SpaceX Set to Launch the World’s First Reusable Booster

Technology Review ^ | March 13, 2014 | By Michael Belfiore

[Cincinatus]

SpaceX is teaching lessons. They are cutting cost to access space by about 3/4.

You can put down the SpaceX Kool-Aid now.

NASA has a contract with SpaceX for ISS re-supply. That 12 flight contract costs the government $1.6 billion or, $133 million per flight. The up-mass for a single Falcon 9/Dragon is 7300 lbs. That costs out at $18,219 per pound of supplies delivered to ISS.

For comparison, the costs of delivery to ISS by Shuttle were around $10,000 per pound. That makes SpaceX about 80% more expensive than Shuttle, at least for this purpose.

Welcome to the revolution.

[tanknetter]

Iirc that’s the opposite extreme, assuming that the Shuttle was hauling up it’s full capacity each launch.

Which, after the ISS construction ended wasn’t going to happen any more. In fact, I think that the most the shuttle could haul up were two of those ESA pressurized cargo modules due to the docking port limitations on the Destiny module. And NASA really didn’t plan for ever hauling up more than one.

[Dagnabitt]

Appears they weren’t that Set to Launch.

[Gaffer]

Oh, the promises they made when they first proposed this system. Dozens of flights per year, days turnaround....impossibly optimistic claims. Just like government always does when they want to spend your money.

[TruthFactor]

I love that video. Hat's off to Elon Musk and SpaceX. I hope that can develop reusable boosters just as the video depicts.

[GEC]

This isn’t reusable, but it would be cheap, and it’s scalable.

http://starfirescientific.com/

[zeugma]

The main fuel tank (orange) was completely expendable.

This has always bothered me. Several organizations attempted to get the government to leave the tanks in orbit for future use. We spent a lot of money to get that hardware up there, and NASA just let the stuff burn up in reentry. There were engineering studies done that indicated they could have been used for many things, from habitats, to raw materials.

[Moonman62]

The shuttle was a nice try at reusability, but in practice fell far short. The main fuel tank (orange) was completely expendable. The solid rocket motors (white) were recovered, but the amount of repair work needed to use them again put the price of reuse to be not much less than building new ones. The orbiter was the reusable part, but even it had to go through very expensive repairs and checks between flights.

I remember FReeper Physicist once saying that it would be cheaper to launch a new Hubble telescope than to do a repair mission.

[Mike Darancette]

Totally bitchin’. Shows the difference from government (disposable parts) and private (reusable parts) solutions.