-
#320
by
SoftwareDude
on 03 Jun, 2022 04:05
-
Commercial crew discussion thread (https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=49156.0) is going over the 5 new Dragon flights to ISS purchased by NASA. It’s looking like Boeing are not going to get any more NASA Starliner flights, beyond the already awarded 6 operational missions, prior to 2030.
So will Starliner ever get any more missions? I can’t see who would pay to cover the costs of certifying Vulcan to carry people? If Vulcan doesn’t have any more delays, maybe some Amazon Kuiper launches move off Atlas. That would make a few more Starliner flights possible, but may mean ULA has to maintain Atlas infrastructure for longer.
It’s looking to me that before Starliner has any crewed flights, its manifest is already complete.
Boeing and ULA have to decide if crewed flight is a business they want. If so then they will make the investment to certify Vulcan. People here have said that Starliner is not competitive but maintaining a foothold in a market is more important than the profit for now.
Hard for me to believe that Boeing would give up on such a market.
(My bolding)
Are you confident that the Boeing C suite agrees with that assertion?
It seems to go against everything they have done for the past decade.
And it may be hard for you to believe something but they may not see as profitable a market by their criteria as do you with yours.
Yeah, I posted before that Boeing does
not seem to be treating crewed space flight as the opportunity of a lifetime; that was my original disappointment. The world has changed though even in the short time since OFT-1 and the market is beginning to reveal its potential.
Boeing has a spacecraft that is a good start but more importantly, they know what it takes to build it and have the expertise after spending a fortune to acquire it. Boeing is just going throw that all away? It's hard to believe. Stockholders should be in revolt.
-
#321
by
FutureSpaceTourist
on 03 Jun, 2022 07:42
-
The world has changed though even in the short time since OFT-1 and the market is beginning to reveal its potential.
As they’ve already flown commercial crewed missions, I think SpaceX are best placed to assess the state of the market at the moment and they’ve decided they don’t need to build any more Dragons. Yes, they plan to switch to Starship but my take is that SpaceX thinks 4 Dragons are sufficient for the next few years.
Boeing has a spacecraft that is a good start but more importantly, they know what it takes to build it and have the expertise after spending a fortune to acquire it. Boeing is just going throw that all away? It's hard to believe. Stockholders should be in revolt.
Sounds like the sunk cost fallacy. Boeing have to invest more to unlock any more returns and those returns are by no means guaranteed. Commercial satellite market does spread payloads around to maintain different launch options. Not yet clear if commercial crewed launch will do the same, or at least how long it will take for that to become established. I can imagine some stockholders saying to Boeing don’t throw more good money after bad.
I want to see multiple commercial crewed launch providers. However, I’m not confident that a public company like Boeing can close a business case with a level of financial risk they’ll accept.
-
#322
by
yg1968
on 03 Jun, 2022 13:16
-
See my post below, it's also relevant for this thread:
Boeing charges NASA approximately $90M per seat for Starliner. NASA is strongly encouraging Commercial LEO Destinations (CLD) providers to use two different commercial crew transportation systems. The CLD and Commercial Crew Programs are working on models for certifying new crew transportation systems. I would expect Boeing and the new LV to be certified as part of the CLD Program. Blue has already said that they will be using the Starliner (and crewed Dream Chaser) for their Orbital Reef station.
-
#323
by
donaldp
on 03 Jun, 2022 14:13
-
It seems to me that Starliners future depends a lot on the progress of the Blue Origins/Sierra Space Orbital Reef space station. Boeing Starliner is listed as part of that project. If Boeing drop Starliner then that leaves Dream Chaser as the only listed crew transport and I'm not sure that could be operational in the time scales required. Both Starliner and Dream Chaser would currently require Vulcan or New Glen to fly and be crew rated. It seems that Starliner on Vulcan is currently the best bet in the short term for that task.
Would Boeing have alowed them selves to be involved in Orbital Reef if they did not plan on persuing Starliner?
My suspect that it will depend on Nasa funding Orbital Reef with a rather large chunk of money.
