Main Engine Cut Off - T+181: Falcon 9 Fleet, ABL in the UK, Firefly to the Moon

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

SpaceX broke their turnaround record and is racking up quite the flight history across their Falcon fleet. Lockheed selected ABL for a launch from the Shetland Islands. Firefly shook up their board, is looking for new investment, and won a CLPS contract from NASA.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 37 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE, and seven anonymous—and 471 other supporters.TopicsGwynne Shotwell talks about selling flight-proven rockets, Starship | Ars TechnicaSpaceX fires 60 Starlink internet satellites into orbit, with more set to launch Friday – Spaceflight NowLockheed Martin selects ABL Space Systems for UK launch - SpaceNewsEpisode T+169: Commercial Small Launcher Updates - Main Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off on Twitter: “Something is up at @Firefly_Space, though. Max Polyakov and Mark Watt have been removed from Firefly’s about page within the last month or two. Here it is on the Wayback Machine from October…”On eve of first launch, Firefly revamps board of directors, may go public | Ars TechnicaFirefly Aerospace seeking to raise $350 million - SpaceNewsNASA Selects Firefly Aerospace for Artemis Commercial Moon Delivery | NASAThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. I want to talk about a couple of different launch stories that have been bouncing around my head the last week or two. There's been some news that I want to break down, but there's also some other stuff that's more, you know, trends and things like that that I want to talk about. And that's where I'm going to start. This really goes back, this storyline, to the beginning of this podcast itself. I've been doing this almost five years now. If you've been around since then, or if you've gone back and listened to a lot of those past episodes, you might remember that a lot of the

early episodes were us discussing minutiae of SpaceX figuring out reusability you know they had just landed their first booster or two they were starting to recover these regularly they were starting to turn them around we were talking a lot about some of the hardware side things that they needed to do to get these flying again we were talking a lot about customers and governments getting comfortable with flying on top of reusable rockets. And, you know, five years on, the game has just changed entirely for SpaceX. There was an interview that Gwen Shotwell did with Eric Berger a couple of weeks ago. And in that, it's definitely a great piece you should read. But in that, they talk about the

fact that they, at this point, SpaceX sells launch services, not rockets themselves. So you buy a launch service from SpaceX, they're going to figure out which thing you're flying on, which booster, potentially, which vehicle when Starship is up and operating. And that is really the model that, you know, I remember talking about that as a mindset shift that was inevitable five years ago. And now we are there for the vast majority of the customers with SpaceX. Obviously, there's going to be some customers like NASA, the Department of Defense, and some people that are more particular about the boosters they fly on and the things they require from SpaceX. But in all, you know, overall, that game has changed entirely at this point, and SpaceX is getting close to a couple of milestones that they had set in the early days, and that's kind of why I want

to talk about this, is because it's such a slow creep over time, and I talked about it so much in the past that I feel like, you know, when's the last time I came here and talked about Falcon 9 reusability? It's been a while, but it is worth checking in on every once in a while because maybe there's not so much changing day to day anymore. But when you look over the long history here, things have drastically changed. And these milestones that SpaceX is getting close to,

they've got a couple of boosters now that are creeping up on that 10 flights achievement for that particular booster. That was a thing long set by SpaceX that they're going to be able to fly 10 flights without major refurbishment and up to like 100 or something with major refurbishment after that. We'll see exactly how that shakes out. They seem to have no problem flying these things up to seven, eight times at this point. And now they're getting the turnaround time down very significantly. So they've set two records recently.

