I stumbled across the headline that “Falcon 9 reaches a flight rate 30 times higher than shuttle at 1/100th the cost” over on Ars Technica today. My first reaction is that flight rate probably isn't a fair comparison because while the Falcon 9 is approved for crewed missions ("man-rated") a tiny percentage of Falcon 9 flights are with a crew while all shuttle missions were manned. It's just the more I read, the more mind-blowing it gets.
Author Eric Berger starts out with some of the same numbers covered here in Saturday's post - things like the record fast booster turnaround of Booster 1080, the 400th mission on the night of Saturday Nov. 23rd from Vandenberg Space Force Base, and the two launches within 3 hours in the early morning of Saturday Nov. 30, all of which were in my post.
This brought the total number of launches in November to 16, a new company record over the old launch record of 14.
The company's vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, said on the social media site X that SpaceX plans to attempt 15 additional Falcon rocket launches in December.
While they clearly aren't a Falcon 9 launch, the two Falcon Heavy launches they had this year count as two launches, but it's really six Falcon 9 first stages.
So far this year, SpaceX has launched a total of 119 Falcon 9 rockets, for an average of a launch every 2.3 days. The company has already superseded its previous record total for annual Falcon 9 launches, 92, completed last year. If SpaceX achieves its goal of 15 additional Falcon 9 launches this month, it would bring the company's total this year to 134 flights. If you add two Falcon Heavy missions to that, it brings the total to 136 launches.
This probably started the comparisons because over the three decades it
flew, NASA's Space Shuttle flew 135 missions - right between just Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 +
Falcon Heavy launches for the year. SpaceX looks as though they will fly
as many Falcon 9 missions in one year as the Shuttle flew in its 31 year
career.
Is it a fair comparison? Here's where you get to really hard to answer
questions. The shuttle was undeniably more complex than the Falcon 9, and (as
mentioned already) every mission was crewed. It was a bigger ship that
carried bigger payloads, while the Falcon 9 was specifically designed under
the guide that "the best part is no part." It was designed with "better, faster, cheaper" computers and decades more experience at optimizing engine design.
The principal goal of the Falcon program was to demonstrate rapid, low-cost reusability. By one estimate, it cost NASA about $1.5 billion to fly a single space shuttle mission. (Like the Falcon 9, the shuttle was mostly but not completely reusable.) SpaceX's internal costs for a Falcon 9 launch are estimated to be as low as $15 million. So SpaceX has achieved a flight rate about 30 times higher than the shuttle at one-hundredth the cost.
Space enthusiast Ryan Caton also crunched the numbers on the number of SpaceX launches this year compared to some of its competitors. So far this year, SpaceX has launched as many rockets as Roscosmos has since 2013, United Launch Alliance since 2010, and Arianespace since 2009. This year alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more times than the Ariane 4, Ariane 5, or Atlas V rockets each did during their entire careers.
Ryan Caton's Tweet
That is truly amazing.
ReplyDeleteAmazing also is SpaceX is looking forward to the day they can ditch the Falcon and Dragon systems and go only with Starship.
SpaceX. Changing the way everything, absolutely everything, is done regarding space.
Looking forward to seeing the Flight 2 S.tarships
It's almost become routine!
ReplyDeleteWondering what the overall successful flight comparisons are like, because just giving it a think without actual numbers seems like SpaceX is highly rated by a large margin.
ReplyDeleteps,
Deletein regards successful flight record, be really interesting to know how SpaceX has achieved its rate of success. They must be doing something rather different with their processes and quality control, something way out of the box in overall aerospace comparison practices. A certain key methodology leading to their success.
This is where the comparisons get dicey. The shuttle program had two failures that destroyed the vehicle and both of which killed everyone on board. The Falcon 9 has had two failures. This past July the Falcon 9 had a second stage fail and that was the first since 2016 when one exploded on the pad. This July's failure lost a load of Starlink satellites, and if it was a manned flight, it might have taken out the crew depending on the capsule's ejection system. The 2016 explosion was during a test, so just a loss of vehicle.
DeleteOn the shuttle's side that's two in 135 flights. On the Falcon 9 side it's two in 415 flights. The loss of two crews on the shuttle is horrifically worse than a load of Starlink satellites (which, IIRC, they can produce faster than they can launch), and that's where the comparison gets really dicey.
When all there is, is an orange, you compare your apple to the orange. What else but the shuttle?
ReplyDeleteToo, the comparison itself seems yet another arcane unit of measure. As much as 4 Olympic pools ... as heavy as 95 adult male elephants ... as often as 30 shuttles flights.
Impressive is the word they're looking for.
"As much as 4 Olympic pools ... as heavy as 95 adult male elephants ... as often as 30 shuttles flights."
DeleteAmerican's will do *anything* to avoid using the metric system, as someone once said.
Nonsense… we’re willing to use it for ammunition.
DeleteI stand corrected.
DeleteI really should have said this a couple of days ago, but...
DeleteLong ago, '70s I think, I heard the excuse we weren't going metric because the changes to machine tools and production shops would be too much. In the last 20 years, I've noticed that the home shop machinists I hang out with were among the most adept at going back and forth between imperial and metric I've ever seen. As much as the physicists in the '70s.
If anything, I think it's due to things like a billion miles of pipe infrastructure built to the old standards like "1 inch pipe" (which isn't 1 inch in any dimension whatsoever) and thinking of repairing or converting any of those things.
But "As much as 4 Olympic pools ... as heavy as 95 adult male elephants..." or anything involving bananas has absolutely nothing to do with Imperial or metric systems - or any other system of measurement. It's news media idiots (yeah, I know it's redundant.)
Hear you, makes me think about StarShip, big rocket, lots of passengers, catch arm landings no matter what area real tricky feat, if one ever crashed, they be setting new records in fatalities.
ReplyDeleteMy admiration for the Starship is huge. That said: it's early days.
ReplyDeleteThe flyer's payload is about 150 tons to LEO. This is about 7 TEU equivalent.
By comparision the *smallest* of naval container ships, "feeders", are about 100 TEU, and cost about $44M USD from a mainland China yard:
https://qinhai-shipping.en.made-in-china.com/product/eOctDFEdkjVA/China-105-Teu-Container-Vessel-3280-Dwt-Muti-Purpose-Ship-for-Sale.html
Simply scaling, you'd need a 15X increase to match this.
Starship Ultra?
Your comparison is silly. It takes a LOT of energy to get those tons moving at 8Km/sec to stay up, so engine performance is critical. A container ship can simply limp in to the nearest port if it starts having engine problems.
DeleteNow if you can take the average container ship and push it to orbit, you've got something to compare it to...
Nothing silly.
ReplyDeleteEconomy of scale is a thing. There is a reason ships are big and carry a lot.
Sending up 7 TEU at a time is commendable right *now*, but not the end of development.
I propose a lift classification:
Class 0: 0 -- 9 TEU.
Class 1: 10 -- 99 TEU
Class 2: 100 -- 999 TEU
Class 3: 1000 -- 9999 TEU
Class 4: 10,000 -- 99,999 TEU
Starship is Class 0, Modern containerships are 1 to 4.