-
#324
by
Robotbeat
on 03 Jun, 2022 14:39
-
I have a hard time believing a rocket that needs 7 engines to get off the ground will be cheaper than one that needs 2.
New Glenn is designed to be reusable (booster at least) from the get-go while Vulcan is not. So in THEORY, it could be cheaper.
I think initially Vulcan will be cheaper, but I fail to see what’s so hard to understand about the idea that if you reuse a rocket a bunch of times (let’s say 12 times), it’s going to end up significantly cheaper than if you use it just once and dump it into the ocean.
Like why is this concept so hard?
Anyway, Blue hasn’t proven they can reach the operational capacity to make New Glenn and its reuse worth it (even New Shepard has a disappointing launch rate), but the concept is pretty easy to grasp.
-
#325
by
Lee Jay
on 03 Jun, 2022 14:44
-
I have a hard time believing a rocket that needs 7 engines to get off the ground will be cheaper than one that needs 2.
New Glenn is designed to be reusable (booster at least) from the get-go while Vulcan is not. So in THEORY, it could be cheaper.
I think initially Vulcan will be cheaper, but I fail to see what’s so hard to understand about the idea that if you reuse a rocket a bunch of times (let’s say 12 times), it’s going to end up significantly cheaper than if you use it just once and dump it into the ocean.
Like why is this concept so hard?
Because it's not that simple.
Driving my car 5,000 miles and then throwing it away is still cheaper than flying and reusing a 4-passenger helicopter, mostly because the maintenance on the helicopter is ~$500 an hour.
We don't know the cost of turning a landed New Glenn into a ready-to-launch system, but it's a safe bet that it's in the tens of millions of dollars.
-
#326
by
Robotbeat
on 03 Jun, 2022 15:18
-
I have a hard time believing a rocket that needs 7 engines to get off the ground will be cheaper than one that needs 2.
New Glenn is designed to be reusable (booster at least) from the get-go while Vulcan is not. So in THEORY, it could be cheaper.
I think initially Vulcan will be cheaper, but I fail to see what’s so hard to understand about the idea that if you reuse a rocket a bunch of times (let’s say 12 times), it’s going to end up significantly cheaper than if you use it just once and dump it into the ocean.
Like why is this concept so hard?
Because it's not that simple.
Driving my car 5,000 miles and then throwing it away is still cheaper than flying and reusing a 4-passenger helicopter, mostly because the maintenance on the helicopter is ~$500 an hour.
We don't know the cost of turning a landed New Glenn into a ready-to-launch system, but it's a safe bet that it's in the tens of millions of dollars.
It’s not safe. The marginal turnaround cost for a F9 booster, for instance, is on the order of $5 million vs maybe around $50 million for a new booster. (Expendable upper stage, etc, is an additional cost, around $10 million, plus the cost to build the booster in the first place and the R&D to get there.) And the reduction in payload is only about 25%. Pretty clear win.
But that’s only true if you get a high enough launch rate. If they don’t actually launch New Glenn any more than New Shepard is now, then Vulcan will always be cheaper.
Again, this concept is easy to grasp, and the ground is well-trod even before SpaceX made it a reality with 50 launches per year rate.
Fundamentally, costs will never get much lower with the expendable approach. Scale of spaceflight, especially human spaceflight, will never significantly expand beyond roughly that of Apollo. Enough for nostalgia, not enough for much of anything else.
-
#327
by
Jim
on 03 Jun, 2022 15:33
-
Commercial satellite market does spread payloads around to maintain different launch options.
yes, it does
-
#328
by
punder
on 03 Jun, 2022 16:13
-
Driving my car 5,000 miles and then throwing it away is still cheaper than flying and reusing a 4-passenger helicopter, mostly because the maintenance on the helicopter is ~$500 an hour.
This is a non sequitur of a response. Under discussion are two rockets—very similar vehicles within the same mode of transportation, of similar capabilities and production costs, one of which is used once and tossed, the other of which is reused repeatedly like any normal vehicle.
