
Intelsat 35e Mission [pdf] - janober
http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/intelsat35epresskit_july5.pdf
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ChuckMcM
A possibly interesting question for someone at Spacex.

At some point the Falcon9 heavy will be flying. And with it comes the ability
to put a heavier mass into orbit, or to put what an F9 could put into orbit
but could not recover the boosters from.

So on a mission like this, if it "upgraded" to a Falcon9 heavy and all three
boosters were recovered, then it seems the marginal cost difference would be
the cost of fuel versus the cost of a booster. Since it has been asserted that
the fuel cost is 'insignificant' compared to the cost of a booster, does the
math pencil out?

Of course there is a risk of losing all three boosters but in other transport
industries spending additional fuel to save operational costs is often a good
strategy. I'm wondering if that is being considered once F9H is qualified.

~~~
Cogito
Not at SpaceX but read /r/spacex a lot.

The general consensus from arm chair rocket scientists is that the expendable
version of the F9 will eventually be phased out completely. The one place it
may remain is for customers who want a brand new rocket and also have an
unrecoverable mission profile.

As long as the Falcon Heavy is reliable, and the three cores are reliably
recovered, it makes sense to replace an F9 expendable launch with a heavy
launch. That won't happen immediately, but if the progress goes along a
similar trajectory as the F9 did it probably won't take too long before every
F9 core is recovered.

Worth noting as well - the Falcon Heavy is never referred to as F9, but rather
as F27, as the number refers to the number of engines on the main stage.

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thatcherc
Interesting that nothing is said about why two scrubs occurred. SpaceX seems
to have been forthcoming with details about anomalous flights in the past like
Amos 6 and CRS-7, but I haven't found anything that gives an explanation for
why the first two launch attempts didn't succeed.

~~~
crush-n-spread
They were forthcoming in both Sunday and Monday's webcasts of the failed
launch. In both cases, it was a data anomoly 10s from launch

~~~
ChuckMcM
Which is to say at t-10 seconds when its pretty simple and routine to scrub,
they do a _massive_ comparison of sensor data and system status versus
expected data and expected status. If that fails for any reason they scrub. It
takes them a while to go through all of the data to figure out what data
caused the scrub and then a while longer to figure out what caused the data to
be "wrong".

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aphextron
What is SpaceX's scrub rate in comparison with the rest of the industry? It
seems they are never hesitant to make the call, which seems great in my
(uninformed) opinion.

~~~
dangrossman
There's this 10-year-old infographic from the AP about NASA's space shuttle
launches:

[http://i.imgur.com/HVJtlTR.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/HVJtlTR.jpg)

The shuttle launched on its scheduled launch date only 40% of the time. 56.2%
of the delays were due to technical reasons, not weather.

~~~
voltagex_
How serious is a scrub, in terms of lost revenue and loss of "face"? I get
that it's much less of a problem than losing a rocket/payload, but it must
still be bad.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
Imagine you're paying $300m to put a satellite in to space (SpaceX nominally
charges $60m for private customers, and satellites are often hundreds of
millions of dollars). The satellite will be in service for 5-15 years.

Imagine that, due to price (you save, I'm guessing, $40m or more) you choose a
young rocket company that has experienced two serious failures that destroyed
the payload.

Imagine that company is very cautious and will happily abort any launch that
looks odd.

I imagine the caution is a positive aspect.

~~~
jgalt212
I don't think you came even close to answering the question.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
That's fair. I think an insiders perspective would be needed to provide a real
answer - all I can do is take the basic facts I know and speculate. The head
of a global telecommunications company will have a very different outlook than
I would, but we're all human and my imagination seems at least like one
plausible view.

To the second half of the question:

I know the fuel is nominally $300k - or that's the number Elon uses. I don't
know if they can recover the fuel or have to vent it in the event of a scrub.
And the ground crew and launch prep has some cost. We could speculate that the
total cost of launching is on the order of $5m (not including the vehicle and
associated engineering), but that those costs do eventually result in a
launch. A scrub costs salaries and hotel stays of ground crew, fees paid to
overseeing agencies for range patrol, and any lost fuel - maybe $1-2m.

This is all speculation. I don't have real answers. I'm also reasonably sure
the parent wasn't in dire need of a critically accurate answer so I hope my
efforts to estimate an answer might be helpful to someone.