They went to, I think it was like 38-day turnaround, and then now it's down to 27 days. That's launch to launch time. We don't know what that theoretical minimum turnaround time is at this point. In the past, Elon Musk has floated the idea that they would do launches 24 hours apart. It was a couple of years when he was saying this is the year for it. That seems to have gone out the window as a demonstration mission. A lot of their attention has shifted to Starship, obviously. So maybe that's something that isn't such a big priority anymore now that they're getting comfortable with the flight rate of Falcon 9. And certainly when you look at their manifest, the bulk of it is Starlink and then, you know, NASA missions up

to the ISS. There are much less, you know, one-off commercial missions today than there were in years past. So all of that kind of stuff changes. But what doesn't is that they are really creeping up, like I said, to that 10 flight milestone and to the very short turnaround times that were two of the things that were sort of predicated, uh, or that the entire concept of reusability was predicated on was that we need to be able to fly these a lot. We need to be able to fly them frequently and we need to be able to shorten the amount of time between that thing, launching landing, being recovered and launched again. Now, what I didn't expect was that they would be this far along with still such a gigantic lead

in, uh in this department, right? There's been, this is similar to what I've talked about recently with Rocket Lab. I didn't expect Rocket Lab to have the run on the place in terms of small launch for three or four years like they did have. And I didn't expect SpaceX to still be so far out ahead of everyone else in the industry in terms of being able to reuse things and bring costs down. And in the case of both Rocket Lab and SpaceX, to let reuse play into your production capabilities as well. Because at this point, SpaceX is really just flying a fleet of Falcon 9s. You know, they've got like something probably between 8 and 10 boosters that are flying the bulk

of these missions at this point. Many of them are flying commercial missions or Starlink missions. There's one booster that is flying crew missions. There's one that's flying Department of Defense missions. I think there's one that's going to be used for a lot of NASA science missions. But they're really flying this relatively small fleet of vehicles, which was a thing that Gwen Shotwell herself has talked about over the years of going from a production-based inventory to a fleet management-based inventory. And they're still making Falcon Heavies. Those are most of the things rolling off the production line for the first stages are Falcon Heavies that we'll start to see flying more regularly soon.

But in terms of Falcon 9s, like I said up front, when's the last time that you've seen a new Falcon 9? It's very rare to see a totally shiny Falcon 9 take flight these days. And of course, now we're well into the fairing reusability that SpaceX has been working on. So they're to the point where for the vast majority of their missions, the only new thing is the second stage and a bunch of fuel. What that means is they have cut their launch cost internally down tremendously for these flights that are using first stages that have flown, right? These fleet boosters. Their price internally is probably down, you know, I've heard some numbers be floated around

30 million. I've heard some say be floated around 30 million. I've heard some say under that at this point. I wouldn't be shocked of it being, you know, below that, but let's just say, you know, 30 million to be conservative and do some conservative math with that. Well, you've noticed that SpaceX is still selling launch services on Falcon 9 for well above that, closer to their market rate that they've, you know, in the past had posted on the website. Now they don't so much anymore. If you see contract go out for Department of Defense missions or NASA missions, you're going to see for Falcon 9s, you know, 80, 90 million, depending on how much

other stuff is in that contract. So there's always someone that says, well, if the launch cost is 30 million, why are you still selling these for $80 or $90 million? And it's because there is still today, in 2021, no downward pressure on SpaceX. There is no other competitor that's even close to putting downward pressure on their price. So through this era, SpaceX is increasing its margin on these flights while not having to drop their price much and still offering the best price on the market when there is another competitor that comes out with a launch price and a lift capacity that is very close to SpaceX SpaceX has

that room to drop their price lower and still be profitable on any given launch. So if their floor is $30 million and New Glenn comes out and they're launching, you know, $40, $50 million or something like that for a payload to orbit, SpaceX still has room to adjust to that. And then you've even seen on the other end, right, when now they know that they don't have that downward pressure, when they're in these bids for things like the National Security Space Launch Program, it turns out they weren't the lowest cost option on that phase two award that went to SpaceX and ULA. And the same thing sort of happened with the most recent round of commercial cargo contracts for NASA. The second round, they had a higher price than they did the first time,

