cadence, it sounds more like "we set that requirement so if we miss it and only reach weekly cadence, that was our real goal all along, and by overshooting we reached the target despite inevitable setbacks." If you consider 50 launches a year to be penny ante stakes that demonstrate they're not serious about being in the launch industry long-term, that seems to me to be a rather rosy view of what Starship's launch cadence will be (personally, I doubt it'll be an order of magnitude more than 50 launches a year), but that's an irreconcilable difference of opinion.
Indeed. One needs to accept the fundamental mindset shift that the Starship system entails.
But that’s the speculative future. The undeniable present is an F9 booster that has landed 11 times, and an F9 booster fleet size that already numbers around 10, and will easily exceed 30 by 2025 unless Starship makes it obsolete.
Enabling a launch cadence, customer responsiveness and economy of scale that will be very difficult for an experimental new rocket to challenge.
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#51
by
RotoSequence
on 20 Dec, 2021 04:13
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The amount of stuff that Neutron's booster has to do, given its available propellant volume when contrasted with the size of its structures, gives me feasibility concerns. Even with carbon fiber, there seems like an awful lot of weight tacked on to achieve recovery, and SpaceX is visibly struggling to eliminate weight from their own vehicles with what could be a larger propellant mass fraction in its first and second stages than Neutron has to work with.
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#52
by
M.E.T.
on 20 Dec, 2021 04:25
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Elon has been notably silent on Beck’s latest Neutron revelations. His last comment was some months ago when the larger Neutron was first mentioned. All he said was that they will eventually end up making it F9 sized.
With the latest presentations he has not commented at all. Even after Beck’s not so subtle digs.
I suspect he has some fundamental differences of opinion on the design philosophy.
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#53
by
ArbitraryConstant
on 20 Dec, 2021 05:01
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I noted that in the NSF interview too. They worry about cost elements as minute as the size of the safety team required, the need for a strongback, etc.
To me this signifies a radically lower cadence ambition than SpaceX. If you’re launching 1000 times a year, those costs get diluted to insignificance compare to launching 50 times a year.
I'm not sure I follow that reasoning, to be honest. I actually think it's almost perfectly backwards. Those are the kinds of optimizations you worry about for a highly scalable, optimized operation. To make a comparison to commercial aviation, eliminating the flight engineer and moving to a 2-seat cockpit is the kind of optimization you make for a mature technology that operates at a large scale routinely. It's not an important savings unless it's repeated.
This seems like an extremely obvious thing to say, but I will say it anyway: minimizing equipment and crew at each launch site makes it very simple to spin up new launch sites. It is a very horizontally scalable architecture. Less equipment to buy for each site, fewer staff to hire and train. We know how aviation achieves high flight rates, don't we. Busy airports have multiple runways, and there's lots of airports globally.
SpaceX's approach provides better vertical scalability and we have every reason to think the cost per kilogram IMLEO will be lower, but because of all the moving pieces I think they are going to require longer than people think and require several iterations to work their way up to a high flight rate. I think RL's design is probably a better approximation of a final working system, and wouldn't be at all surprised to see, for example, SpaceX expending the upper stage for an interim period just because they're quite pressed for time on the next gen Starlink satellite.
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#54
by
M.E.T.
on 20 Dec, 2021 05:08
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I noted that in the NSF interview too. They worry about cost elements as minute as the size of the safety team required, the need for a strongback, etc.
To me this signifies a radically lower cadence ambition than SpaceX. If you’re launching 1000 times a year, those costs get diluted to insignificance compare to launching 50 times a year.
I'm not sure I follow that reasoning, to be honest. I actually think it's almost perfectly backwards. Those are the kinds of optimizations you worry about for a highly scalable, optimized operation. To make a comparison to commercial aviation, eliminating the flight engineer and moving to a 2-seat cockpit is the kind of optimization you make for a mature technology that operates at a large scale routinely. It's not an important savings unless it's repeated.
This seems like an extremely obvious thing to say, but I will say it anyway: minimizing equipment and crew at each launch site makes it very simple to spin up new launch sites. It is a very horizontally scalable architecture. Less equipment to buy for each site, fewer staff to hire and train. We know how aviation achieves high flight rates, don't we. Busy airports have multiple runways, and there's lots of airports globally.
SpaceX's approach provides better vertical scalability and we have every reason to think the cost per kilogram IMLEO will be lower, but because of all the moving pieces I think they are going to require longer than people think and require several iterations to work their way up to a high flight rate. I think RL's design is probably a better approximation of a final working system, and wouldn't be at all surprised to see, for example, SpaceX expending the upper stage for an interim period just because they're quite pressed for time on the next gen Starlink satellite.
SpaceX is investing heavily in launchpad infrastructure precisely to allow a higher cadence. Allowing airplanes to land on a bare runway does not improve flight rate. Having a highly sophisticated airport does.
Put another way, the high volume of flights allows (and requires) a Heathrow type airport. If on the other hand you are going for a few charter flights only, you can make do with a simple runway with minimal infrastructure.
Someone already used the container shipping example. Think of the massive harbor infrastructure required to enable that. Elon’s “stage zero”, if you will.
Rocketlab is doing the opposite.
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#55
by
ArbitraryConstant
on 20 Dec, 2021 05:49
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SpaceX is investing heavily in launchpad infrastructure precisely to allow a higher cadence. Allowing airplanes to land on a bare runway does not improve flight rate. Having a highly sophisticated airport does.
