SpaceX offers NASA lunar cargo service

[Dr Mordrid]

FlightGlobal article....

SpaceX offers NASA $80 million lunar cargo lander service

By Rob Coppinger

Space Exploration Technologies has proposed to NASA a robotic cargo lunar lander service that would be priced at $80 million per mission.

SpaceX proposed the lander at a meeting with the US space agency because it is a member of Odyssey Space Research's team for NASA's Altair project office lander evaluation study that began in March. The SpaceX lander would deliver 1,000kg (2,200lb) to the Moon's surface in support of NASA's Altair missions. The unmanned Altair cargo version could deliver 14,000kg to the Moon. (NOTE: at a very high price - almost $1B/launch on an Ares V)

The SpaceX lander is launched by the company's heavy version of its Falcon 9 rocket. The standard version will make its maiden flight in 2009 with a first stage powered by nine Merlin 1C engines. The heavy version would use 27 engines with two Falcon 9 first stages as strap-on boosters.

SpaceX senior mission manager Max Vozoff says: "We presented to the Altair team the idea of a $500 million lunar lander COTS [Commercial Orbital Transportation Services] competition that could bring about vehicles with cargo capabilities of 1,000-3,000kg."

SpaceX is competing in COTS to develop a resupply capability for the International Space Station. NASA's commercial crew and cargo office has examined options for the extension of procurement beyond ISS resupply to lunar services. The options include lunar navigation and communications, sample return and "micro-landers".

Separately, SpaceX achieved a successful orbital launch of its Falcon 1 rocket from Kwajalein Atoll on 29 September. Three earlier launch attempts failed to reach orbit.

Chief executive Elon Musk says preliminary data indicates that Falcon 1 achieved an elliptical orbit of 500 x 700km (310 x 435 miles), 9.2° inclination, exactly as targeted.

Falcon 1 carried into orbit a dummy payload of around 165kg to simulate the mass of the US government satellites lost on 2 August, when the third launch ended in a stage separation failure.

SpaceX has said that a launch success would be followed by a NASA lobbying push to secure funding for crew transport capabilities under COTS.

[WxDude]

Am I missing something?

The SpaceX price isn't cheaper for the same amount of cargo compared to Ares V. $1,000 M for
14,000 kg on Ares V vs. $1,120M for 14,000 kg on SpaceX (14 x $80M for 1000kg). It would make
sense for the occasional small run. But for a large amounts of cargo...

Again, am I missing something?

[Claymonkey]

There are a few reasons I could see doing this. One.. Chance of loss of equipment per mission failure is cut to 1/14 of the Ares. You also can do more of these missions. $80million isn't anything to sneeze at but you can do them more often, and don't have to wait until you have 14000kg of things to send to the moon.

Now if you had the purse strings.. how much easier is it to justify $80million every 3-4 months versus $1billion 2-3 years from now?

Not only that.. but building a base on the moon will be a long project. Each launch bring up the next step of the project. You allow yourself to not only send up replacements for broken equipement but can take advantage of constantly changing tech and the end result will be of higher quality. Also, that's $80million to start and each launch will teach them more and they will bring the cost down (think how much cheaper processors get as they get the fab process to have better yields). Also if fuel prices keep going up you buy the fuel at the market of the time of launch versus the price when you have everything ready 3-5 years from now.

[cjolley]

There are a few reasons I could see doing this. One.. Chance of loss of equipment per mission failure is cut to 1/14 of the Ares...

It doesn't work like that.
Assuming the rockets are of about the same reliability, you would reduce the cost of a single failure, but increase the likelihood of a failure.
Personally I think that would be a wise choice.

Pragmatically the best choice is probably a combination of the two depending on what is being sent and when.

[Dr Mordrid]

The entire idea of Falcon9/Falcon9 Heavy is very high reliability. Example -

Most rockets are lost when an engine chamber or turbopump blows or its gimballing system goes awry (rare in these days of triple-redundant electronics).

Falcon 9's Merlin 1C engines are designed to be used in arrays, so one expected concern is what happens if an engine blows. We've all seen on the old NASA films what this can do. BIG bada-boom.

One innovation SpaceX is using are blast blankets (Kevlar etc.) around each thrust chamber, turbopump and between the engine mount and the lower tank; if/when a blowout occurs the faulty engines fuel/oxidizer valves are shut down, its actuators set to the zero position and the remaining engines take up the slack to complete the launch.

Yes, they have tested this on the stand many, many times by placing charges on the turbopump, chamber and other parts and blowing them while the engines were firing full blast in a complete first stage (9 Merlin's and a full load of fuel).

Nice trick.

Saturn could do this, and did in at least 1 flight I know of, but AFAIK none of NASA's systems since the Saturn are capable of this trick. Then again none of them had enough engines to pull it off - 2, maybe 3 - while Saturn had 5 and Falcon has 9.

Ares V will have nothing like it unless things change drastically, even though it's recently been upgraded from 5 engines to 6. Go figure.

Also: what happens if you need to fly a replacement part or system in an emergent or urgent situation? You going to shoot a couple of tons worth to the moon on an Ares V at a cost of $1B or would you put it on a F9 Heavy for $80M? Ares, Atlas and Delta would also take months to get ready, they're basically built-to-order for each launch, so in an urgent situation they're no good. Too much infrastructure and definitely not for time critical situations. On the other hand the Falcons are designed to launch on short notice - a few days or even less if necessary, which is why the USAF is so interested in them.

Do they have the capacity to build engines for such rapid deployment missions? YES! SpaceX is how turning out rocket engines, Merlin's and Kestrel's for now, at a higher rate than anyone but the Russians, and they're catching up to them. In fact they bought one of Boeing's 747 plants for mass production of the Falcons, Merlin, Kestrel and Dragon and have been in production there since early 2008.

Their launch infrastructure is also minuscule by anyone's standards: 7-8 laptops in a trailer instead of the hundreds it takes NASA to launch even a bottle rocket. It's served them very well. Several times SpaceX has found a minor problem just before liftoff and cut the engine before release. They then de-fuel the rocket in about 20 minutes, fix the problem then re-fuel and launch WITHIN ONE HOUR. That would take NASA at least one, and often several, weeks.

Another example: in the recent flight 4 they found a problem in the 2nd stage the day before launch. They laid down the rocket (they're all assembled horizontally then moved horizontal using a gantry), fixed the problem and had it back up ready to launch in 24 hours.

[WxDude]

I agree that for smaller payloads, it definitely makes sense to go the SpaceX route. It was
just the quote from the article with the note made it sound like SpaceX was a deal. I love
the work SpaceX is doing and I think it is going to revolutionize the space industry, but
the comparison with the Ares rocket was misleading to me.

- Wx