On Thursday, December 24, 2015, Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On 12/24/2015 3:54 PM, William Claybaugh wrote:they just happened to be most of the "value".
On Thursday, December 24, 2015, Henry Vanderbilt
<hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
All due respect, but SRB's are simply not a useful reuse economics
model for soft-landing recovered liquid booster stages. As I
recall, between the effects of double-digit-G's water impact and
salt immersion, the only part of the SRB's NASA was actually willing
to reuse were the stripped steel casings, after they were scoured
out then checked for cracks.
Don't disagree with your first comment; they are, however, the only
reusable first stage data I have. Second comment is incorrect; all the
major forgings were reused until damaged.
In essence I'm correct, then - not all the steel parts were describable as
"casings" but they reused mainly the steel parts and built new solids
around them each time.
I'm not certain that is accurate; lots more than the forgings were reused;
money simply is.... Taking a "40 year" perspective means accepting a 2%
So, it was essentially built-from-scratch SRB's every time, save for
steel casings that even new were a fraction of the overall cost.
Agreed, the economics of that were never likely to make sense.
It remains to be seen what level of teardown and refurb Blue's and
SpaceX's boosters will require, but the equivalent of an SRB
"refurb" is way over at the far end of the range of probabilities.
Agreed
Further, the amount of refurb needed is NOT some fixed constant. I
believe both Blue and SpaceX are treating this as an opportunity to
discover what parts of their boosters do or don't need beefing up to
reliably survive multiple flight cycles without refurb. IOW, the
results from these first recoveries are the start of an improvement
process, not some final result they'll have to build an economical
reuse operation from.
Fair but that is a development cost that--were either organization for
profit--would drive up the amortization per flight...which is usually
the highest cost (SpaceX appears to have found a way to thread that
needle, provided the costs you propose do not materialize).
Again I'd caution that traditional industry perspective may lead to
error. In this instance, both because the development costs seem to have
been kept far lower than trad industry equivalents, and because both
outfits seem to be planning to amortize them over a larger number of
flights over a longer run than is traditional.
There is not any traditional industry perspective here: the time value of
I'd suggest Amazon.com as food for thought. It's apparently been run
hard-over for growth rather than profit for most of its existence - yet
somehow it's made its founder rich enough to have a sideline of developing
boosters "..planning to amortize [the R&D] over a larger number of flights
over a longer run than is traditional."
Agreed that SpaceX is not necessarily operating at an overall profit
currently either. I'd be inclined to guess from what I've seen that their
goal is to operate somewhere near break-even, while both grabbing more of
the existing market and expanding it. With "break-even" including paying
for their (both remarkably active and remarkably by-trad-standards cheap)
ongoing R&D operation.
They seem, so far, to have been able to raise the capital to take this
approach.
Looking at these operations from a traditional industry perspective
can lead one to assume the designs are largely fixed and veryI'm not sure they will, at least not to any huge extent. SpaceX may
difficult to change, and thus must be factored into economic
calculations largely as-is. But SpaceX in particular has made it
very clear they're not following this traditional frozen-design
model at all, but rather one of continuous incremental improvement.
Assuming such incremental improvement won't be part of the process
of bringing reuse into the routine operation strikes me as very
likely to be a significant error.
Careful: the organizational effects of the launch failure have not shown
up in prices yet.
instead treat the immediate impact as a capital cost (didn't they recently
shake the investor tree again?) and make it back over more time than you'd
expect. But yes, several months of gotta-be expensive delay/recovery
aside, it will be interesting to see to what extent this will have forced
higher costs on their ongoing operations. My guess would be, not much - I
expect they'll have worked very hard to fix the problems revealed with a
minimum of increased ongoing ops costs.
I expect we can agree entirely that it'll be interesting to see.
Henry