Posted on 11/21/2017 10:14:32 AM PST by Elderberry
SpaceX, now on track to more than double its personal best for launches conducted in a single year, wants to further accelerate its launch pace in 2018 by perhaps 10 or more missions.
“We will increase our cadence next year about 50 percent,” Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX president and COO, told SpaceNews in an interview last week. “We’ll fly more next year than this year, knock on wood, and I think we will probably level out at about that rate, 30 to 40 per year.”
With 16 launches completed and three to four remaining by year’s end, SpaceX is tracking to perform around 20 launches this year. Remaining 2016 missions include the mystery Zuma payload, NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services-13 mission, a launch of 10 Iridium Next satellites, and potentially Falcon Heavy’s long-awaited debut.
Shotwell said the demand coming from the satellite telecommunications market for missions to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) will weigh heavily on SpaceX’s ultimate launch rate next year.
“It really depends on the telecom market for what the rate is going to be,” she said. “We have seen a dip in GTO missions. I don’t know whether that is a temporary dip or more permanent.”
Commercial satellite operator purchases of large, geostationary satellites were low the past two years, and even lower this year. To date, just eight have been ordered in 2017, well below the 20 to 25 the industry previously considered normal. Some operators are buying smaller non-geosynchronous satellites instead of traditional geostationary spacecraft.
Shotwell said those launch projections don’t include SpaceX’s own satellites, which a company executive told Congress Oct. 25 would begin launching “within the next few months.” She said SpaceX has estimates for how many missions will be required to launch its own constellation of 4,425 satellites, but declined to give further details.
(Excerpt) Read more at spacenews.com ...
Hey, haven’t you heard, all us right wing nuts hate Space X ‘cause Musk’s a liberal.
What do we care if he building the biggest, most reusable rocket imagined?
/s
SpaceX is blowing every other payload company out of the water yet it’s common to see FReepers claim that a “fraud”. Go figure.
SpaceX is blowing every other payload company out of the water yet it’s common to see FReepers claim that Elon Musk is a “fraud”. Go figure.
Sorry...fixed it.
I just like watchin’ ‘em blow up. And doing controlled landings. For some reason that’s just as good.
What could possibly go wrong?
The pace is considerably slower than what they projected in Jan 2017 though.
Musk is well known for over promising, but the marks his companies hit are still usually far ahead of anybody else. What SpaceX has done in 15 years is incredible, and they are just getting started.
And just to think, if the Russians hadn’t tried to get him drunk and steal his money he probably wouldn’t have started SpaceX.
Looking forward to the Falcon Heavy. Will be interesting to see what payload Musk chooses to send up on the first test launch.
And of course, 27 engines burning at once.
What’s the story?
If you visit YouTube, you'll learn that *all* space travel is a fraud, because the Earth is really flat and we're under a dome. SpaceX launches have even been used to "prove" it. My favorite is the joker whose entire argument in favor of the snow-globe model of Earth is to replay video from orbit while shouting, "look how FAKE! It's so obviously FAKE! It's FAKE!" :^)
Just in case, I'll end this all with the /sarc tag. :^)
They weren't starting a rocket company. The idea at the start was, in Ressi's words, "to influence public opinion by launching a high-profile mission to Mars." That was it, and that was all — they planned to buy a rocket and then send it to Mars with something in it, something alive that had a chance of staying alive. At first, they were going to send a mouse; then they thought of sending a plant, maybe a food crop in its own biosphere. "We created a company called Life to Mars, because that was the objective," Ressi says. "We were going to show the world that two guys with money and vision could reach Mars, and that it wasn't that bad a place."
They began shopping for the rocket, or, in aerospace-industry parlance, the "launch vehicle." Cantrell had arranged for them to meet with Arianespace, the European consortium that sends a significant portion of the world's satellites into space, and Musk and Ressi arranged for them to stay in Paris. "We rented the penthouse suite of one of the major hotels in Paris, across from the Louvre," Ressi says. "We had the whole top floor, usually rented by the sultan of Brunei or something. Elon and I invited all our friends. It was basically about sixty hours of meetings and thirty hours of partying, and by the time we got to Russia, we were destroyed...."
