Wow, I like how candid they are about the pricing. It feels like they are targeting consumers more than governments -- most 'expensive,' enterprise targeted products are of the 'call us and ask for pricing' variety.
My thoughts exactly. Space X can quote a price on their website, but if I want to know what "Infrastructure Monitoring Tool XYZ" costs, I have to call and talk to some retired used car salesman.
I started a company that sells to enterprise customers and we thought we could differentiate ourselves by making our pricing public, simple, and affordable. It was VERY easy for anyone to figure out how much we'd charge them without having to call. There were no hidden fees, nothing tricky or weird.
This has proven to be a mistake for two main reasons: Firstly, everyone expects huge discounts (since all their other enterprise contracts give them big discounts off of the list price). Trying to explain that we're already the cheapest option they're looking at does help. They all want more off. Secondly I think we're losing opportunities because we aren't making people call us. Those phone calls are missed opportunities for us to really pitch our advantages for their specific situation and needs better than our website ever could.
So you just massively increase your price for the same value, put a call for discounts or whatever, offer them the original price and they will be happy to have got such a good deal. Weird how these things work..
Unfortunately, I tend to agree with you. Sales through lack of information actually works in some markets. Is this just old man-ery, wanting special rates "cuz we're business!", or are we all susceptible to this?
I feel like it is, but maybe not - I have friends who still like to walk into their bank to deposit a big check...
Not in our case at least. I'd happily spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a new sale. And a phone call is a really great opportunity for us to explain our advantages and establish a personal connection with someone.
What about pumping up the prices somewhat (so you have room to give discounts), listing a base price, and then saying something about calling to outline a specific situation and seeing which discounts apply? Add in a few testimonials about people being glad they called, etc.
That way you give people a ballpark price (while they're doing preliminary research), give people a real motivation to call, and still give yourself wriggle room.
I like companies who list pricing and generally avoid enquiring otherwise, probably because of two reasons; [1] embarrassed if it's going to be way over my budget, [2] may just be doing early research and don't want a sales guy following me up every week afterwards.
If that is true for others also, you could easily add wording/checkbox to opt-out of follow-ups or outline that people just running early budgets are welcome to call too.
Very true. I almost expected there to be an "Add to cart" button at the end of the article. :-P
But seriously, there are cases in which both hiding and flaunting prices make sense. If you believe cost is a competitive advantage and your competition is unable to match it, it makes sense to flaunt it. When one or both of those things aren't true, it makes sense to hide them, give quotes, etc.
Looks like there's an opportunity here for an entrepreneur to set up a consumer market. At $3,000 / kilogram you'd make a tidy profit if you could attract sufficient customers.
I think this is an important macro trend. We're doing this for manufacturing quoting at our startup using 3D files and some specs. Most suppliers give elaborate reasons why they're needed for very simple parts. With a few constraints on specs, you can really simplify even complex orders.
Elon Musk seems to be someone who really knows how to do cool things with the spoils of a successful software company. Are there any other good examples of people like this that have taken one big win and parlayed it into investing in seriously futuristic technology?
Perhaps the ur-example would be Howard Hughes. Got rich selling drill bits, plunged it all into much more interesting ventures like aeroplanes and motion pictures.
With all their partnerships and contracts, SpaceX is now a viable alternative in the industry. Clearly they can compete on price. What remains to be determined however is if they can compete on mission success and reliability. You can bet their competitors are playing the fear card to their customers.
How much does a satellite cost to build? Even with a lower success rate, with a cheaper launch cost, it might end up being a better bargain launching twice as many satellites and losing half of them.
Of course, that wouldn't be acceptable for human cargo.
I think it depends on the customer. Probably somewhere between $50 and $300 million [1,2]. My guess is that the more successful programs will retain their current (probably defense) customers, but SpaceX will effectively serve a new generation of private companies who can take the risk. You also have to keep in mind that a lot of this is political and regulated. Depending on how a government contract swings, it might favor SpaceX or their competitors.