Put another way, the high volume of flights allows (and requires) a Heathrow type airport. If on the other hand you are going for a few charter flights only, you can make do with a simple runway with minimal infrastructure.
Hm, going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that;
both are valid ways to increase flight rates. For many years by far the most prolific aircraft was the 737, which owed much of its success for its ability to operate from quite rudimentary airports (in some configurations it doesn't even require a paved runway). Really depends on what kind of scaling you're going for.
If you need to shove a huge amount of traffic through limited real estate you adopt the Heathrow model, even though it's extremely expensive. If you can spread out, the tradeoffs can quite easily favor horizontal scalability. Not always obvious how this will play out. For aviation recently things have shifted from a hub-and-spoke model that demands extremely high traffic hubs, to direct flights between smaller airports. In aviation it happened as a result of things like more efficient high bypass engines coupled with ETOPS. Do we know enough about the launch industry of the future to know which applies here? I'm open to arguments but find it unpersuasive to just assume a single prevailing scaling regime. In aviation there's a
lot more 737/A320 than anything else.
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#56
by
M.E.T.
on 20 Dec, 2021 06:15
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SpaceX is investing heavily in launchpad infrastructure precisely to allow a higher cadence. Allowing airplanes to land on a bare runway does not improve flight rate. Having a highly sophisticated airport does.
Put another way, the high volume of flights allows (and requires) a Heathrow type airport. If on the other hand you are going for a few charter flights only, you can make do with a simple runway with minimal infrastructure.
Hm, going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that; both are valid ways to increase flight rates. For many years by far the most prolific aircraft was the 737, which owed much of its success for its ability to operate from quite rudimentary airports (in some configurations it doesn't even require a paved runway). Really depends on what kind of scaling you're going for.
If you need to shove a huge amount of traffic through limited real estate you adopt the Heathrow model, even though it's extremely expensive. If you can spread out, the tradeoffs can quite easily favor horizontal scalability. Not always obvious how this will play out. For aviation recently things have shifted from a hub-and-spoke model that demands extremely high traffic hubs, to direct flights between smaller airports. In aviation it happened as a result of things like more efficient high bypass engines coupled with ETOPS. Do we know enough about the launch industry of the future to know which applies here? I'm open to arguments but find it unpersuasive to just assume a single prevailing scaling regime. In aviation there's a lot more 737/A320 than anything else.
It’s not like SpaceX won’t do any of that. After all, on Mars Starship will launch straight out of the wilderness. Can’t get any more bare bones than that.
But on earth, to get maximum efficiency, the plan is to move as much of Stage 1 into “Stage zero” (the launch mount) as possible.
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#57
by
Yggdrasill
on 20 Dec, 2021 07:05
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Reminder folks, plane changes is changing the angle of the orbit, not the relative position of said plane where it cross the equator.
That can be solved with precession. Starship could in theory drop off satellites at multiple inclinations, and then the satellites precess for some time before raising their orbits to the target orbits.
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#58
by
TrevorMonty
on 20 Dec, 2021 09:57
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From watching the everyday astronaut video, I think an item that's probably not getting the right attention is the elimination of things like the strongback etc. People say RL will be forced to do barge landings because SpaceX does them hence they will inevitably make sense for RL. The scenario where that wouldn't be true is with operational costs well below those of SpaceX; Beck talks about having a ship in port costing a few tens of thousands of dollars a day being prohibitive. It's not for SpaceX but if the RL Neutron cost structure provides big enough savings that decision might change.
I'm starting to think their operating costs won't be much different than Electron, maybe even better in some ways.
I noted that in the NSF interview too. They worry about cost elements as minute as the size of the safety team required, the need for a strongback, etc.
To me this signifies a radically lower cadence ambition than SpaceX. If you’re launching 1000 times a year, those costs get diluted to insignificance compare to launching 50 times a year.
I suspect that what’s really going on is RL are not in the launch game for the long haul. They see it as a means to an end to get into in-space services. So they’re trying to do just enough to enable their own, reasonably competitive access to space as cheaply as possible, but intend to switch focus as soon as they can. This is already shown by the emphasis they place in their annual report on the growing share of their revenue generated by non-launch activities.
So industrial scale mass production of launch vehicles is probably not part of their long term master plan.
I think it's fair to say that Rocket Lab isn't planning on launching 1,000 times a year, yeah -- for that matter, when Beck talks about even a daily cadence, it sounds more like "we set that requirement so if we miss it and only reach weekly cadence, that was our real goal all along, and by overshooting we reached the target despite inevitable setbacks." If you consider 50 launches a year to be penny ante stakes that demonstrate they're not serious about being in the launch industry long-term, that seems to me to be a rather rosy view of what Starship's launch cadence will be (personally, I doubt it'll be an order of magnitude more than 50 launches a year), but that's an irreconcilable difference of opinion.
There is no reason to plan on 1000 launches a year. SpaceX is just getting to 30. Unless we go all in on space solar power, 50 a year per LV type will be about it.
There is also finding enough launch sites with launch windows to support this high cadence.
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#59
by
TrevorMonty
on 20 Dec, 2021 10:19
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Compared to SS and its very complex launch pad, Neutron's mainly below ground design should be a breeze to maintain. Stargate is going take lot to maintain especially with high expose to sea air.
The same will apply to SH and SS which will live outside most of the time.
Neutron on the other hand should be in its hangar/highbay within a few hours of landing.
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