![]() The latest is from Jefferies International LLC. The interest of SES, a publicly traded company, in rocket reuse has set in motion analyses by investment banks covering the commercial satellite telecommunications industry. SES has said repeatedly it is willing to be the inaugural customer for a reused first stage, but would like the price to move closer to $30 million, at least for the first flight. When measured by contract volume, SpaceX’s biggest customer is SES of Luxembourg. If this translated into a 30 percent price reduction to customers, that would drop Falcon 9’s advertised price to $42.8 million from today’s $61.2 million. In March, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the company could expect a 30 percent cost savings from reusing the first stage. Outsiders are left with piecing together what they can, based on SpaceX’s public statements. SpaceX is a privately held company that does not publish its financial statements, making a detailed cost analysis difficult. But his caution related not to the fact of landing safely, but to the economics of refurbishment. I want to be realistic: We are not as smart as we think we are and we don’t understand the environment as well as we think we do.”ĭumbacher was speaking in April 2014, before Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX succeeded in landing the Falcon 9 first stage, first in December on a pad near the launch site, and then during the April 8 mission. Look how long and how much money it took for us to do that, and we still weren’t completely successful for all the parts. “We tried to make them reusable for 55 flights. “The SSMEs were reusable,” Dan Dumbacher, former NASA deputy associated administrator for exploration systems development, said of the space shuttle main engines. But after beating their heads against the problem for years, they also would say it’s much more difficult than hopping back into your car. NASA engineering veterans of the space shuttle would surely agree about its being fundamental. “It’s just as fundamental in rocketry as it is in other forms of transport – such as cars or planes or bicycles,” Musk said in a post-launch briefing. The stage has since been returned to port and will be repeatedly test-fired to determine its fitness for reuse as early as this year. “It’s quite fundamental,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said April 8 after the Falcon 9 first stage made a clean touchdown on a drone ship located offshore the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, as part of a successful mission to deliver supplies to the international space station for NASA. ![]() The prima facie appeal of reusing rockets has always obscured the challenges of refurbishing, at low cost, a rocket stage and engine bloc that has suffered the stresses of hurtling through the atmosphere in advance of landing. space shuttle, investors and competitors are sharpening their pencils to assess the business case. KOUROU, French Guiana - Now that SpaceX appears on the verge of being the first to reuse rocket hardware since NASA with the U.S.
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