Comments on: Despite delays, SpaceX still winning commercial launch business

By: Neil

Neil — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 01:43:11 +0000

ESA has stated that they can’t survive without a commercial market component. That’s assuming that the European governments don’t decide, for purely political reasons, to increase subsidies.
Russia, China and India will continue to pursue mostly government programs.
U.S. who knows? Again politics.

But I think most commercials would go to SpaceX assuming they can handle them assuming that their prices do drop significantly and the reliability continues in terms of launch success.

Skylon is interesting but I’ve yet to understand the business case. It seems such a technically difficult motor. There are kilometers of very fine tubing. QA’s going to be a nightmare. Personally can’t see it becoming operational.

Cheers.

By: JayJay

JayJay — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 19:09:34 +0000

Other than litigation where is the true response from the rest of the industry? I can’t help but think they’re hoping that SpaceX will have some sort of spectacular failure and Musk and his company will just go away.

The response is the same here in Europe; limited re-organization, some cost cutting but no real innovation.

If/when Musk and SpaceX stick the landing of a F9R first stage on land, the game will be almost over. What happens when SpaceX instead of charging a jaw droppingly low price of ~$64m per launch suddenly come up with ~$20m? Well then nobody buys Arianne a drink, ULA are screwed in the end even with their clever move on the block buy. The Russians will seriously feel the pinch on commercial launch as if they don’t have enough issues to deal with anyway.

So not much competition really. The Chinese are looking at glide back on a first stage but other than Skylon – which will likely not be funded in time, our best best is that Musk will release the patents on this too.

By: g.r.r.

g.r.r. — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 13:49:44 +0000

I think that it was all about price. SpaceX has 100% success rate (on primary; and the one failure was still a partial since the company found out all that they wanted). SpaceX may have delays, BUT, it is obvious that they are gearing up their production. As long as they keep price down and success at 100%, they will no doubt win more commercial launches.

By: g.r.r.

g.r.r. — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 13:45:58 +0000

First off, Less than 1/3 of their launches are with the feds.
Secondly, and more importantly, SpaceX would have a fully human launch system that Bigelow AeroSpace could use. And I have no doubt that Musk would then push Bigelow to get his system up there quickly.

Third, the real loser would be USA. For starters, CST-100 uses atlas which the first stage is pretty much foreign and the engine is Russian. As such, Boeing would have issues with Russia controlling the situation. And Boeing would charge a lot more for launching humans.

Fourth, I would guess that GOP supporters and backers of Shelby for doing this would backfire on them and costs them several senators. Not Shelby, but others.

By: Pete Zaitcev

Pete Zaitcev — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 04:37:53 +0000

I am surprised Inmarsat didn’t try to launch with Sea Launch more. Despite the bad publicity their long term reliabiltiy is not worse than ILS’ Proton. Or, what the heck, they could’ve tried to deal with the Japanese for H-IIA. The market is not that badly constrained even without Chinese.

By: Gary Warburton

Gary Warburton — Fri, 04 Jul 2014 04:01:12 +0000

If SpaceX refused to do Shelby`s red tape night mare and stated it planned to drop out of the commercial crew and move else where what would be the consequences?