They went to Russia because Arianespace's rockets were too expensive, and they'd been told that Russia was selling what Cantrell calls "repurposed ICBMs" for $7 million apiece. A superpower had collapsed, and Musk and Ressi thought they could cash in by buying three of its rockets. "This was when it was still the Wild West over there," Ressi says. "I mean, there were like dead people on the side of the road. We got pulled over multiple times, at gunpoint, and had to bribe the police. No reason. Just 'Give us money.' 'Okay....'
"Then we started having meetings with the Russian space program, which is basically fueled by vodka. We'd all go in this little room and every single person had his own bottle in front of him. They'd toast every two minutes, which means twenty or thirty toasts an hour. 'To space!' 'To America!' 'To America in space!' I finally looked over at Elon and Jim and they were passed out on the table. Then I passed out myself."
It was no different when the Russians visited Musk and Ressi in Los Angeles. "They came to L.A. to ask us for cash," Ressi says. "'We can't continue unless you give us $5,000 in cash.' We heard this on a Saturday, because they wanted party money for the weekend. How do you come up with five grand in L. A. on a Saturday? You don't. So we went to the Mondrian, where I knew the manager. 'I need all the cash you have... .' We cleaned the Mondrian out to give the Russians their fee. The final bits of cash were ones... ."
They had two more trips scheduled to Russia; now Ressi decided, as he says, "I didn't like dealing with Russians," and told Musk he wasn't going back. Musk went anyway. On the second trip, Musk brought his wife, Justine — "I think that's the trip when the lead Russian designer started spitting at us," Cantrell says — and on the third and final trip he brought his money. He was ready to buy three Russian ICBMs for $21 million when the Russians told him that no, they meant $21 million for one. "They taunted him," Cantrell says. "They said, 'Oh, little boy, you don't have the money?' I said, 'Well, that's that.' I was sitting behind him on the flight back to London when he looked at me over the seat and said, 'I think we can build a rocket ourselves.'"
Musk wanted to put a very small greenhouse on Mars with a decommissioned Russian ballistic missile using some of his Paypal money. He went there twice and for whatever stupid reason the Russians wanted to take his money rather than do business, and they did get him drunk. (Think about it. Russia is no longer able to compete for commercial launches because of SpaceX.)
Anyway, Musk went there with an expert on rocketry and after failing to buy a rocket, he got to talking with the expert about starting his own rocket company during the return trip. The rest is history.
I think it helped that Musk belonged to an organization of tech people who were pushing for human travel to Mars.
I agree. I love it when the launches are successful, and the SpaceX first-stage landings have now become so routine as to be a little boring -- even though no one else on Earth is doing that -- I also enjoy a good old fashioned launch failure.
Great press releases by Musk!
—feels like a long con of the taxpayers from where I am sitting
"Elon just said, 'I'm going to do it. Thanks.'"
As long as no one is aboard, of course. I didn’t enjoy the Challenger explosion one bit, as I’m sure you didn’t. But all that fuel and kinetic energy of a (unmanned) rocket just going off at once—nice, in a sort of sick way.
That's a great story, I'd never heard him tell that in any of those videos, or read it in interview.
When they decided to build the rocket themselves, they attempted to hurry it up by buying and using off-the-shelf parts. At least one of the legacy companies gave them a price quote that was off the charts, and a timeline for delivery that was way out of line. So they just quietly went back and started building the entire thing themselves, all the engineering, everything.
Later on as the defense budget was cut or shifted, and the legacy companies needed business, they approached SpaceX, are you still interested in that part, we can do it for half that price. Too late, we've already built it ourselves was their reply.
I still regard Musk as a huckster (and he is one, although IMHO he is also absolutely convinced that he's going to accomplish what he says), but when they managed to shoot their fourth Falcon 1 without a hitch, from that guano-pile island in the Pacific, with essentially no infrastructure, after three really bad launch failures, I realized that he and SpaceX had to be taken seriously.
On what basis? SpaceX has delivered the goods. Where is the con??
On what basis? SpaceX has delivered the goods. Where is the con??
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