Falcon Heavy gets another contract
Capitalism in space: With the announcement on October 30th that the Space Force has added a third military Falcon Heavy launch for ’22, the rocket is now scheduled to fly five times next year.
The addition of a third national security mission for Falcon Heavy will make for quite a scheduling challenge for SpaceX’s three-core rocket that also is projected to launch in 2022 a Viasat-3 commercial broadband satellite with an Astranis communications satellite as a secondary payload, as well as NASA’s Psyche planetary science mission.
The Space Force missions USSF-44 and USSF-52 both were scheduled to fly in 2021 but have been delayed by payload readiness and range scheduling issues. No target launch dates have been announced yet although the Space Force said they would happen in 2022. Falcon Heavy rockets lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
It increasingly looks like 2022 will be a major record-setting year for rocketry.
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Capitalism in space: With the announcement on October 30th that the Space Force has added a third military Falcon Heavy launch for ’22, the rocket is now scheduled to fly five times next year.
The addition of a third national security mission for Falcon Heavy will make for quite a scheduling challenge for SpaceX’s three-core rocket that also is projected to launch in 2022 a Viasat-3 commercial broadband satellite with an Astranis communications satellite as a secondary payload, as well as NASA’s Psyche planetary science mission.
The Space Force missions USSF-44 and USSF-52 both were scheduled to fly in 2021 but have been delayed by payload readiness and range scheduling issues. No target launch dates have been announced yet although the Space Force said they would happen in 2022. Falcon Heavy rockets lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
It increasingly looks like 2022 will be a major record-setting year for rocketry.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Despite all these successes: There are again allegations against Elon Musk, for manipulating the share value of Tesla through not really correct news (in this case: allegedly purchase of 100,000 vehicles by Hertz). Crime fiend? Despite his wealth: I have the feeling that his luck will run out of luck at some point.
What do you think?
I am confused by the story. Hertz says “we bought cars”, Musk says, “There is no contract yet, but it has no impact on our economics”.
Not sure how that is manipulation. He basically says, sale or no sale, no impact.
I really want to see a Centaur atop Falcon Heavy.
Jeff Wright:
The Centaur upper stage (especially its RL-10 engines) is incredibly expensive.
Questioner responded to Jeff Wright: “The Centaur upper stage (especially its RL-10 engines) is incredibly expensive.”
I appreciate Jeff’s dream. Since the RL-10 is a hydrogen/oxygen engine, its efficiency is greater than the Falcon Heavy’s upper stage, and Jeff is clearly trying to imagine how much more mass could be taken to space with the Centaur than with SpaceX’s own upper stage.
For most of the history of modern rocketry, the engineers have tried to optimize for performance: mass to orbit. However, the cost to get to orbit remained at around $10,000/lb (around $20,000/kg).
Elon Musk had wanted to privately explore Mars but discovered that the launch cost was too high. He founded SpaceX in order to optimize not for mass but for cost: dollar spent per payload mass to reach orbit. SpaceX did well with Falcon ($1,450/lb) and did better with Falcon Heavy ($650/lb). According to SpaceX’s announcements, SpaceX could easily reduce that lower cost by a factor of five or ten.
As a result of the reduced costs of the Falcons, there are now hundreds of private companies eager to do business in space with relatively inexpensive small satellites. Hundreds of these satellites have already been launched.
It may be interesting to improve the efficiency, but the cost also must be low, otherwise few people are willing to pay for the ride. Jeff’s dream is likely to remain only a dream, but if someone finds a way to reduce the cost of a hydrogen upper stage, a similar demonstration may be possible by a company that improves on SpaceX’s cost and performance. SpaceX showed it is possible, but left plenty of room for improvement. Now we need other companies to do even better than SpaceX.
sippin_bourbon:
Has the time now come to intervene and stop these manipulated undesirable developments?
John Authers:
“Now Elon Musk is worth 3 times as much as Warren Buffett, some fun with valuations. Berkshire produces the highest EBITDA of any US company, 20 times that of Tesla. But Tesla is worth 2 Berkshires. Make sense?”
https://mobile.twitter.com/johnauthers/status/1455541487882678280
Edward:
About the choice of term: Like so many amateur rocket scientists, you are using the term “efficiency” incorrectly. Efficiency – when applied to the quality of a rocket engine – is the ratio of real experimental to ideal theoretical performance. For example, the combustion efficiency. But you mean the absolute level of a certain performance parameter, in this case the specific impulse.
Elon Musk was very well advised not to use the LH2 / LOX fuel combination for his rockets because of the high costs and other disadvantages. And he was also very well advised to keep his rocket technology and launch systems so simple that he used the same fuel combination for all rocket stages and not two different ones for the upper and lower stages. The additional infrastructure for liquid hydrogen storage and refueling for the additional launch, test stand and production systems never pays off.
The specific impulse of LH2 / LOX is higher than that of LCH4 / LOX (or RP1 / LOX), but rocket stages (this applies to the structure as well as the engines) are much heavier due to the extremely low density of liquid hydrogen than with methane or kerosene as fuel. I guess that in the end there isn’t a very big difference in the ideal delta-v (ideal velocity change) of a hydrogen or of a methane upper stage. SpaceX certainly calculated all of that.
Your question assumes the manipulation happened.
Based on his statements, I do not see manipulation.
Meanwhile, (unrelated) he just had success in court against Bezos.
I should also point out, that several days now after this event, the SEC has not announced any new investigations, stated they are considering an investigation, nor alleged new manipulation.
They still can of course, but so far, your statements do not appear to be accurate.
sippin_bourbon:
Musk was up to now still smart enough in his choice of words and he slowly built up the whole thing and created a dependent, believing following who worship him almost godlike and thrown a sensible reflexiveness (also because of greed) overboard. The whole thing reminds me a bit of the Bhagwan phenomenon of the 1980s.
I have re-read his comments:
What he says:
There is currently no contract yet.
If Hertz is buying cars, it is at market price.
Such a contract, or lack thereof, has no impact Tesla economics.
All of this was in direct comment to the status of the stocks.
If anything, he was being cautious.
If he let it run longer, letting investors believe there was a deal on paper, with signatures, when no such deal existed, that could come back to bite them later.
He did not announce anything that drive the price up. Hertz did that. Should they be investigated?
The last statement above, about no impact on economics, is the most important his stockholders would want to hear.
I also checked again. The SEC, which has pounced on Musk in the past for saying really dumb things, does not appear to be concerned at this time.
Questioner,
You wrote: “Like so many amateur rocket scientists …”
You have been here long enough that you should already know that not only am I an engineer but an aerospace engineer. I know what efficiency and specific impulse are. I also know that my audience is not fellow rocket scientists, so I often use terms that are similar enough but not industry jargon.
It is best when one’s audience understands what is said and meant (I failed with you), so the communicator needs to understand his audience. The challenge is to avoid the jargon and unfamiliar acronyms without talking down to the audience. An amateur communicator may not understand these concepts and may insist upon jargon and PhD-level communications.
“Elon Musk was very well advised not to use the LH2 / LOX fuel combination for his rockets because of the high costs and other disadvantages.”
That was my main point. Another point was that someone may find a way to make hydrogen less expensive to use. Next time read my comment.