Anthony:
If I were pressed to guess, I would bet that Mr. Musk’s secret is very
cheap money.
Bill
On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 4:04 PM Anthony Cesaroni <anthony@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We worked on a very detailed design, manufacturing and ConOps exercise for
one of the major players in 2014. The vehicle had a lot of similarities to
Falcon at the time. The first and second stage propulsion system in
particular. It's a long story including a prior court challenge over
certain aspects of propulsion IP.
At the time, recycling of the first stage system was discounted very
early. The refurbishing cost was not any less than building a new booster,
primarily due the analysis indicating less than 12% of the system component
cost was cleanly reusable for lack of a better term. It was difficult to
merge the recovered booster back into the production cycle without
complicating what was believed to be a simple and cost-effective production
plan. It really required a whole separate recovery and production line
right down to delivery of the finished booster otherwise it killed the cost
efficiencies of the proposed line. This also increased the plant NRE as
well as field operations cost significantly. The planned approach was KISS.
The current SpaceX recovery method would at first glance be a lot gentler
on the hardware than the recovery method that we reviewed at the time, but
we didn’t have to carry a lot of extra fuel and additional systems to
accomplish the task, just a measurably higher amount of thermal protection,
payload and structure. Taking all this into consideration, my question is
what reason is there to think that refurbishment costs for a Block 5 first
stage are *less* than manufacturing costs. I've been involved in four
orbital system propulsion projects since 2000 and I'm currently working at
the flight hardware level of my fifth. I'm not convinced of the claimed
economics of recovery and re-use in a cost effective launch system given
the utilization rates, current state of the art manufacturing methods and
performance limits of available propellants. Maybe Mr. Musk will share his
secret someday.
Anthony J. Cesaroni
President/CEO
Cesaroni Technology/Cesaroni Aerospace
http://www.cesaronitech.com/
(941) 360-3100 x101 Sarasota
(905) 887-2370 x222 Toronto
-----Original Message-----
From: arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On
Behalf Of Rand Simberg
Sent: Monday, July 1, 2019 4:35 PM
To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AR] Re: Human Rated Hydrogen Tanks (was Re: Re: tank frost (was >
SpaceX's customers neither buy satellites by the pound, or pay for launch
by the pound. Launch costs per pounds aren't particularly relevant to
launch economics except for bulk commodities (which are not yet a launch
market). For example, CRS payloads tend to be volume limited, so SpaceX is
still better off getting the booster back than not. Do you have some reason
to think that refurbishment costs for a Block 5 first stage are more than
manufacturing costs?