And you respond with… comparing a ~$30,000 road vehicle to a multi-$M flying machine? I don’t even know what you’re trying to say, seriously. Would you please elaborate?
-
#329
by
Lee Jay
on 03 Jun, 2022 17:12
-
Driving my car 5,000 miles and then throwing it away is still cheaper than flying and reusing a 4-passenger helicopter, mostly because the maintenance on the helicopter is ~$500 an hour.
This is a non sequitur of a response. Under discussion are two rockets—very similar vehicles within the same mode of transportation, of similar capabilities and production costs, one of which is used once and tossed, the other of which is reused repeatedly like any normal vehicle.
And you respond with… comparing a ~$30,000 road vehicle to a multi-$M flying machine? I don’t even know what you’re trying to say, seriously. Would you please elaborate?
I was using an example to show why two different vehicles of wildly different sizes and costs can be different when comparing different modes of use.
We know that helicopters are more expensive to maintain than cars, but also way less expensive to reuse than rockets. The cost to reuse a rocket is orders of magnitude more expensive than the cost to reuse an airliner, meaning it's not so clear-cut as to whether a smaller, expendable (or partially expendable) vehicle will be cheaper or more expensive than a fully reusable (or partially reusable) rocket, especially when the number of reuses is small (airliner = 100,000, rocket ~10).
The point being Robotbeat's incredulity is not evidence for correctness in this comparison.
-
#330
by
Lee Jay
on 03 Jun, 2022 17:16
-
I have a hard time believing a rocket that needs 7 engines to get off the ground will be cheaper than one that needs 2.
New Glenn is designed to be reusable (booster at least) from the get-go while Vulcan is not. So in THEORY, it could be cheaper.
I think initially Vulcan will be cheaper, but I fail to see what’s so hard to understand about the idea that if you reuse a rocket a bunch of times (let’s say 12 times), it’s going to end up significantly cheaper than if you use it just once and dump it into the ocean.
Like why is this concept so hard?
Because it's not that simple.
Driving my car 5,000 miles and then throwing it away is still cheaper than flying and reusing a 4-passenger helicopter, mostly because the maintenance on the helicopter is ~$500 an hour.
We don't know the cost of turning a landed New Glenn into a ready-to-launch system, but it's a safe bet that it's in the tens of millions of dollars.
It’s not safe. The marginal turnaround cost for a F9 booster, for instance, is on the order of $5 million
Many people (Musk included) who don't want to address cost issues quote marginal costs when full-wrap costs are appropriate. I don't believe for a second that the full-wrap costs of reusing an F9 are $5M, plus that's just the booster, not the second stage or the costs of mounting a launch campaign.
-
#331
by
Robotbeat
on 03 Jun, 2022 17:24
-
I have a hard time believing a rocket that needs 7 engines to get off the ground will be cheaper than one that needs 2.
New Glenn is designed to be reusable (booster at least) from the get-go while Vulcan is not. So in THEORY, it could be cheaper.
I think initially Vulcan will be cheaper, but I fail to see what’s so hard to understand about the idea that if you reuse a rocket a bunch of times (let’s say 12 times), it’s going to end up significantly cheaper than if you use it just once and dump it into the ocean.
Like why is this concept so hard?
Because it's not that simple.
Driving my car 5,000 miles and then throwing it away is still cheaper than flying and reusing a 4-passenger helicopter, mostly because the maintenance on the helicopter is ~$500 an hour.
We don't know the cost of turning a landed New Glenn into a ready-to-launch system, but it's a safe bet that it's in the tens of millions of dollars.
It’s not safe. The marginal turnaround cost for a F9 booster, for instance, is on the order of $5 million
Many people (Musk included) who don't want to address cost issues quote marginal costs when full-wrap costs are appropriate. I don't believe for a second that the full-wrap costs of reusing an F9 are $5M, plus that's just the booster, not the second stage or the costs of mounting a launch campaign.
Of course, which is why I compared only the costs of a new booster vs reusing an existing booster. And it’s also why reuse doesn’t really pencil in except at decent launch rates, which is half my point. There’s no trickery here. Certainly nothing that should be hard to grasp.
