Impact of SpaceX rideshare on small sat launchers market

[RedLineTrain]

Look, I guess I’m a bit confused. Is someone actually claiming SpaceX’s Transporter move was not aimed at killing Rocketlab and other wannabees?

Of course it was. And rightly so.  As an analogy, Elon loves Polytopia. He says he is “built for war”. In the game, you take competitors’ territory and resources early, before they become a threat, else it becomes a brutal slugfest. That’s how you win. By being faster, more efficient, more ruthless.

Of COURSE he is happy to make only a small profit on Transporter flights, if it takes competitors out of the equation.

That’s just good business sense. Are some of you claiming he should not do that out of some sense of solidarity or even charity?

I read this passage in The Heavens Went on Sale, and my opinion is that this decision was made without reference to Rocketlab.  What Rocketlab did was establish in Musk's mind that maybe there now was an actual market that was worth serving and that there was sufficient price elasticity in that market to respond to an offering from SpaceX.

[RedLineTrain]

What I don't get is the thought processes of anyone who, being aware of these facts then goes ahead and thinks "We're going to do a smallsat ELV".

The thought process is simple.  A smallsat ELV is a natural first development goal for a new organization.  But we're seeing that this proposition is uninvestable.

Frankly, I don't believe any launchers are investable at this point, now that SpaceX is pulling up the ladder that it used to get where it is.  The amount of capital needed to eventually thrive in this environment is insane.  Tens of billions of dollars.  An amazing money pit.

[Robotbeat]

Nah, there are ways to do it. Stoke’s approach is one way.

[RedLineTrain]

Nah, there are ways to do it. Stoke’s approach is one way.

How much money do they need to raise to get to cash flow break-even and what kind of vehicle capacity will they have at that point?

[joek]

Nah, there are ways to do it. Stoke’s approach is one way.

Such as?

[Robotbeat]

Nah, there are ways to do it. Stoke’s approach is one way.

Such as?

Instead of starting small and expendable, start small and reusable, starting with the upper stage and doing gradual envelop expansion tests all the way up to simulating a full orbital flight under tether or with shallow hops. Do it for the first stage, too. This is would be a more extreme version of what Stoke has done. I have seen it suggested for first stages mostly.

Note that stoke can probably go a lot faster than spaceX due to the small size of the vehicle.

[Zed_Noir]

Nah, there are ways to do it. Stoke’s approach is one way.

Such as?

Instead of starting small and expendable, start small and reusable, starting with the upper stage and doing gradual envelop expansion tests all the way up to simulating a full orbital flight under tether or with shallow hops. Do it for the first stage, too. This is would be a more extreme version of what Stoke has done. I have seen it suggested for first stages mostly.

Note that stoke can probably go a lot faster than spaceX due to the small size of the vehicle.

Unless Stoke can field a launcher with high enough launch cadence quickly to filled the order book. They will run out of cash.

This isn't an easy time to startup a launch provider business with the Spacing Guild (aka SpX) fully established.

[john smith 19]

Nah, there are ways to do it. Stoke’s approach is one way.

Yes. Full reusability trumps partial reusability which trumps fully expendable under normal circumstances.

SX have shown the way to do partial reuse by changing the standard delta V split from 50/50 to 25/75.

Perhaps splitting the delta V further, say into 3 steps opens up more options.?
IHMO a big part of developing viable competitive architectures is what appears to be the deep unwillingness of organisations to swallow their pride and say
"SX and Musk came up with a pretty clever plan which we can't better. However we've studied their whole approach and what they took 9 years to develop (from first F1 launch to first F9 recovery in 2015) we will do in <highly ambitious time scale>"

So you wouldn't start  to try building a reusable stage with an ablatively cooled thrust chamber (Merlin 1a anyone?). But you would start shopping around for a barge now. You'll need it in the end.
I'd also stop listening to folklore and old wives tales and go with LOX for the cooling as well, given NASA (and Rotary Rocket)showed it was viable in the early 90's.
If you're up to handling LOX then Methane is the obvious choice for fuel now. LiAl alloy using FSW or welded steel seems a bit trickier, unless you're factoring reentry heating (which if you're serious about this you definitely should be).  SS could be done with laser welding for very narrow HAZ in air, diffusion bonding in a vacuum chamber (but that's tricky) or even ultrasonic welding (yes that's a real option) again in air.

I'd remind people that while in principal you can scale up the Apollo capsule to 100s of ft in dia (IE SERVE) the only large man made object that has demonstrated actual recovery and reuse is the Shuttle. So "things-with-wings," to coin a phrase would seem to be the lower risk option.
Note that lower risk development is not a synonym for no risk development.  The lowest risk option is the TSTO ELV. If you do what you've always done you get what you always got. ELV development problems during development and ELV failure rates in production. 
Of course you've now got two (or three?) stages that are completely different.
Which would lead some people back to biemes/triamese concepts and of course the MUSTARD project, with a single (absolutely common) shape and engine and functions carefully split between common systems on all hulls and a large "mission pod" that turns a hull into either a booster or an orbiter (who needs a payload bay, or payload bay doors, on a booster). Yes all the stages are now the same size rather than carefully sized in terms of mass they carry and delta v to orbit, but so what? If you're going in this direction the goal is not "optimum" performance (whatever your definition of that word happens to be) it's keeping the development costs down.

