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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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Hot take alert:
SpaceX has accomplished some amazing things. There are some very brilliant engineers working at that company. The fact that they are routinely landing and reusing first stage boosters is absolutely extraordinary, Starship is one of the most impressive launchers that humanity has ever devised, In a century, when children are learning about space flight, SpaceX will be alongside the space shuttle and Soyuz as groundbreaking achievements in human spaceflight.
The fact that The engineers and technicians at SpaceX have accomplished so much, while being led (on paper) by a man as stupid as Musk, is a massive testament to their skill. I salute those workers who have accomplished so much despite all the hurdles that have been put in their way.
Remember what this article is about. After several dozen, if not hundreds, of successful launches and landings, one booster failed to make a successful landing on a barge in the middle of the ocean after successfully putting its payload in orbit. People who designed and built this system deserve to be proud of their accomplishment.
And we should be grateful, that while Musk is nominally CEO, He's let competent people run this company for him. Because God knows if he were actually running things day to day the falcon 9 would look like the bazinga truck and would explode 3 ft off the ground.
(Of course, their environmental record is not good, their plan to fill low earth orbit with cheap satellites that deplete or ozone is questionable, there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make about this company.)
Reusable boosters were never a particularly important problem to solve
Reusable rockets is a pretty important step in bringing down the cost to orbit
There are myriads reasons to be skeptical of that claim.
For a start, SpaceX is a private company and we can’t see their financials so claims about the true launch costs of SpaceX rockets are impossible to verify. You’re trusting Musk on that and you should know by now not to trust Musk.
Secondly their actual launch prices are not much lower than their competition. SpaceX claims this means a high profit margin but this cannot be verified.
Their competition have alleged unfair pricing practices, using debt and government loans to subsidize launches, claiming this is the reason why SpaceX can undercut the competition.
Very very very frequently when arriving at cost per kilo comparisons, people fudge the numbers due. For example, it’s extremely common to see price per kg derived from reusable launch cost but assuming the payload of a non-reusable rocket. Actually the reusable configuration has a dramatically decreased payload (about 2/3rds) and this has an important impact on price per kg that gets overlooked.
Another common error is comparing LEO vs geostationary launches or even more nonsensical comparisons such as claiming SpaceX LEO is dazzlingly cheap by comparing it to the cost of getting to the moon and back.
And reusable isn’t really reusable. Major maintenance and refit is required between each launch. The cost of labor is the most important factor here rather than the materials cost, plus the most expensive parts like engines would often only be worth their scrap metal costs, so the saving isn’t easy to quantify without seeing their books, which we can’t.
NASA and government contracts with SpaceX are juiced and NASA seems fine with this so it amounts to a public subsidy to a US company, which would explain how they are able to undercut rivals more directly than the questionable economics of rocket reuse.
Other private companies and government programs going back decades have looked at this problem and the answer has always been that the economics of massively reducing payload to save on boosters just doesn’t work out. No one has ever identified why SpaceX cracked the economic side of this problem other than Musk magic.
There probably are some use cases where rocket reusability moves the needle, specifically LEO for Starlink and small comms satellites really, but it isn’t a game changing or critical development and it definitely is not relevant for Mars or Lunar missions or for larger launches and probably not for geostationary either. It’s not that big a deal.