I think such an attitude would seriously harm SpaceX's future space tourism strategy. Also the environmental damage caused by failed launches could be disastrous, and outweigh the cost of the payload.
The Falcon XX is planned to have a 140 metric ton to LEO capacity, but that comes later, for when we need to ship cargo to Mars colony without requiring a space station stop.
Unless you extract fuel from the environment on your stop, it's a very bad idea to make a stop when you are shipping cargo to space. Any change in trajectory spends fuel. If you absolutely have to send the vehicle in pieces, you'd better send them to the lowest energy orbit, assemble them there and blast off. The ISS is not on a particularly useful orbit for this and the only reason I imagine to stop by would be to use the extra helping hands of the resident crew to do the required assembly.
And shipping cargo to Mars doesn't need to be very expensive if you are patient - you send the cargo towards a low-perihelion trajectory and deploy a solar sail closest to the Sun. It may take a good couple years for the shipment to get to Mars, but the delta-V on the way up will be free. If you send the shipments well ahead of the landing crews, they'll have lots of toys when they arrive.
But I agree with the SpaceX folks. Nuclear is the way to go if we are to even go back to the Moon.
> The ISS is not on a particularly useful orbit for this and the only reason I imagine to stop by would be to use the extra helping hands of the resident crew to do the required assembly.
That, and the living quarters. If it's going to take a couple months to put stuff together and test, you don't want to be living out of an Apollo-sized capsule.
I didn't mean to suggest the ISS in any way. I am talking about the various plans such as von Braun's Das Marsprojekt, where you assemble a fleet of (for example) 3720 ton Mars ships in orbit: http://www.thelivingmoon.com/41pegasus/01archives/Von_Braun_...
It's not possible to launch a 3720 ton ship to Mars from the surface in one shot, it has to be assembled in space from parts and fuel shipped up in multiple launches.
Von Braun's plan, while spectacular, was never particularly feasible - it's more like colonizing Mars on the first trip than anything else. You don't need to send your crew in a 3000+ ton spacecraft towards Mars - you can send the crew on a smaller craft and send habitats, vehicles, supplies and all other stuff in advance in low-energy orbits (because food is less sensitive to radiation than astronauts). Von Braun's plan did not rely on automation (we can land a robot on Mars) and thus required every supply ship to be manned.
Yeah I'm aware of that. Above I pointed out that the XX was possibly coming and would have Saturn V level payload capability. The Saturn V is a giant rocket and needed to be that big to ship a bunch of stuff in one launch in order to beat the Russians rather than longer term plans involving using smaller rockets with smaller payloads and assembling things in orbit. Right now there is less point to going to the moon again rather than Mars but there is still the issue of assemble a big payload in orbit from small parts sent in modest ships or send a medium payload in one big giant freaking rocket. The Mars rovers and such were very tiny lightweight payloads compared to sending a human contingent to Mars, and even with the XX's payload, it is still barely enough to send a Mars crew and ship. So the issue remains. I only mentioned "without a space station stop" because I thought that people were going to otherwise jump on me with commentary about "yes but what about a space station stop then you can have smaller rockets". By mentioning "without" I had hoped to avoid needed to have that debate. I was not expecting to have the opposite debate and sorely wish I had said nothing at all and kept the link to the XX to myself now.
But now that we are having to have this talk, personally I think multiple ships assembled are still the way to go. A one-shot XX launch means not enough weight for proper radiation shielding, and enough food and spare parts to make it all the way there is a problem, and enough space to prevent the astronauts from killing each other is also an issue. We still have to have enough fuel to get there and land even if there is a bunch of fuel on site waiting in pods both in orbit and on the surface. The Dragon capsule is not really big enough to prevent mission failure from mass homicide en route, something considerable larger, and larger than the XX can lift in one go with fuel and food and water is needed to avoid this.
The space assembly step doesn't have to be something done in a giant station over a period of months. It can be send 4 modules up one after another, dock them together and go. We assembled two space ships together en route to Luna using this method on the Apollo mission. Adding a few more modules isn't a big deal, if we could assemble (not build from scratch) stuff in space 40 years ago, we can do it again now.
