Henry:
I don’t think that is quite right: that giant machine for FSW tanks had a
cost which had to be amortized, irrelevant of whether they are building one
tank set per year or per month or per week. Likewise, all those hundreds
of tool boxes and the tools in them have to be amortized. And all that
production infrastructure also has to be maintained and replaced as
needed. Those costs are both fixed and carry over; previous generations of
investment don’t get written off because one switches from expending to
reusing.
Bill
On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 12:38 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Tue, 24 Mar 2020, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
SpaceX knew this going in. Being sensible people not locked into the
established way of doing things, they likely would have set up a
production establishment for sixty expended cores a year very
differently than they did the plant for ~12 5X reused cores...
One caution on this: remember that intact reuse *wasn't* the original
plan, even for Falcon 9 -- the plan was splashdown-and-salvage. Using
salvaged subassemblies in new construction wouldn't save you nearly as
much on the production establishment. They "knew this going in" only for
facilities built since the decision to switch to Plan B, retrofire and
powered landing.
Henry