So there's a couple of options that people might consider.

Of course the accountant in me wonders why no one ever seems to run the problem backward IOW "We're going to deliver X Kg to our standard orbit (whatever that is) at Y $ 000. Z x a year. What does that mean we can afford in terms  of permanent staff, launch facilities etc? Likewise there are a bunch of TPS materials  available. Design your architecture to use them, and re-design it until it fits the TPS, not  the other way round.  That way you avoid being lumbered with a potentially open-ended R&D programme on top of an RLV development project.

[Blackjax]

3) Closely related: what fraction of today's Transporter customers would be in business and launching on a small-launcher competitor if Transporter had never existed?

I think this point doesn't get enough consideration by people. As you consider it ask yourself the followon question of how many of those customers who are proving out their business on transporter flights will become future scaled up customers on starship flights.

I think SpaceX has multiple reasons for their transporter pricing, and one of them is to foster the development of customers who, in contrast to traditional purchasers, are building business models around the idea of frequent low cost flights.  A new kind of offering on the market needs a new kind of customer and that won't appear overnight.  If they want an entrepreneurial set of customers ready to take advantage of starship, they need to seed the ground years in advance.

[seb21051]

Prior to Spacex, was anyone asking $275,000 to launch a 48kg sat?

[M.E.T.]

Look, I guess I’m a bit confused. Is someone actually claiming SpaceX’s Transporter move was not aimed at killing Rocketlab and other wannabees?

Of course it was. And rightly so.  As an analogy, Elon loves Polytopia. He says he is “built for war”. In the game, you take competitors’ territory and resources early, before they become a threat, else it becomes a brutal slugfest. That’s how you win. By being faster, more efficient, more ruthless.

Of COURSE he is happy to make only a small profit on Transporter flights, if it takes competitors out of the equation.

That’s just good business sense. Are some of you claiming he should not do that out of some sense of solidarity or even charity?

I read this passage in The Heavens Went on Sale, and my opinion is that this decision was made without reference to Rocketlab.  What Rocketlab did was establish in Musk's mind that maybe there now was an actual market that was worth serving and that there was sufficient price elasticity in that market to respond to an offering from SpaceX.

Maybe. The notion I am addressing is that it is apparently seen as a negative if you try to kill your competition. That’s the whole point of the system. Outcompete your adversaries or you die.

[Exastro]

Frankly, I don't believe any launchers are investable at this point, now that SpaceX is pulling up the ladder that it used to get where it is.  The amount of capital needed to eventually thrive in this environment is insane.  Tens of billions of dollars.  An amazing money pit.

I'm not sure "pulling up the ladder" is the right metaphor here.  It seems to me that the commercial launch business as it is today tends strongly toward having a single successful provider: the advantages of scale are just too big for it to make economic sense for the addressable commercial market to be split two ways or more. 

SpaceX was founded at the right time (not the earliest of the current generation of space companies, but close).  Their rocket designs are fundamentally sound and difficult to improve upon (Notice that the clean-sheet Terran R, developed with the full benefit of more than a decade of hindsight, looks an awful lot like a Falcon 9... as does the only successful small launcher).  So it's not really a surprise that SpaceX ended up holding the high ground.

So how long can they hold it?  Barring some disaster, I think they will slowly lose their engineering edge, drive, and vision, until eventually somebody else comes up with a big enough advance in technology and/or business model to dethrone them.  Or maybe the cost to get in will fall dramatically as modeling & simulation and new manufacturing processes make designing and building LVs easier and cheaper.  Or the market for launch could get so big that the investment required to pursue it looks small in comparison.

Meanwhile, let's learn to thrive in a climate dominated by the cheap, reliable, readily available services SpaceX provides, and stop breaking ourselves trying to compete in the commercial launch market with too little, too late.

[Nomadd]

 People are looking at the wrong thing. It's not just timing or capital or any of that stuff. Depending on a lot of unknown factors, Relativity and Rocketlab spent 20 to 30 times as much on their first vehicles as SpaceX did on the F1. And the factors that cause that kind of ratio don't just disappear when you go into production.
 
 A good part of this thread could be copy and pasted to an EV discussion.

[Asteroza]

Prior to Spacex, was anyone asking $275,000 to launch a 48kg sat?

If someone has historical data on the Dnepr rocket it would help, but a rough estimate for 48kg to SSO is $600,000, based on the $29 million dollar price and 2300kg to 300km SSO rating. That that was circa pre-2016, so inflation and currency exchange needs to be accounted for.

[M.E.T.]

Fast forward five years. Starlink will be fully operational, pulling in $10B-$20B revenue a year.

Starship will be launching multiple times a week just to maintain the 30,000 satellite Starlink network. So its economies of scale will likely be insane - allowing Starship to fly for $10M or less.