-
#332
by
Robotbeat
on 03 Jun, 2022 17:26
-
Driving my car 5,000 miles and then throwing it away is still cheaper than flying and reusing a 4-passenger helicopter, mostly because the maintenance on the helicopter is ~$500 an hour.
This is a non sequitur of a response. Under discussion are two rockets—very similar vehicles within the same mode of transportation, of similar capabilities and production costs, one of which is used once and tossed, the other of which is reused repeatedly like any normal vehicle.
And you respond with… comparing a ~$30,000 road vehicle to a multi-$M flying machine? I don’t even know what you’re trying to say, seriously. Would you please elaborate?
I was using an example to show why two different vehicles of wildly different sizes and costs can be different when comparing different modes of use.
We know that helicopters are more expensive to maintain than cars, but also way less expensive to reuse than rockets. The cost to reuse a rocket is orders of magnitude more expensive than the cost to reuse an airliner, meaning it's not so clear-cut as to whether a smaller, expendable (or partially expendable) vehicle will be cheaper or more expensive than a fully reusable (or partially reusable) rocket, especially when the number of reuses is small (airliner = 100,000, rocket ~10).
The point being Robotbeat's incredulity is not evidence for correctness in this comparison.
Reusable and expendable rockets in the F9 vein are built basically the same way, which is why your analogy is obsolete. And it’s your own incredulity that is in question, not mine. I understand why reuse is cheaper at high launch rates without any great mental struggle.
-
#333
by
Robotbeat
on 03 Jun, 2022 17:29
-
Desperately trying to bring this back on topic:
Starliner probably can’t really take advantage of the low launch cost that reuse could provide because it has too much expendable hardware of its own. (Even Dragon probably can’t.)
So in this sense, there’s a decent argument for choosing Vulcan instead of New Glenn for Starliner. Starliner is still built for low flight rate, high cost per flight. And New Glenn will take longer to get to a decent flight rate than Vulcan will.
-
#334
by
SoftwareDude
on 03 Jun, 2022 17:37
-
Lee, comparing Vulcan to New Glenn, said:
And, as I said, we and they won't know costs until after several (or many) flights. This is a new company (from a launch history point of view - not from a calendar point of view) that hasn't ever launched an orbital rocket before, and I have a hard time believing a rocket that needs 7 engines to get off the ground will be cheaper than one that needs 2.
Vulcan in the VC0 configuration is ideally sized for Starliner to ISS and needs no SRBs, while New Glenn is a heavy-lift vehicle, oversized for the mission. Even so, If NG's reusability is roughly equivalent to F9, then NG needs seven booster engines to fly at least 12 missions, while Vulcan will need 24 booster engines for 12 missions. Both rockets will expend 2 upper-stage hydrolox engines per flight.
So with respect to engine count Lee might be technically correct for the cost of the first flight, but not for the average of 12 flights.
I'm not counting on reusability on either one until I see it happen, repeatedly and reliably enough to actually save money. Since neither vehicle has flown, we're a long way away from that. ULA is way ahead, though, because they actually know what it takes to mount a launch campaign, integrate a payload, and complete a launch - things that they themselves say cost at least as much as the rocket.
Frequent launches drive down costs because of the salaries of operational staff, regular maintenance of ground facilities, and maintaining the infrastructure behind crewed launches including manufacturing of space suits. Perhaps Boeing calculated its margins based on only one launch a year for NASA. Meanwhile, their competitor is thinking in terms of several launches a year because they sell rides outside of NASA. The same holds true for ULA as a launch provider who in the past thought in terms of a handful of flights each year, not once a week.
The economics of reusability assumes a high launch cadence. Refurbishing rockets and spacecraft is not the only thing involved in reusability.
