Speaking at SATELLITE 2018, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell reiterated the company’s commitment to and their customers’ acceptance of reusable rockets at the 2018, stating that SpaceX intends to fly reused boosters on at least half of their 2018 launch manifest.
Barring unforeseen circumstances, SpaceX is effectively on track to complete 30 separate missions this year with more than half flying flight-proven Falcon 9 (and Heavy) boosters. Thus far, the company has completed five launches – three flight-proven – in two months, perfectly extrapolating out to ~18 flight-proven missions and 30 total launches in 2018. While the middle weeks of March will not see any SpaceX launches, the company is on track to reach 11 flights total in late April/early March, six with reused boosters.
Ignoring the tidal wave of reusable rockets
Ultimately, SpaceX’s scheduled launch cadence lends a huge amount of credence to Shotwell’s historically pragmatic claim. Assuming a successful introduction of Falcon 9 Block 5 sometime in April (currently April 5), SpaceX may even be able to get closer to flying reused boosters on two thirds of their 2018 launches, a truly jaw-dropping achievement for a year-old technology in an industry that previously saw minimal technological progress in rocketry for the better part of two decades, if not three or even four.
In almost every conceivable manner, SpaceX has taken a complacent industry by surprise, to such an extent that other major rocket builders have barely begun to develop their competitive responses to successful reuse. SpaceX’s main domestic and global competitors – ULA, Arianespace, and ILS – are at best five years away from more than dabbling in operationally reusable rocketry. ULA is in the best shape here, and their strategy of recovering just the engine segment of their future Vulcan rocket is unlikely to fly – let alone conduct the first real reuse of engines – before 2023 or 2024 at the absolute earliest, and reuse is by no means a public priority for the company.
SpaceX’s main competitors are at best five years away from more than dabbling in operationally reusable rocketry
At this point in time, Arianespace has been halfhearted for years in their attempts to seriously consider reusable rocketry. As of 2018, the closest they have gotten is a noncommittal study that would see the French and German space agencies field a Falcon 1-sized (tiny) vehicle to study the SpaceX approach to landing rockets. In the case of Arianespace, ULA, and ILS, their Ariane 6, Vulcan, and Proton Medium rockets currently under development for inaugural launches no earlier than 2020 have indeed all been explicitly designed to compete with SpaceX’s highly-competitive Falcon 9. Sounds promising, right? The reality, however, is that each distinct company has more or less designed their modernized rockets to compete with Falcon 9’s pre-reusability pricing. Even before SpaceX begins to seriously lower the cost of reused Falcon 9s at the customer level, their competitors are already incapable of beating the price of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, at least without accepting net losses or leaning on government subsidies.
Arianespace’s Ariane 5 and ULA’s Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets do have impeccable and undeniably superior records of reliability, but SpaceX is making rapid progress towards enhanced reliability and unprecedented launch cadences. Falcon 9 Block 5 – SpaceX’s hard-won solution to rapid and cheaply reusable rocket boosters – is weeks away from its first launch, with something like six or more additional Block 5 boosters in the late stages of construction and assembly at SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory. The first prototype of BFR, a rocket designed with a fully-reusable booster and upper stage, has already begun to be assembled, with spaceship test hops scheduled to begin in 2019 and full-up orbital tests hoped to begin as early as 2020. Even with a pessimistic outlook on SpaceX’s BFR development prospects, the likelihood of orbital tests/operational launches beginning before the mid-2020s is incredibly high, barring insurmountable technological hurdles.
Whether or not SpaceX actually manages to begin its first flights to Mars in 2022 (even 2024-2026), BFR and its highly reusable orbital upper stage will swallow the launch industry whole if it manages to be even a tenth as affordable as its engineers intend it to be, and it will likely be in the late stages of hardware development and test launches before ULA, Arianespace, or ILS have even begun to operationally fly their tepid responses to reusability.
SpaceX’s BFR is being designed to launch crew, cargo, and fuel for unprecedentedly low prices. (SpaceX)
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Your article is accurate as far as it goes, but you seem to be tip-toeing around the elephant in the room. Compare the SpaceX tech with SLS. For each SLS launch NASA could buy a fleet of 10 Falcon Heavy Rockets and assuming NASA is capable of learning how to operate them, they could turn each of those rockets into 10 flights so 100 flights for the cost of one SLS launch. Possibly even more if they refurbish them after that. SLS seems to have lost its luster. The OMB says NASA will spend 210 Billion dollars just to put one manned craft in orbit around Mars. That equates to 2000 Falcon Heavies and 20,000 launches and more with refurbishment. Worse yet the BFR Tech might even eclipse Falcon Heavy. They need new management in NASA and who would want to admit that SLS needs to be shelved unless it can be made to compete with SpaceX. or better yet just buy SpaceX hardware and call it a day. How long will it be before USAF starts looking to buy fleets of SpaceX craft.