and it was because they had learned that, guess what, price than they did the first time. And it was because they had learned that, guess what, they bid too low the first time around. And Gwen Shotwell has even said that about the Carew Awards as well, is that if we knew what Boeing bid, we would have certainly bid higher, that they underbid probably what they should have. And they would have liked to go back in history. And if they had a time machine, bump that bid up a bit to still win, be low cost, but have that additional money in the bank for development purposes and profit, obviously. So what I'm getting at is that SpaceX is using this time where they're ahead of the industry at large to increase margins, keep their costs down, and be prepared for whatever the industry does over the next five years, be able to respond to it by, like I said, dropping that price closer to their floor. They've given themselves a lot

of flexibility and a lot of runway, honestly, to push hard in Starship areas and really try to figure out what is next for launch services so that when the industry does change, they're changing too. The other thing I see still talked about a lot is that people say that SpaceX has not and might not ever make back the research and development money that they spent on reusability when it comes to launch services. That they spent, you know, whatever it was, the math is pretty tricky to figure out what they spent on developing, you know, reusability generally, because it's in some places hard to kind of suss out from money they would have spent otherwise. And it's hard to figure out which pieces you would account for as

reusability efforts versus, you know, improving Falcon 9 itself, because a lot of those are intermixed in a lot of ways. So the math is kind of hard to do. But, you know, generally, a couple hundred million probably seems about right to develop, you know, the reusability to this point. So a lot of people will say, well, they're never going to make up that kind of money because, okay, say that a launch is 30 million, they're still selling it for 60 million and they spent, you know, something between 500 million and a billion or whatever the math is, right? All my numbers are fuzzy and not accurate by any means. So generally you get the idea of what I'm saying, right? That people say, well, they're not going to make that money back because it has to be, it's a ton of money that they spread over a lot

of launches. And the math doesn't really work out that they're profitable on launch yet. And I think if you limit your thinking to launch services, that's probably accurate. But if you expand your mind to what SpaceX does, it's pretty hard to argue that when you bring in Starlink, that reusability has not already paid off. You know, where we're at today as I'm recording this, they've launched, I think, 18 full batches of Starlink missions. Let's say it's $30 million internal cost to launch those because they're using reused boosters, reused fairings, they're building a new second stage, got to pay for fuel and the range fees and whatever else goes into it. But roughly $30 million. Every Starlink satellite that has been

launched to date has been launched for a grand total of $540 million. Just barely more than one Delta IV Heavy has put a thousand satellites in orbit for SpaceX's Constellation. Now, if you try to figure out what that would cost if they didn't have reusability, or if they had, you know, worse yet, to buy launch services from another company, you quickly get up into, you know, reusability itself has saved Starlink about a billion dollars. And that's conservative math. So that's, I think, where this money is actually being made or saved or whatever you want to say, recouped. I don't know what word you want to use, but the return on that R&D for SpaceX has been enabling them to do what they're doing today with Starlink. And much like propulsive recovery

of Falcon 9, right? Originally, it was going to be parachute recovery, and then they realized that wasn't going to work. But they had already built Falcon 9 with this cluster of nine engines on the bottom that they could use to do propulsive landings. And that has been the foundation for their reusability plans. They sort of stumbled into that strategy. In a lot of ways, they sort of stumbled into this one as well, because I don't know that Starlink was in Elon Musk's head years ago. I don't know when the Starlink idea came about, but I don't think the entire business was leading that direction up until they really decided to do Starlink. And what I mean by that is when they decided to do Starlink, this reusability math factored into it. I don't think you can separate those. But the fact that all of these

satellites, and we're 1,000 satellites in to a constellation of however many satellites you want to say, it's going to be at least 2,000, it's going to be probably 4,000, whatever numbers you want to pull out. They're not even that close to done launching these satellites yet. And they're already, you know, a billion dollars of savings here in terms of launch cost. So almost on its own, reusability was worth it for Starlink. They could never fly a reused core for a customer, and it still would be worth it because of all this money that they're saving on the Starlink side of things. And that relationship is really hard to untangle, and I think that should be talked about more in terms of where's

