
SpaceX Will Launch Its First Reused Rocket Later This Month - ayanai
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-08/spacex-reflying-rocket-this-month-in-step-toward-cheap-launches
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mabbo
The exciting part is if they successfully land it again.

Consider: eight first stage rockets have been landed already. One is a show
piece (the first one) and at least one is too beat up to ever be reused. But
that leaves a fleet of six-ish rockets. How many Falcon 9s would SpaceX need
to run an active fleet that is constantly refurbished and reused, never
replaced? They'd start to look less like Boeing and more like Delta.

~~~
gozur88
They're a ways from being Delta. One of the things that came out recently
regarding crewed launches is Merlin turbines have been developing cracks under
test. They're probably only good for a handful of flights.

Musk claims that's all going to be fixed in the next version. We'll see.

~~~
kitsunesoba
Even if a booster can only be reused 2-5 times, it's still a dramatic
improvement over throwing it away after a single flight and will still have a
measurable impact on launch prices. There's also savings to be had by putting
all expendable flights on boosters that only have one or two launches left in
them.

~~~
XorNot
Seriously. Going from 1 to 2 uses is a massive improvement.

~~~
TorKlingberg
I think if they can only get two flights out of a launcher, it will not make
economic sense to reuse them. But I think SpaceX will do much better than
that.

~~~
Zardoz84
cost = cost of single / 2 - cost of prepare the landed first stage

The "cost of prepare the landed first stage" is the big question here.

~~~
simonh
Plus the cost of the second stage.

~~~
Klathmon
And the additional cost of developing a rocket that can land

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amorphid
Once it has been recovered, how challenging is it to recycle a the first
stage? If I recall correctly, the solid state boosters on either side of the
space shuttle would get reused, too, if you went out and picked them after
they fell into the ocean.

EDIT:

It looks like making the shuttle boosters wasn't all that economical...
[https://www.quora.com/Space-Shuttle-How-much-money-was-
saved...](https://www.quora.com/Space-Shuttle-How-much-money-was-saved-by-
reusing-the-Solid-Rocket-Boosters-SRBs-instead-of-making-them-
disposable/answer/Dave-Mohr-1)

~~~
TorKlingberg
Solid fuel rockets have a much simpler design, no fuel pumps or cry-cooled
fuel tanks. But they are less efficient weight wise, and you cannot turn them
off to abort a launch.

~~~
simonh
Unless you decide to compromise the design by manufacturing them in sections
with dodgy O-ring connections.

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ygra
With Echostar 23 being pushed further out I'd guess SES-10 will slip to April.
It seems they're still working out the kinks of their new launch pad.

~~~
Herodotus38
I was going to say the same thing. I've been watching the static fire for
Echostar 23 get delayed twice now for undisclosed reasons. I think April is
more realistic.

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ChrisBland
What a fun time to be alive, I've been hoping for this step for a long time
now, reusable rockets will greatly improve our access and exploration of space
and should allow some great leaps in our species progression. It makes me
wonder how many years from now until rocket launches to space like this will
seem like today's commercial airline travel.

~~~
vkou
The difference between a commercial airliner, and a rocket launch is four to
five orders of magnitude of power.

Rockets have, and will continue to occasionally explode. (From 1% to 5% of the
time.)

If airplanes would explode 1-5% of the time, there wouldn't be a commercial
air travel industry.

~~~
valuearb
The Martin M-130 was the main plane Pan-Am used to establish the first cross
pacific passenger service. Three were built exclusively for Pan-Ams cross
pacific service started in 1936, offering one flight per week.

The Hawaiian Clipper disappeared in the pacific with all hands in 1938. PanAm
also used the Sikorsky S-42 on shorter legs, one exploded in mid-air in Pago
Pago same year. The other two Martins crashed with heavy fatalities in 1942 &
1945, 100% loss rates. Pan-Ams ten Sikorskies had at least five fatal
accidents for a 50%+ loss rate.

They were replaced by the Boeing 314, 12 were made, 3 crashed for a 25% loss
rate. They were all taken out of service by Pan-Am quickly after WWII, so Pan-
Ams total fatal accident rate for its seaplanes was around 45% in only about
13 total years of service for all types.

Despite this Pan-Am was hugely successful at establishing profitable ocean
crossing passenger flights and changed the world doing it.

