Um. My English needs correction at times. I thought revenue meant profit or
profitable. I had no idea a revenue could be negative = loss. Not a meaning
which is possible for the word revenue translation in my lingo.
So to rephrase my point: sending a mission to Pluto is a pure (economical)
loss for the organization financing it. OTOH it could be a profit if the
financing offered to the manufacturers exceeds their manufacturing costs.
Hence my question if sending goods to the ISS is profitable.
jd
-----Original Message-----
From: arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Rand Simberg
Sent: zaterdag 9 januari 2016 23:10
To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AR] Re: Revenues... Re: fatigue life (was Re: Re: SpaceX F9
Launch/Update...)
Revenue is revenue, regardless of whether it more than covers costs. If it
does, it's a profit. If it doesn't, it's a loss.
On 2016-01-09 09:26, John Dom wrote:
I hear on this list the word revenues so often regarding rockets which
made me wonder. Who pays say Orbital, XSpace or Roscosmos for
delivering goods to the ISS? Does it cover the launcher cost? If more
than that, then it is indeed revenue. Else only a loss.
All amateur work is only for amusement and a total financial loss
without a revenue. Or?
jd
FROM: arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] ON BEHALF OF Edward Wright
SENT: zaterdag 9 januari 2016 17:43
TO: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
SUBJECT: [AR] Re: fatigue life (was Re: Re: SpaceX F9
Launch/Update...)
That assumes the "only possible benefit" is the money saved on a fixed
number of flights. But in the real world, there is price elasticity of
demand. As the price of a flight drops, demand increases, creating an
opportunity for greater revenues. There are also competitors. If you
reduce costs by 50%, while your competitor reduces his by 90%, you may
lose all your business -- in which case, the benefit is not 50%, it's
negative whatever you spent to produce a product you can no longer
sell. There's also the time value of money. If it takes N flights to
recover your initial development costs, the time required to get that
return on investment is going to be limited by the time it takes to
build N rockets or the time it takes to fly one rocket N times. The
ability to do many reflights with one vehicle, and do them rapidly,
enables you to amortize the development costs more quickly. It also
improves amortization of launch pads, control rooms, etc.
Applying your argument to other transportation industries, 90% of the
possible benefit from reusing an automobile, a ship, or an airliner
should be achieved by the 10th trip. Transportation companies like
Southwest Airlines would disagree, and it's not because they are
irrational economic actors.
Sent from my iPad
On Jan 9, 2016, at 7:58 AM, William Claybaugh <wclaybaugh2@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Henry:
If we imagine an RLV that has the same unit cost as an ELV with the
same payload, then it follows from depreciation that--compared to the
ELV--50% of all possible benefit from reuse is achieved on the second
use. Similarly, 90% of all possible benefit is achieved on the 10th
use.
People are not focused on limited reuse because of culture or
history, they are simply behaving as rational economic actors.
Bill
On Saturday, January 9, 2016, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
(catching up on some old messages...)
On Fri, 1 Jan 2016, Richard Garcia wrote:
...If you're a launch vehicle startup, unless you're backed by a
dedicated billionaire, you'll probably have very modest funding for
the task at hand. The longer it takes to develop a vehicle and the
longer it takes to reach reusability, the more likely you'll run out
of funding before you reach profitability...
I agree in general, but want to nitpick :-) about one bit of wording
here: speaking of "reaching reusability" as if it's something that
happens late in development. There is a strong argument to be made
that that is doing things exactly backwards, the SpaceX example
notwithstanding. A large part of the benefit of reusability is
during development, because you (usually) get your test rocket back!
There are major benefits to "reaching reusability" right at the
start, and then proceeding toward meeting your other goals, rather
than vice-versa. Not least, it lets you do a proper test program --
dozens or even hundreds of tests *before* you fly paying payloads --
like the aircraft people do, which is impossible when you're throwing
away costly hardware every time.
I suspect that even SpaceX wouldn't do reusability last if they were
starting over. They ended up doing things this way because their
original re-use concept was a complete failure and they had to go to
Plan B.
So that's where I'm coming from when thinking about transpiration
cooling. A launch company of today needs laser like focus, and only
do R&D on what will probably be an enabling technology.
Agreed in general, with the caveat that what's an enabling technology
depends on what you are trying to enable. For example, your
long-term plans might call for truly long-lived engines that don't
need a detailed inspection after every few flights. (The fact that
20 flights looks like a laudable goal for engine/vehicle life
reflects how badly rocketry's world view has been warped by the
artillery-rocket mindset.) If so, it's not obvious that short-lived
limited-reuse engines are a worthwhile first step toward that.
Maybe they are, but maybe it's too big a detour and you want to get
serious about engine life from the start. In which case, you could
easily decide that avoiding chamber-wall low-cycle-fatigue problems
entirely is an enabling technology.
when I look at something like transpiration cooling, I see a
technology that was developed by experience people who made a genuine
attempt with significant money and manpower, but couldn't overcome
the difficulties.
Here I think Richard has erred, just slightly but I think it's
important. The problem is not that the experienced people with
significant resources couldn't make transpiration cooling work,
because *some of them did*, like the P&W high-pressure-engine group.
The problem is that the results from the
experienced-people-with-resources have been *inconsistent*, which
says not that it's intractable, but that it's complicated and that
fiddling with the details doesn't help if you picked the wrong basic
approach.
If indefinite chamber life doesn't look important to you, then yes,
this inconsistency means it's a scary obstacle that is best avoided.
If, on the other hand, you think truly long life could be quite
valuable, then figuring out how to do it might confer a real
competitive advantage, which you throw away if you decide it's too
scary.
Also there are off the shelf technology that work well enough.
For sufficiently small values of "well enough". I agree that if you
want an incremental improvement on today's launchers, you can do that
with existing technology. But if you think the real payoff comes
from changing the world, and you want to be the guy who does it,
rather than one of the guys whose business model he destroys, that
might not be enough.
Henry