their return on the R&D that they've done for reusability. Now, obviously, long-term as well, they're going to have good return on it if Starship works out. Because not only have, like I said up front, they've given themselves runway here to let Falcon 9 dominate the industry, have headroom for other competitors that come online, and it gives them time to go work out Starship. Also, all the lessons learned on the Falcon 9 program from people that are in charge there and are now working on Starship, that stuff's going to play in down the line as well. So anyway, there's a little check-in on the state of SpaceX on the Falcon 9 fleet that they're flying. It's really interesting days, especially, like I said, go back, turn your head back

five years and think about where we were when I was just starting this podcast and where we're at now. back five years and think about where we were when I was just starting this podcast and where we're at now, we knew it was going this direction, but now it is firmly in this direction. And I just am a little surprised still that they are so on top of things, right? New Glenn for a while was the hope that could put downward pressure on Falcon 9. And I say hope in that we like competition. Competition is good. It lets people, you know, forces people to innovate a little bit and not just rest on their laurels. That is an amazing vehicle like Falcon 9. Well, New Glenn still looks like it's a year or two away. You know, I don't think they're launching this year. I'd be shocked if they do next year, in all honesty.

All right, I want to cover two other stories about ABL Space Systems and Firefly. But before we do that, I want to say thank you to everyone out there who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com support. There are 508 of you supporting the show every single month. I'm so thankful for all of your support. It's awesome to be over 500 at this point. And this episode was produced by 37 executive producers. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd,

the Every Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your help, for supporting the show, for making this possible. And I really do need to emphasize this. If you want to help support the show, but you also want some extra stuff back, you got to head over to mainenginecutoff.com support,

and you got to get in on headlines because headlines has been really valuable lately, I think. The news has been a little nutty, and I talk about every single story of the week over on this special rss feed you can listen to it right wherever you're listening to this right now but you got to go over and get in on that three dollar a month club and you'll get an rss feed to drop in you know this past week it was almost 30 minutes uh so as tyler says he's tyler's

in the off nominal discord uh which is another feature of joining up. Tyler says headlines is a whole nother podcast. And I feel like I need to really emphasize that it is an entire other podcast that keeps you up on all of the space stories of the week. I don't cover them all here on the main show. I cover the ones that I have something to add to the conversation about. But over there, I talk about everything, give you some thoughts, some short thoughts on stuff that's going on. That's maybe sometimes a little outside of what I'm talking about here on the show. So I think it's a great way to stay up on everything happening in space, help support the show, and I thank you so much for your help.

All right, a couple of cool stories that have come out recently. The first one is ABL Space Systems. They are a company that is about to launch their first vehicle. They're, I don't know, a couple months away. They haven't really set a specific timeline. But sometime this year, they are planning on launching their first vehicle, which is the RS-1 vehicle. They're one of the small launch competitors that are in the 1,000-kilogram-ish range to low-Earth orbit. I actually think they're a little higher.

They're like 1.3 tons to orbit. And their thing is that they have a containerized launch system. So they can launch anywhere where there's a concrete pad, access to fuel and consumables and things like that, and a mission control system. I'm not going to go too deep into what makes ABL, ABL. If you want some of that, I did a show a couple of months back, episode 169, about all of the commercial small launchers that are either operating or on the verge of operating. And I think that holds up pretty well because I talk through their payload ranges, the price to orbit, where their launch sites are, when they're going to launch. I give a full breakdown of all these different competitors because there's a lot going on there and a lot of, you know, we think that's going to be a big shakeout in the market. So there's a lot to

talk about between the companies. But ABL has had a cool announcement this week. Lockheed Martin announced they had selected ABL to carry out a launch from the Shetland Space Center, which is on the Shetland Islands. If you're looking at a map of the UK, it's way northeast. It's actually the northernmost point of the UK, northernmost point of Scotland as well. I believe that is accurate, but everyone out there from the UK can correct me. At the time of this award that Lockheed Martin won back in 2018 from the British government, they were awarded a contract to carry out a launch from the UK. At the time, it looked like that would be from the Sutherland spaceport, which is actually on the main body of the UK. And now this launch is going to happen out Shetland Islands. There's a bunch of like, I think it's environmental stuff

holding this up. There's a little bit of a regulatory tit for tat happening over there to figure out where this is happening from. But the long and the short of it is that Lockheed won a contract from the British government to carry out a launch from the UK. Lockheed has now selected ABL, who Lockheed also invested in ABL. So it's one of the things kind of in their arsenal. At the time of the award back in 2018, a lot of the assumptions were that maybe Rocket Lab would set up another launch site there. They are now, you know, they've got two in New Zealand, they've got one in Virginia. So that did start to seem a little less likely, especially with Peter Beck saying, you know, building a launch site is really annoying.