I'm actually surprised things haven't gotten cheaper by more than a factor of 5 in half a century. (If anyone's wondering, $1.11 Billion is in 2011 dollars.) Does anyone know what the primary costs are? People, construction, raw materials, etc.?
Fixed costs are usually the biggies, especially R&D and the infrastructure for supporting production.
Probably the biggest impediment to lowering launch prices over that time period was the existence of the Shuttle. It was sold with promises of capabilities (especially in terms of flight rate) that it would never have, and that disrupted a lot of other launch vehicle development at the time. Worse yet, it kept billions per year of NASA funds locked up maintaining jobs for the standing army of Shuttle engineers instead of being spent on improving launch systems.
One interesting thing I read Elon Musk saying the other day is that it's definitely not fuel -- the cost of fuelling a Falcon 9 is actually only about the same as the cost of fuelling a Boeing 747.
The problem is that the cost of building a Falcon 9 is still similar to the cost of building a 747, and you throw it away after one flight. So if you could recover and re-use the booster rocket then you'd be looking at a serious cost reduction.
> So if you could recover and re-use the booster rocket then you'd be looking at a serious cost reduction.
This was the logic behind the space shuttle. But unfortunately, they have to survive to high stresses that inspecting and repairing them between launches costs more than building a simpler disposable launch vehicles.
I honestly believe that as long as we will be using rockets, the best cost savings will not come from reuse, but from increasing the launch volumes to the point where launch vehicles stop being hand-built boutique items and start being mass-produced commodities.
This announcement gives me hope that this might happen during my lifetime.
The Shuttle is an excellent example of how an initially good idea (reusable launch vehicles) can become twisted and perverted by excessive compromises and congressional meddling. The Shuttle as it was built was actually a step backward from previous generations. Not only was it not properly reusable (it was at best refurbishable and partially reusable), it's unusual characteristics caused it to require a huge standing army of engineers to keep the program going, regardless of flight rate. As the true limits to the flight-rate of the Shuttle came to light it became obvious that no matter what the Shuttle system was capable of it wasn't capable of lowering launch costs over conventional expendable boosters.
It's a good case study in the downfalls of a waterfall type process and of committing too early to a system before it's true character is known.
I honestly believe that as long as we will be using rockets, the best cost savings will not come from reuse, but from increasing the launch volumes to the point where launch vehicles stop being hand-built boutique items and start being mass-produced commodities.
I'm not sure that economies of scale can get you that far when you're talking something as complicated as a rocket. How many jet engines does Rolls Royce make every year? Rolls-Royce and GE make many hundreds (thousands?) of jet engines per year, but they still cost a crapload of money each.
You might be right, maybe fully-recoverable rockets aren't possible. On the other hand, being personally unqualified to judge, if I've got some random piscinymous internet commenter telling me that it's not possible on one hand, and Elon Musk telling me that it is possible on the other, I'm more inclined to believe the dude who owns a rocket company.
The fuel requirements to decelerate are much lower than the requirements to reach orbit, for multiple reasons. You aren't fighting against gravity, your weight is greatly reduced (having burnt the fuel to get to orbit), and you also don't need to fully decelerate, only decelerate sufficiently to avoid burn-up upon reentry.
The original comment said that fuel was very cheap, and the primary expense was constructing the launch vehicle. Suppose it required five times as much fuel to be able to launch a rocket with sufficient additional fuel to be able to decelerate out of orbit. Wouldn't this still be much more economical if it meant the ability to easily reuse the launch vehicle after reentry?
I'm actually surprised things haven't gotten cheaper by more than a factor of 5 in half a century.
We're used to electronics getting cheaper as we find ways to make smaller and faster chips. We get change driven by Moore's law.
Getting to orbit is governed by simple lifting against gravity, and that hasn't changed at all. ( It's still 9.8 m/s^2 ) A Falcon rocket looks a lot like a Saturn rocket, so desipite a lot of ideas, a radically different and better design hasn't been commericialised yet.
