Orbital adventures use recycled rockets
SpaceX entrusts pricey satellites to ‘flight-proven’ Falcons that can be reflown
A year ago, launching an expensive satellite to orbit on a used rocket seemed like a high-risk proposition. It had never been done.
Now, it doesn’t seem so risky. SpaceX aimed to do it again Friday morning. The upstart firm planned to launch 10 Iridium Communications satellites from California atop a Falcon 9 rocket that blasted another Iridium mission into space last fall.
It will mark the 10th time SpaceX has relaunched a Falcon rocket, exactly one year after its historic first launch of what the company calls a “flightproven” booster.
An 11th reflight could follow Monday from Cape Canaveral, where a flight is scheduled to launch supplies for NASA to the International Space Station.
“I don’t want to get complacent, but I think we understand reusable boosters,” CEO Elon Musk said last month after two recycled boosters assisted the debut of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
Buy-in from customers has come quickly.
“A reusable rocket seemed impossible,” Iridium CEO Matt Desch said. “Now it seems commonplace.”
What has come less quickly is longpromised savings on launches.
It’s still early in the quest to make rocket flight more like air travel, opening doors to new endeavors in space and ultimately enabling Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars.
“The big surprise to me is how seamlessly customers have accepted this concept of a reused rocket,” said Chris Quilty, president of Quilty Analytics in St. Petersburg, Fla.
“What hasn’t happened, maybe to the disappointment of a lot of SpaceX fans, is that they haven’t driven down pricing dramatically.”
Blasting stuff into space is expensive. The traditional “use it and lose it” approach — firing a payload into space on a multimillion dollar rocket, only to see it fall back to Earth — plays a major role in driving costs.
A long-repeated assertion by Musk is that if rockets could be used over and over, spaceflight could become much cheaper.
Discounts for used rockets have been small, not the 30% or more forecast.
At $62 million for a new rocket, SpaceX already offers the lowest price in its class.
SpaceX said it must first recoup its billion-dollar investment in reusable systems before it can further cut the cost of flight.
An improved Falcon 9 that could launch 10 times or more will soon bring greater cost efficiencies.
The current model is retired after two flights.
Lower-cost launches are key to ambitions for mega-constellations of small satellites to observe Earth or beam global Internet access, but there’s no guarantee of their success.
“You still need to make business cases work and find ways of making money,” Desch said. “People who are waiting for three rockets to launch every day of the year, I’m not sure we’re quite there yet.”
From the beginning, SpaceX’s focus was not solely on launching satellites but a grander vision: reaching the Red Planet.
“Elon Musk is working from a different playbook than everybody else,” Quilty said. “The fact that he was working outside the box that everybody else was living in is what has enabled SpaceX to basically change the rules of the game.”
A long-repeated assertion by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is that if rockets could be used over and over, spaceflight could become much cheaper.