Henry:
It isn’t clear to me that there is all that much difference between making
12 per year and making 6 or 24.
One saves the material costs and the marginal labor cost but the
infrastructure doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) change much over that range
of production.
That said, if you optimize your system for four units per year you will
find making 24 more costly than a line optimized for twenty-four.
But rates of a few dozen per year—or a few hundred—all fall into “craft
production” and are not going to show economically significant variation on
production costs. The benefit of even a few reuses is in the depreciation
of the hardware cost over multiple launches.
Bill
On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 2:24 PM Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Another way of looking at this that I think is relevant: 5-reuse boosters
allows SpaceX to support a given flight rate with (to a first
approximation) 1/5th the size of production establishment they'd need for
fully expendable operations.
Henry
On 3/23/2020 8:12 AM, William Claybaugh wrote:
Robert:
There is too little data to make any assertion about stage longevity at
this point.
However, ignoring propellant and launch operations costs, five flights per
booster would indicate a cost per booster at 20% of the manufactured cost,
not including refurbishment between flights. The former is around $30-35
million, so $6-7 Million per flight, again, not including refurbishment. If
an overhaul costs more than about $6 million, it would make more sense to
simply build a new five launch lifetime stage.
We may note that compared to a $50 million price, these depreciated stage
cost estimates suggest either a good deal of profit or that other costs
(launch operations, refurbishment) are high.
Bill
On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 8:51 AM Robert Steinke <robert.steinke@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
From hobbyspace.com about the latest Falcon 9 launch:
" A first stage engine shut down prematurely (just before staging) but
had no effect on the mission as the other 8 engines made up the difference.
The booster also failed to make a successful landing on a sea platform.
This was the fifth flight of this booster."
That was after a previous launch attempt aborted due to slightly high
power.
Wonderful demonstration of engine-out fault tolerance, but it does look
like the rocket is showing some wear and tear after 5 flights. What does
this do to their economics if stages need an overhaul/have an increased
chance of loss of vehicle after only 5 flights?