The table here doesn't give cost comparisons for the other launch vehicles, but in the press conference Elon Musk said that the Delta IV Heavy costs roughly 3x the Falcon Heavy, meaning that the FH is approximately 6x cheaper in $/lb to low earth orbit.
The figures quoted on the page work out to $1,070 per lb to LEO. That's less than $200k to lift the mass of a 180lb human.
Ahem: a Russian Orlan-M spacesuit, about the best available off the shelf today, weighs 112-120Kg (or up to 250 of your quaint imperial "pounds"). Then you need to include air, water, and food. The structural mass of the seat the astronaut sits in isn't insignificant, either. A Mercury capsule -- a can sized to hold one guy in a space suit -- weighs around 1100Kg at splash-down, minus retro-rockets, parachutes, escape tower, and most of the heat shield; the corresponding weight for a Soviet Vostok spacecraft was around 2400Kg, with the cosmonaut sitting in an ejector capsule weighing around 340Kg (they ejected before touchdown because it had no soft-landing system).
All told, I reckon 1000Kg of spacecraft deadweight plus 200-250Kg of supplies per astronaut is as low as you're going to get. So once you add your notional 85Kg astronaut, you're talking about 1500Kg at US $2300/Kg, or around US $4M per person for a ride into orbit. If you're really slick you might be able to shave that by 50%. 90%? I don't think so.
Done right, this will cut the cost of space tourism by nearly an order of magnitude and will open up the possibility of the private sector actually being able to send folks to do stuff in orbit -- like fix or upgrade comsats. But it's not a magic wand and it's not going to reduce the cost per person to orbit to the rough order of a year's salary for an engineer.
Of course, I fully agree. Please don't read any implication about space tourism into a simple FYI calculation. But a 6x cost reduction is a big deal, and this figure illustrates that very well. See the follow up comment I'd already posted here:
> That's less than $200k to lift the mass of a 180lb human.
Before anyone tries to estimate how much space tourism will cost, remember that the actual weight of humans will make up a tiny fraction of the total weight of any orbiting hotel. Probably need to multiply by an order of magnitude or two.
Yes, indeed. And even disregarding the mass of the destination and of the ferrying craft, the mass of life support systems and consumables for each individual on the way up and down are likely at least double this anyway.
But, longer term, consider what happens if/when there is existing infrastructure in LEO and highly productive and profitable work for an individual to do there. The cost of actually getting to LEO will be a relatively minor relocation cost, even at these numbers.
> consider what happens if/when there is ... highly productive and profitable work for an individual to do there.
What productive work is there to do in LEO? I can hardly think of any, and NASA was scrapping the bottom of the barrel looking for worthwhile science to do on the international space station.
Longer term you'd hope for another order of magnitude reduction in launch costs. If SpaceX can make a fully reusable Falcon 9 as Elon Musk has said he really wants to:
That's less than $200k to lift the mass of a 180lb human.
No, it's $80-$125 million to lift 650 humans, packed like intermodal containers in stacks roughly 20 bodies high. Which technically amortizes to ~$150k/sardine, but I don't think this is meaningful!
Great details, got a chuckle out of the address for questions. sales@spacex.com "Uh, it says here prices range from $80M to $125M. Would you consider going down to $75M?"
Haha, nooooo. GEO will actually probably be the major market for the Falcon Heavy. I suspect specs weren't in there due to the fact that they would be heavily dependent on the performance of the upper stage, which I think is still being developed. I think the current estimate of GTO capacity for Falcon Heavy is 19,500kg.
Which ironically would make the Falcon Heavy the best choice for launching a lot of the most secretive NRO payloads (due to bloated satellite size). For servicing the commercial satellite market it's likely that a lot of launches would be 2 or 3 comm-sats at once.
This is extremely cool but I have one question about the website design; what's with using Flash for the headings (I only noticed because I have click-to-flash turned on)?
