[AR] Re: Blue Origin beats SpaceX to re-launching a reusable rocket
- From: Rand Simberg <simberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2016 13:09:53 -0800
On 2016-01-24 12:45, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Sun, 24 Jan 2016, Nels Anderson wrote:
Seems to me the approach may have been forced on Musk. Unlike Bezos,
he's not wealthy enough to self-fund, so he needed a near-term income
stream.
The price for appealing to existing customers, though, was having to
build something fairly orthodox, regardless of long-term goals. And
orthodox rockets are inherently very expensive to develop and operate,
and so much of that near-term income stream is being sucked away by
the near-term expense stream.
Just doing things efficiently was a sufficiently radical break with
past practice that it's shaken up the industry, for sure. But SpaceX
*is* fighting with one foot in a bucket, trying to retrofit some
reusability into an expendable rocket. They have a big head start,
but whether it's enough to make up for that handicap remains to be
seen.
Henry
While I've always assumed that the path to reusability was expanding the
performance envelope of reusable systems (per the Greason philosophy),
in light of what SpaceX has accomplished, I'm kind of scratching my head
here at all this talk about making an "expendable" rocket reusable. Elon
has always been adamant (once to me personally) that if he didn't get to
reusability, he would consider it a failure, regardless of profitability
or market share. AFAIK, he has designed everything in the Falcon for
multiple reuse and long life, with a lot of engine testing in McGregor
to demonstrate that. The only thing he didn't do initially is provide a
viable recovery scheme, hoping that he could recover in the ocean with
chutes. I (and no doubt others) told him over half a decade ago that the
only way he was going to get the stage back was hot jets, and sacrifice
payload. He's now doing that, so it's not obvious to me what advantage
Blue will have.
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