People will take a lot more risk to reach new worlds, if we only let them.

~~~
vkou
Assuming each plane flew 1-3 times a week, for 13 years... That would be
600-2000 flights. If half the planes crashed, that would give them a failure
rate of 0.1-0.025%.

The Space Shuttle (Also a second generation vehicle) had a failure rate of
1.5%.

The Souyz (Widely considered to be the most reliable launch system, with a
successful launch rate of 97.3%) had 2 accidents which killed everyone on
board - out of 136 launches. Also a failure rate of ~1.5%.

~~~
valuearb
Your estimates are a bit off. Each plane didn't fly for 13 years, on average
they flew 5 or 6 years. And the pacific routes were only once a week until the
first crash, and Pan Am didn't replace it, just flew the route 3 times a
month.

Edit: The pacific route was nearly a week long, so obviously if you count each
leg separately percentages were better, but passengers had to fly every leg to
reach their destination, unless they wanted to be marooned on a remote island.

And your failure rates are backwards looking. Flying boats before 1938
certainly had even worse safety records than post 1938, so the first
passengers on Pan Am flights had worse safety expectations. Counting legs
separately would be like saying the Shuttle actually made 270 trips, 135 up
and 135 down.

The Falcon 9 and Heavy are likely far safer than the Shuttle, which was a
clearly unsafe design, from the rube goldberg melding of solid and liquid
rockets to a crew cabin with no abort systems, and unproven reentry shielding
on a shape that accentuated the dangers of its use.

Falcons are a refinement of proven launch technologies, combined with a much
safer crew compartment with excellent abort features and using proven reentry
shielding/shape. Odds are it's far safer than the shuttle.

Only 10% of Magelleons crew survived the circumnavigation of the world, yet
explorers lined up to follow. If SpaceX offered rides to Mars with a 20%
chance of death, there would be a waiting list of hundreds of thousands of
people.

In reality it shouldn't be too hard to reduce launch safety risk by a factor
of 10 from historical launches. The Dragon capsule can almost add that
improvement by itself.

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Banthum
Is there info on how many times a Falcon 9 stage can be used before it's
simply worn out?

~~~
nialv7
I think the current design can survive ~10 reuses? [1]

However, the next and last iteration of Falcon 9, Block 5, is supposed to
survive much more reuses, and easier to refurbish.

[1]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/590wi9/i_am_elon_mu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/590wi9/i_am_elon_musk_ask_me_anything_about_becoming_a/d94r9ap/)

~~~
simonh
They've ground-tested boosters with full-flight equivalent burns hundreds of
times without seeing any serious degradation. Of course that's not the same as
putting them through re-entry and landings. Block 5 will include improved legs
and I'm sure they will make other improvements based on lessons learned from
examining the recovered boosters.

Personally I'd expect the main stresses on the system to be due to running the
engines. I see no reason to suppose that the other stresses the cores
experience in flight can't be engineered round to a similar degree of
resiliency.

~~~
Robotbeat
Not hundreds, but they have tested one of the boosters they recovered about
8-10 times through a full flight cycle in Texas. Doing it hundreds of times
would cost a lot of money just in propellant! And the boosters (pre-Block 5)
are supposed to be good for around 10 uses.

And they do test the engines a LOT. Each new engine is separately acceptance-
fired (less than full mission, but not just a burp) in Texas, then integrated
into a full stage and acceptance-fired again in Texas. Then, the stage is
brought to the launch site and a very short static fire test is done. If there
are any last-second aborts (i.e. after engine ignition but before clamp
release), that puts another short cycle on the engine. So launch will be at
least the 4th firing of each engine. And if it's the center engine, it'll do a
boost-back burn, an entry burn, and a landing burn. So the engines get a lot
of work done even on a nominal mission before we talk about reflying the
stages.

And since each Falcon 9 takes 10 engines, that means they do (depending on the
mission type) around 40-50 engine firings per launch, so yeah, over a half
dozen or so launches, they ARE indeed doing hundreds of engine firings, just
not all on the same engine and same booster.

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perilunar
'Later this month'?

Spaceflightnow.com says the next Falcon 9-SES launch is SES 10 on March 27.

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TaylorAlexander
That's the launch in question, and we're in the month of March...

