October 15, 2024 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who also let me know about today’s Chinese launch. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- China’s long term space science plan also calls for a “Venus atmospheric sample return mission”
The link is in Chinese. Jay provided a translation which mentioned the Venus mission with few details.
- Chinese pseudo-company Landspace hopes to attempt landing and recovery of first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket in 2025
Landspace has been using a Grasshopper-type engineering test vehicle to do vertical landing tests.
- NASA touts the advantages of the halo lunar orbit of Lunar Gateway
Ah, but will it ever get launched, and at what cost?
- More video of Superheavy’s tower catch, plus a graph illustrating how much SpaceX has lowered the cost to orbit
The video is incredibly fun to watch, but the graph is far more important. While everyone else has done only a little to lower the cost, SpaceX has smashed the floor.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows 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. 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. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally 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.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four 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.
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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.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who also let me know about today’s Chinese launch. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- China’s long term space science plan also calls for a “Venus atmospheric sample return mission”
The link is in Chinese. Jay provided a translation which mentioned the Venus mission with few details.
- Chinese pseudo-company Landspace hopes to attempt landing and recovery of first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket in 2025
Landspace has been using a Grasshopper-type engineering test vehicle to do vertical landing tests.
- NASA touts the advantages of the halo lunar orbit of Lunar Gateway
Ah, but will it ever get launched, and at what cost?
- More video of Superheavy’s tower catch, plus a graph illustrating how much SpaceX has lowered the cost to orbit
The video is incredibly fun to watch, but the graph is far more important. While everyone else has done only a little to lower the cost, SpaceX has smashed the floor.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows 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. 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. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally 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.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four 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 or subscription:
4. 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.
The truly amazing thing about the graph is the vertical axis.
It’s normal to see data truncated and sometimes a huge slope is shown by slicing the range shown.
Obviously the cost to orbit is never going to be zero, but wow, look at the change.
How expensive the Space Shuttle was is eye opening.
Hmmm… where is SLS on that chart?
“Hmmm… where is SLS on that chart?”
Yeah, I also wonder where Vulcan fits and where New Glenn will fit. Also don’t see Rocket Lab’s Electron.
Even if Blue Origin gets New Glenn going and succeeds with some of it’s reusability I doubt it can compete with SpaceX economically.
Someday someone will win a prize in Economics for doing a study/writing a paper on how SpaceX did it.
Ironically, Saturn V has a lower cost per pound as the more prolific R-7
Size matters.
schwit,
Yes, that was eye opening to me as well and that is what got my attention. The shuttle was supposed to drop that price, but just increased, despite the promises.
As for Steve’s observation, we could figure it out with some napkin math. Right now there are six committed SLS launches (I remember Bob’s article on that). Yes, there are variations in the designs: Block 1, 1B, 2, etc… I will just say 100 tonnes to LEO to average it out. I will also not include the towers being rebuilt and the Orion capsules. Roughly it took $20 billion to build SLS plus the first flight and $2B per flight after. So $30 billion for all six SLS rockets. Divide it by 600 tonnes, $50,000 per kilogram.
You guys can play with the numbers if you wish, but it is coming close to the cost of the shuttle= $51,500 per kg.
Steve Golson asked; “where is SLS on that chart?”
Right now, she launches about 70 tons every three years, or so, for $4.1 billion, making for $50K to $60K per kilogram. Eventually it is supposed to launch 130 tons once a year for around $800 million, for a cost of around $6,000 per kilogram, which is competitive with the Ariane 6, which can launch multiple times annually. Too bad Ariane 6 is not competitive with the rest of the launch vehicles, making it already obsolete.
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The higher priced launch vehicles in the 1960s through the 1990s are probably American. American launch to orbit was around $10K per pound for that time period, and did not drop much. In the 1990s, launch customers begged for a drop in launch costs to $2,000 per pound, which they believed at the time would generate a large demand for launches. Apparently, governments thought that they already had plenty of business, because they didn’t work much on such a drastic reduction in launch costs.
Then along came Peter Diamandis, who offered his X Prize for reusability, which was thought to be the key to lower launch costs. Although Scaled Composites won that prize, showing it can be done, Blue Origin and SpaceX pursued commercial reusable launch vehicles. SpaceX won that race, reaching the requested price tag, but Blue Origin is about to enter its reusable orbital launcher. We have seen that with lower cost to orbit, the customers were right about the demand. Fortunately, reusability also means that the booster stages are still available for more launches, so the launch cadence can increase to meet that demand. No wonder SpaceX is so busy: it has the launch vehicles on hand, whereas the other companies still have to make each vehicle for each launch.
SpaceX alone is launching almost as many non-Starlink commercial payloads this year as worldwide total launches two decades ago, and the lower launch cost has allowed Starlink to be so successful.
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The graph is a little bit misleading. The dotted lines representing the price regions of the SpaceX launchers is somewhat better than the points on the graph. The points appear to be the start dates for each of the launchers and would be more representative portrayed similarly as the SpaceX launchers, where the years that each vehicle was operational are included, and would be even more representative if they could also portray the number of launches of each vehicle per year in order to answer the question of how much average launch costs were over the period. Is this what the wispy nebular cloud does with the SpaceX launchers? (I don’t think so, either.)
For instance, Arianespace was successful because it had lower prices than American launchers, so from the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s it had a large influence on the average launch cost for payloads. SpaceX is currently launching a whole lot of mass at relatively low cost, so the right side of the red line is probably somewhat higher than is should be. Unless the red line is all launchers except SpaceX.
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Mitch S. wondered: “Yeah, I also wonder where Vulcan fits and where New Glenn will fit.”
Vulcan costs between $100 million to $200 million and lifts 27 tonnes for a ratio of $3,700 to $7,400 per kilogram, and New Glenn is $68 million to lift 45 tonnes for a ratio of $1,500 per kilogram. New Glenn seems to have found efficiencies that Falcon 9 had left on the table.
Rocket Lab’s Electron costs $7.5 million 320 kg for a ratio of $23,000 per kg. It may not be the best deal, but it gets a payload to the desired orbit.
John Denver
“War Pigs”
https://youtu.be/L5m5ycA_QHk
(2:02)