It's sIFR - a somewhat older design technique that uses flash to replace bits of text on your site with a custom font. Now that web fonts are more widely supported, and other methods such as Cufon have gained popularity, sIFR isn't used nearly as often.
The most perplexing thing about the usage here is that at the size used the font isn't even that interesting. I would have just stuck with Helvetica bold and called it close enough if that's all they wanted.
I am totally blown away by how a private company has done this, especially at a cost much lower to what government programs have managed to achieve.
I was recently watching a documentary about the early jet era and I remember being amazed at the innovation showed by those at De Havilland, Boeing, DC and thinking 'this would never happen again, everything is too expensive' - and here we have a private company getting us into space at 20% of the cost.
That is a great point. I hope it is structured in such a way so that post-IPO (I assume there will be one) there would be a poison pill of some description to prevent a hostile takeover.
They have a number of government contracts now, in the value of billions of dollars. They have only raised $125M total, so they may not need to raise much in an IPO.
It might be the most powerful that can be used now, but
it is not the most powerful ever ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energia could lift up to 100 tons to LEO in the tested configuration and up to 200 tons in Hercules configuration (which never tested though).
"Anticipating potential astronaut transport needs, Falcon Heavy is also designed to meet NASA human rating standards. Falcon Heavy is designed to higher structural safety margins of 40% above flight loads, rather than the 25% level of other rockets, and triple redundant avionics. Despite being designed to higher structural margins than other rockets, the Falcon Heavy side booster stages have a mass ratio (full vs. empty) above 30, better than any launcher in history. By comparison, the Delta IV side boosters have a mass ratio of about 10."
There's no taking away from "better than any launcher in history". On the other hand, the comparison to the Delta IV isn't as informative as you might think it is. Falcon uses kerosene for fuel and kerosene is quite a bit denser than the liquid hydrogen used by the Delta IV. Liquid hydrogen not only needs a larger tank, that tank also needs to be heavily insulated. One consequence of this is that you simply can't get as high a mass ratio with liquid hydrogen as you can get with kerosene. On the flip side, hydrogen delivers a higher specific impulse, so extra tank weight is offset by fuel that is substantially lighter.
It's all the more impressive when you realize that the Falcon series to designed to (eventually) be reusable. Now, the mass fraction won't be anything like as good as the expendable version, and the turnaround time will be significant, (you'll have to sea-recover each stage, install new seals, and reapply the heat shield; but the STS also has a turnaround time for the same orbiter measured in months, even with their reusable heat shield and dry-land capability) but they've given themselves quite a lot of margin.
Both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy are planned to carry humans to orbit. In fact, the 2nd ever test of the Falcon 9 used the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX's in house developed capsule spacecraft capable of being manned, as a payload.
There's only one thing I don't like about this, and that's the name. Falcon Heavy? Doesn't sound cool.
SpaceX has done an excellent job of coming up with cool-sounding names for everything they do, second only to US muscle car manufacturers of the 1960s. Falcon! Merlin! Draco! They even skipped straight from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 because the numbers in between just don't sound nearly as cool.
But "heavy"? Sure, it's descriptive, but it's boring. Falcon X would be much better. Or Super-Falcon. Or ThunderCougarFalconBird...
"Rocket name"-heavy is standard aerospace nomenclature for uprated rockets, derived from such launch systems being described as "heavy lift" rockets. Since there is no such thing as a casual buyer of a 80 million dollar rocket, how cool the name is doesn't matter at all.
It also puzzles me why they're "announcing" this, since a heavy lift version of the Falcon 9 has been planned since day one.
Since there is no such thing as a casual buyer of a 80 million dollar rocket, how cool the name is doesn't matter at all.
You'd think so, and yet SpaceX has always done such a good job of making things sound cool.
As Doc Brown says, if you're going to build a time machine out of a car you might as well give it some style. And if you're going to build a huge fricking rocket that goes to space you might as well give it a cool name.
Skipped the boring numbers? Count the number of engines on first stage of the Falcon 1... now count the number of engines on the first stage of the Falcon 9...