But I didn't really think about ABL when it came to this, and now Lockheed has announced that officially. And this is a really cool announcement because, you know, ABL says that this containerized system is the thing that sets them apart from others. They don't have a dedicated launch site. They can launch, like I said, from wherever there's a concrete pad. They have a fairly capable booster in that it can do, you know, 1.3 tons to low Earth orbit. That's quite a lot of payload, especially compared to the other small launch providers that are out there. And their price is around $12 million. ABL's first launch is going to be from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

I think in this announcement, they said that they do have like five on contract, or this was the fifth contracted mission. So we don't know any of the other details. But now we know they're going to do some from Vandenberg. I think they've talked to Georgia officials about flying out of Georgia. And then now in the Shetland Islands. So they really have this flexibility as a key marker of their unique asset to the market. Now, the other small launch provider that has this is Virgin Orbit, and they've now flown to orbit successfully.

But that's a big thing that they are talking up and that I talked up about them in that episode that I mentioned, is that for a lot of countries out there who don't have a spaceport, who want launches from their own soil for national security or national pride reasons, Virgin Orbit's an awesome capability because they can fly their 747 to whatever nation that wants to host them. They can launch something from that nation's soil and all of a sudden they've got an all-in-one, do you want a launch capability from your own soil? Contact us, Virgin Orbit. I don't know why I'm doing an ad for Virgin Orbit in the middle of this, but that is their thing,

right? Now, here's the catch is that ABL can do that as well. And they obviously have a willingness to do that, at least with the Five Eyes countries, right? They're going to go over and do this in the UK. I don't know exactly how expansive they're going to be in their international efforts, but the fact that they are looking to this so early is a big thing. And I think it could impact the attractiveness of that Virgin Orbit capability quite a bit. Because ABL, they just need a concrete pad, you know? Hey, I'll do one for ABL now. Hi, we're ABL. Do you have a concrete pad, access to fuel, and something that needs to go to space, and also $12 million? Call us, ABL, not the other guys, Virgin Orbit. Because that's the key part here. Virgin Orbit is just about the same price.

They are much less of the payload. Maybe, what? I'm going to look at my math here, a third to maybe a quarter to a third of the payload for the same price. So it starts to look much more attractive for this kind of unique launch capability from launch anywhere in the world. Do you want a homegrown launch capability? Call us, Virgin Orbit. Call us, ABL. That math starts to flip if ABL gets up and running and they can do a lot more payload for the same amount of price from a concrete pad. So I've long been an air launch skeptic in terms of Virgin Orbit and others. I have yet to see this containerized launch system really work out, but mostly because not a lot of people have tried it. And if ABL can pull this off and they can make this a thing they're known for, a thing they're good at, and a key selling point for what they offer, then I really like the payload range they're in.

I'm really excited about that one ton to orbit class of vehicles, and I'm really excited to see where they go and where they launch from in the future. All right, now over in the Firefly world, a couple of weeks back, I mentioned on the show that something was up at Firefly. There was around some shady business dealings that Polyakov has been involved in. There was increasing discomfort with that and his Ukrainian citizenship from the U.S. Department of Defense. That stuff has come out recently, specifically in an Eric Berger article. Well, now a couple of things have come out number one they've shaken up the board of directors uh they have max polyakov has come off of the board of directors they've added uh it was a former member of the national geospatial intelligence agency uh there was someone from the air force a lot of department of defense type uh and intelligence agency type