Spot on, Felix! The SLS should be used as one of the most visible examples of how our political system will never be able to balance the budget. SLS is pure pork, laid on the taxpayers by Congress, who in return are responding to lobbying money. Let's make the SLS madness more visible...and get it killed.
Blue Origin plans to catch up, and might; but the rest of the launch provider landscape is bleak. Luckily Musk and Bezos (personality conflicts aside) both seem to be highly motivated to get Humaniti to a sustainable space-based civilization. Soon.
Your article is accurate as far as it goes, but you seem to be tip-toeing around the elephant in the room. Compare the SpaceX tech with SLS. For each SLS launch NASA could buy a fleet of 10 Falcon Heavy Rockets and assuming NASA is capable of learning how to operate them, they could turn each of those rockets into 10 flights so 100 flights for the cost of one SLS launch. Possibly even more if they refurbish them after that. SLS seems to have lost its luster. The OMB says NASA will spend 210 Billion dollars just to put one manned craft in orbit around Mars. That equates to 2000 Falcon Heavies and 20,000 launches and more with refurbishment. Worse yet the BFR Tech might even eclipse Falcon Heavy. They need new management in NASA and who would want to admit that SLS needs to be shelved unless it can be made to compete with SpaceX. or better yet just buy SpaceX hardware and call it a day. How long will it be before USAF starts looking to buy fleets of SpaceX craft.
Honestly, it could be argued that it is illegal for NASA to be building rockets that would compete with commercial launchers. Part of NASA's mandate is to assist in the development of spaceflight technologies for the American commercial launch industry, not to compete with them. It would be far more efficient if NASA spent no more money on building rockets and simply purchased launch services from the American commercial launch industry. We would easily be ten times further along in actual space exploration if NASA were to do this.
The competition is simply NOT developing any competitive launch system to challenge SpaceX. Perhaps the BFR Interplanetary launch vehicle will be copied by some of them ... but probably not for 5 or 10 years after Elon gets his operational.
And even if the competition is developing rockets to compete with the Falcon 9, they are aiming at a fast moving target, but nor adjusting their aim. By the time the competition develops a Falcon 9 competitor, SpaceX will have moved on to the BFR and even lower launch costs.
Your article is accurate as far as it goes, but you seem to be tip-toeing around the elephant in the room. Compare the SpaceX tech with SLS. For each SLS launch NASA could buy a fleet of 10 Falcon Heavy Rockets and assuming NASA is capable of learning how to operate them, they could turn each of those rockets into 10 flights so 100 flights for the cost of one SLS launch. Possibly even more if they refurbish them after that. SLS seems to have lost its luster. The OMB says NASA will spend 210 Billion dollars just to put one manned craft in orbit around Mars. That equates to 2000 Falcon Heavies and 20,000 launches and more with refurbishment. Worse yet the BFR Tech might even eclipse Falcon Heavy. They need new management in NASA and who would want to admit that SLS needs to be shelved unless it can be made to compete with SpaceX. or better yet just buy SpaceX hardware and call it a day. How long will it be before USAF starts looking to buy fleets of SpaceX craft.
This is exactly what I have been thinking: The USAF will spawn a new army branch - a "US Space Force" ? - and operating BFR/BFS/Raptor technology would give the US military an amazing strategic avantage well into the 21st century.
I think it would be a safe bet that, an orbital operational BFR is going to be about 4 years away. If that happens everyone else is toast the launch services race will be over. Smart money would be doing what Bigelow is doing developing the other needed support system for after you get into orbit or want to land and work on the moon/Mars. Congress will shift it funds away from the SLS and into landing equipment and moon habs and support equipment.
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The BFR is going to be about US $15 per pound to LEO; before the beginning of 2020, the other Launch Service Providers will be doomed. They will continue to exist only as nationalistic ego-projects, government jobs-programs, and as fringe providers to scavenge the last few scraps of capacity when SpaceX is booked solid.
Blue Origin plans to catch up, and might; but the rest of the launch provider landscape is bleak. Luckily Musk and Bezos (personality conflicts aside) both seem to be highly motivated to get Humaniti to a sustainable space-based civilization. Soon.
I believe they were talking about orbital launches of the BFR by 2020 for just the spacecraft itself. Is there any articles that have said that booster would be ready anywhere near ready on that time frame?