-
#335
by
edzieba
on 06 Jun, 2022 11:31
-
There may be a way to satisfy the desire for dissimilar redundancy whilst avoiding some of the costs of Starliner missions vs. competitors: pay Boeing to maintain readiness of their existing fleet of Starliners, but do not actually pay them to launch unless needed. That means a longer lead time before launch than if Boeing were regularly launching, but likely not as much longer as one would expect given the normal lead times for a crew launch. Boeing PHBs get a nice consistent revenue stream to keep them happy about keeping the programme alive in the face of potential unprofitability, and commercial station operators have a fallback option they hope to never use but can if needed - and at a lower cost then buying actual launches.
-
#336
by
DanClemmensen
on 06 Jun, 2022 11:46
-
There may be a way to satisfy the desire for dissimilar redundancy whilst avoiding some of the costs of Starliner missions vs. competitors: pay Boeing to maintain readiness of their existing fleet of Starliners, but do not actually pay them to launch unless needed. That means a longer lead time before launch than if Boeing were regularly launching, but likely not as much longer as one would expect given the normal lead times for a crew launch. Boeing PHBs get a nice consistent revenue stream to keep them happy about keeping the programme alive in the face of potential unprofitability, and commercial station operators have a fallback option they hope to never use but can if needed - and at a lower cost then buying actual launches.
I don't think it's a longer lead time. If they are ready, then they are ready: that's what you are paying them for. They can keep two full stacks in readiness. Yes, there is lead time for the third launch because they would need to re-learn how to do all the work of refurbishing, etc., but that is a year after the first launch.
So much for theory, now for practice: How hard it is to maintain a capability like this?
-
#337
by
freddo411
on 06 Jun, 2022 12:12
-
There may be a way to satisfy the desire for dissimilar redundancy whilst avoiding some of the costs of Starliner missions vs. competitors: pay Boeing to maintain readiness of their existing fleet of Starliners, but do not actually pay them to launch unless needed. That means a longer lead time before launch than if Boeing were regularly launching, but likely not as much longer as one would expect given the normal lead times for a crew launch. Boeing PHBs get a nice consistent revenue stream to keep them happy about keeping the programme alive in the face of potential unprofitability, and commercial station operators have a fallback option they hope to never use but can if needed - and at a lower cost then buying actual launches.
Not a good idea, IMHO. Starliner has had many flaws that have been revealed *only* by actual flights.
Not flying starliner is a recipe for disaster
-
#338
by
edzieba
on 06 Jun, 2022 12:57
-
There may be a way to satisfy the desire for dissimilar redundancy whilst avoiding some of the costs of Starliner missions vs. competitors: pay Boeing to maintain readiness of their existing fleet of Starliners, but do not actually pay them to launch unless needed. That means a longer lead time before launch than if Boeing were regularly launching, but likely not as much longer as one would expect given the normal lead times for a crew launch. Boeing PHBs get a nice consistent revenue stream to keep them happy about keeping the programme alive in the face of potential unprofitability, and commercial station operators have a fallback option they hope to never use but can if needed - and at a lower cost then buying actual launches.
Not a good idea, IMHO. Starliner has had many flaws that have been revealed *only* by actual flights.
Not flying starliner is a recipe for disaster
Starliner literally just flew an orbital test mission, and will fly a minimum of 7 times (CFT plus 6 operational missions) before it would need to be used for visiting commercial stations.
-
#339
by
greybeardengineer
on 06 Jun, 2022 13:27
-
There may be a way to satisfy the desire for dissimilar redundancy whilst avoiding some of the costs of Starliner missions vs. competitors: pay Boeing to maintain readiness of their existing fleet of Starliners, but do not actually pay them to launch unless needed. That means a longer lead time before launch than if Boeing were regularly launching, but likely not as much longer as one would expect given the normal lead times for a crew launch. Boeing PHBs get a nice consistent revenue stream to keep them happy about keeping the programme alive in the face of potential unprofitability, and commercial station operators have a fallback option they hope to never use but can if needed - and at a lower cost then buying actual launches.
Not a good idea, IMHO. Starliner has had many flaws that have been revealed *only* by actual flights.
Not flying starliner is a recipe for disaster
Starliner issues to date have been design flaws. Not flying may create issues with manufacturing and operations consistency and quality but doesn't cause corrected design flaws to creep back in.