That’s $100/kg of payload. $70 if the payload increases to 150t as expected.

Tom Mueller’s Impulse space will have scores of space tugs operating off of Starship fuel depot infrastructure, taking mass delivered smallsats to whichever orbit they choose.

What serious market will remain for dedicated smallsat launchers?

[Zed_Noir]

Prior to Spacex, was anyone asking $275,000 to launch a 48kg sat?

If someone has historical data on the Dnepr rocket it would help, but a rough estimate for 48kg to SSO is $600,000, based on the $29 million dollar price and 2300kg to 300km SSO rating. That that was circa pre-2016, so inflation and currency exchange needs to be accounted for.

According to a chart in a GAO report from 2017. The Dnepr have a cost of $9063 per kg to LEO with maximum payload to LEO of 3200 kg for $29M. So that is slightly more than $435K in 2017 for a payload of 48 kg to LEO. If one pays by the kg.

[deadman1204]

3) Closely related: what fraction of today's Transporter customers would be in business and launching on a small-launcher competitor if Transporter had never existed?

I think this point doesn't get enough consideration by people. As you consider it ask yourself the followon question of how many of those customers who are proving out their business on transporter flights will become future scaled up customers on starship flights.

I think SpaceX has multiple reasons for their transporter pricing, and one of them is to foster the development of customers who, in contrast to traditional purchasers, are building business models around the idea of frequent low cost flights.  A new kind of offering on the market needs a new kind of customer and that won't appear overnight.  If they want an entrepreneurial set of customers ready to take advantage of starship, they need to seed the ground years in advance.

SpaceX would do transporter missions at a loss. They really have 1 main goal here - to starve small launch companies of contracts so they can't grow up and build bigger rockets to compete.

[thespacecow]

SpaceX would do transporter missions at a loss. They really have 1 main goal here - to starve small launch companies of contracts so they can't grow up and build bigger rockets to compete.

Yeah, welcome to competition. Or do you think competition only happens between companies of equal size?

Old space companies tried their best to kill SpaceX in early years too, forced SpaceX to abandon Falcon 1 pad at Vandenberg for example.

It's a juggle out there, it's kill or be killed.

[edzieba]

People are looking at the wrong thing. It's not just timing or capital or any of that stuff. Depending on a lot of unknown factors, Relativity and Rocketlab spent 20 to 30 times as much on their first vehicles as SpaceX did on the F1. And the factors that cause that kind of ratio don't just disappear when you go into production.
 
 A good part of this thread could be copy and pasted to an EV discussion.

For Rocketlab, it's closer to a factor of 1 than 20. Falcon 1 development cost as $90-$100mn (Berger's Liftoff), and Rocketlab have quoted Electron development as 'under $100mn'. That was for 'seriously develop, build, and intend to operate s a small launcher' costs. Relativity are a bit of a different duck, with the small launcher being investor-bait for their large-volume printers and larger launcher - investor bait which has worked. Stoke have managed to skip the investor-bait and gotten investment to go straight to a larger scale, though they're also doing so against others who have had a head start in time, funding, and operational experience.

If you want gross excess development costs for small launch, you can look at Virgin Orbit's $1bn dev cost.

[RedLineTrain]

Frankly, I don't believe any launchers are investable at this point, now that SpaceX is pulling up the ladder that it used to get where it is.  The amount of capital needed to eventually thrive in this environment is insane.  Tens of billions of dollars.  An amazing money pit.

I'm not sure "pulling up the ladder" is the right metaphor here.  It seems to me that the commercial launch business as it is today tends strongly toward having a single successful provider: the advantages of scale are just too big for it to make economic sense for the addressable commercial market to be split two ways or more. 

SpaceX was founded at the right time (not the earliest of the current generation of space companies, but close).  Their rocket designs are fundamentally sound and difficult to improve upon (Notice that the clean-sheet Terran R, developed with the full benefit of more than a decade of hindsight, looks an awful lot like a Falcon 9... as does the only successful small launcher).  So it's not really a surprise that SpaceX ended up holding the high ground.

So how long can they hold it?  Barring some disaster, I think they will slowly lose their engineering edge, drive, and vision, until eventually somebody else comes up with a big enough advance in technology and/or business model to dethrone them.  Or maybe the cost to get in will fall dramatically as modeling & simulation and new manufacturing processes make designing and building LVs easier and cheaper.  Or the market for launch could get so big that the investment required to pursue it looks small in comparison.

Meanwhile, let's learn to thrive in a climate dominated by the cheap, reliable, readily available services SpaceX provides, and stop breaking ourselves trying to compete in the commercial launch market with too little, too late.

I agree with this, especially with regard to the appearance that even partially reusable launch is a winner-takes-most or winner-takes-all market.

Note that setting aside Starship, SpaceX continues to lower its marginal cost to launch by continuing to increase Falcon flight rate.  Absent a launch failure that grounds Falcon for a long time, this is just the beginning of the pain for SpaceX's competitors.