of people to the board, really indicating that they see a lot of potential for their launch services in the defense side of the industry. So at the same time they announced that board shakeup, they also floated that they're looking to raise about $350 million. This would be in addition to the $200 million that was put in by Max Polyakov and Noosphere. And so with this, they're really trying to basically bump Max out of the picture here and revamp not only the management of the company, but the ownership as well. And then just last week, NASA announced that Firefly had been selected for a commercial lunar payload services program task order. Firefly was one of the original competitors for CLPS missions back when it was

first announced. They were one of the nine companies that could bid on these task orders, right? Because the way this thing works is that NASA would put up a task order, all of the approved companies can send in proposals, and then they get selected from that. Quite a surprise here to see Firefly selected. When Firefly first put in,, and then they get selected from that. Quite a surprise here to see Firefly selected. When Firefly first put in, they said that they were going to be working with the Israeli-based lander that would be based off of Beresheet, and they were going to be working with IAI on that. It was going to be called Genesis. Now they say they're doing their own thing. It's called Blue Ghost, which is apparently a type of Firefly and also an excellent troll by Tom Markuzik, who runs Firefly at his old employer, Blue Origin.

But they say they're going to be rolling their own thing here, and that's a smart move, because if you remember the Orbit Beyond story, the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program announced all their first task orders. One of them was to orbit beyond, and that has since been canceled. Because orbit beyond, I believe it was an Indian lander of some sort. They were going to be working with this Indian company that had a lander. And eventually it was determined that not enough of the lander would have been built and assembled here in the US to launch this kind of mission. So the whole thing fell apart. So for Firefly's case, I think, you know, maybe in a post Trump era, there's less of that

push behind the scenes to have so much of this built in the US or whatever this case is there. But but pulling this all in house is a really good move, especially as IAI is going to go on to do bear sheet two, maybe they don't have as much time to devote to working with Firefly. But nevertheless, this is a really interesting and somewhat surprising news story. $93 million for this lander. It's going to take 94 kilograms of NASA payload to the moon. They say they have about 50 kilograms of capacity for other commercial payloads. They also say they're going to launch this on their own Firefly Alpha vehicle, which does not seem accurate to me because they're going to fly 150 kilograms of payload on a vehicle that even with the electric propulsion upper stage can get about 500 kilograms

to lunar orbit. Math doesn't seem to check out super well there. So I'm kind of guessing that was just a PR line in there that, you know, we're trying to be an end-to-end services provider of transportation in space. And that's really the storyline there from Firefly. They're going to have a launch vehicle. They have this upper stage tug, this electric vehicle that can move things around orbit. And then they're going to have this lunar lander as well. They want to be an end-to-end service provider. Now to do that, they've got to get launching successfully. And Firefly is another one in that same class of ABL, about a ton to orbit. And that part of the market is going to be a big focus the next couple of months because we've got ABL, Firefly, and Relativity all looking to launch this year for

the first time. They all probably won't, but they're all in the same range here. Can the market support three of them? I don't necessarily think so. Does having things like clips on your books give you a little bit more credence as someone like Firefly? Certainly so. Are they establishing a close relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense and the intelligence agencies? Certainly seems like that's their intent.

So you see all these different anglings in the industry, right? Relativity has their thing going on with the additive manufacturing, their 3D printing, their entire vehicles. So they've got a lot of value in that company for everything that isn't their rocket, but the thing that makes the rocket. Firefly seems to be taking this end-to-end services route with the Department of Defense bent to it. ABL is going to be a launch from anywhere.

A lot of unique stuff happening in these companies, a lot of potential for interesting missions, a lot of potential for shakeout and churn in the industry at this point. So this is one that I'm really excited to track. And I thought it was worth keeping everyone up to date on what's going on out there. But until next time, thank you all so much for listening. Once again, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support to help support the show, get yourself some headlines in your feed, and as always, hit me up on Twitter if you've got anything to say, at wehavemiko on there, or an email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. Thanks again. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.