One of the things to note about SpaceX is they don't seem to get
emotionally invested in any one approach, to a quite unusual degree. I
suspect the attempt to ramp up to forty cores a year was quite genuine -
right up until they'd established what that would actually cost them,
plus had at least a good initial indication they could do reusability
for usefully less.
Any thoughts on the timing of the scaleback from #40cores versus the
start of the VL experiments?
Henry
On 4/5/2020 11:26 AM, Michael Clive wrote:
During the pre-recovery phase of the Falcon 9 1.1 program, the t-shirts worn by the production team had the slogan #40cores, implying that they wanted to roll a falcon 9 first stage out of the final bay every week or two. So the intent was definitely to build a lot of rockets. I don't know what the t-shirts say now, but it's probably something like #40secondstages10cores
On Sun, Apr 5, 2020 at 11:10 AM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, James Fackert wrote:
> As far as being more profitable due to booster reflights, well,
that's the
> name of the game, especially if your goal is to advance
spaceflight...
Also, that little word "more" is supposition, not established fact.
About four years ago, when SpaceX was just starting to have
successful
first-stage recoveries, a friend observed (roughly): "There's
something
odd at SpaceX. They claim to have a sizable backlog of commercial
launches. They claim to be geared up for volume production. They
claim
their commercial prices are profitable. And yet their commercial
launch
rate is desultory. What's wrong with this picture?"
His guess, looking at the SpaceX-plant crowd scenes in the launch
videos,
was: "Their commercial prices assume first-stage reuse -- commercial
Falcon 9 launches are *not* profitable without it."
Henry
