Main Engine Cut Off - T+7: Bezos and Musk at Code Conference, and a Hard Look at Vulcan’s Economics

Episode Date: June 8, 2016

Some interesting tidbits emerged from interviews with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk at Code Conference. And a hard look at the economics of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan. Jeff Bezos | Full interview | Code Conference 2016 Elon Musk | Full interview | Code Conference 2016 Vulcan Centaur and Vulcan ACES - United Launch Alliance ULA needs commercial customers to close Vulcan rocket business case – Spaceflight Now Orbital ATK beats out Aerojet in ULA booster selection – Spaceflight Now Re-engined Antares rocket completes ground test firing – Spaceflight Now Williams enters BEAM for expandable module milestone | NASASpaceFlight.com Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

This past week wasn't the most busy week of spaceflight, so there's not too much news to break down and analyze. And I do try to avoid making this the Musk and Bezos show every week, but to nerds who like the near future of spaceflight and the way the industry will shake out in the next decade, they do offer the most interesting things to talk about week to week. This past week, they were both at the Code Conference, which was a conference that brought together different leaders of technology companies and groups and things like that to talk about what they're working on, and they were both interviewed in their own session, about an hour and 20 minutes each, and they're extremely interesting to watch. I would highly recommend watching these in full.

They're not 100% about space, but Elon does talk about SpaceX quite a bit, and Jeff Bezos does talk about Blue Origin and the way it was founded at least a little bit. So if you're at all interested in this stuff, it is interesting to watch those interviews and hear them talk about not only their space ventures, but what else they're working on too, and how it all interacts. There were a couple interesting tidbits that I picked up listening to these interviews, and we'll start with Jeff Bezos. As typical with Blue Origin, he was pretty secretive about what they're working on and didn't offer too much to talk about, except for one bit, and he was talking about the mindset behind Blue Origin. It seems that it came from a place of him thinking about what infrastructure existed for him to

create Amazon back in the late 90s, and he kind of took a look at what was there, what was there for him to use, how did he use it to create Amazon, to create such a business that has been successful over the past decade or so. And he kind of took what he was thinking about and looked forward to space and thought about how he could create that infrastructure to be used in space. So while Elon Musk is driven by the desire to get to Mars and to colonize Mars, Jeff Bezos is driven to create an infrastructure and industry that could be opened up to other entrepreneurs like himself, which is a pretty interesting way to think about space. He's not looking at the current commercial space market with Comstats and different things like that and trying to capitalize on what they have to offer.

But he's thinking about the future generations of entrepreneurs that will be operating in space. entrepreneurs that will be operating in space. And he's trying to put the infrastructure in place for them to create things that we haven't really thought about yet, or haven't had the need for yet, or haven't been able to create because of how expensive spaceflight is. So just in the founding principles of Blue Origin and of SpaceX, they have completely different end goals, but the way to get there is pretty similar, and that's why they seem to be doing the same things right now. Both companies need to drastically lower the cost to orbit and beyond and the way that they're doing that is with reusability, with vertical integration in some ways so that they're creating more of their own components internally

rather than outsourcing different pieces of the rocket everywhere else. So they have kind of this parallel work stream and people see that as them competing head-to-head but really they have completely different end goals and they're just getting there the same way, which is great because it creates this competitive environment over the things that they're working on currently. So there's always that back and forth between Blue Origin and SpaceX when one of them lands a rocket and the other one lands another stage or something like that. So it's always fun to watch that competitive side. But really, when you look at the strategies behind the companies, they're headed to different places. But right now, they're kind of riding alongside each other and changing the industry in doing that.

So really, that mindset was the only interesting thing that came out of Jeff Bezos's session about Blue Origin. But again, it was a great session. And I really enjoyed listening to him talk about different things that he was working on and different ways he sees Amazon going in the future, which will always kick back into Blue Origin because that's certainly where he gets the funding that he puts into Blue Origin from. So if you can deal with the creepy Bezos laugh that comes out from time to time, I would highly recommend watching the hour and 20 minute session. Put it on while you're doing dishes or laundry or something and just listen to it and enjoy. Now switching over to the Elon Musk interview. He did talk about SpaceX a lot more than Bezos did talk about Blue Origin, but to a spaceflight nerd like yourself who listens

to this show, there's probably not a lot new there for you to learn about Red Dragon or Falcon Recoveries or Falcon Reusability or Falcon Heavy or even the Mars architecture that's coming down the pipe. So there's not a lot new in that regard. But there was one interesting nugget that he dropped when talking about the Mars plan. When he was asked what the game plan is for Mars over the next couple of years and the next couple launch windows, the direct quote that I found interesting was, we are establishing cargo flights to Mars that people can count on. And this was in reference to them sending Red Dragons to Mars every two years or every 26 months, whenever there's a launch opportunity. But the way he phrased that is extremely interesting. He makes it seem like

they're going to sell cargo space, either in terms of payload size or payload mass, that they're going to sell some of that excess payload to other people who would be interested in putting their own experiments or their own sensors or their own whatever on board a Red Dragon that's headed for Mars. Now that's a really cool way to change the way that science is done on the surface of Mars. Because up until this point, and even up until the regular Red Dragon flights are flying, the way to do that is to develop your own lander or your own rover or contribute your experiment to another lander or rover that's headed for Mars' surface, the way that ExoMars works. The different countries are supplying different experiments and sensors to be

put on the rover or lander to be used on the surface of Mars. But even then, you have to justify why your sensor or experiment deserves the precious space and mass and payload on that lander or rover to even be considered for inclusion in that process. In total, it's a very expensive mission to get something to the surface of Mars because somebody has to build a lander, whether it's customized or not or reused from past landers or past rovers or whatever. Somebody has to put those parts together. And then they have to buy the launch services to get it to Mars. So they'll be buying a full launch from the ground up, you know, whether it's an Atlas V, or Delta IV, or whatever it is, launching it to Mars. They have to buy the full launch services, which could be triple digit millions in a lot of cases. But consider if SpaceX starts using their reflown stages for the Red Dragon missions.

They have a vested interest to fly Red Dragon every two years because they want to get as much to Mars now as they can to lay the groundwork for their future colonization plans. So they have these guaranteed flights every launch opportunity, and it could be flying on a fully reflown Falcon Heavy, which would cut their own launch cost way down. So for SpaceX, the cost would just be the Dragon capsule and the upper stage. Now that's certainly not cheap, but it's certainly not expensive compared to the entire launch infrastructure you need to get something to the surface of Mars. And now consider they start selling payload space on Red Dragon to other commercial or private interests that might want to put

something on Red Dragon. It certainly won't be cheap to buy those spaces, but compared to the entire other stack that you would need for a custom mission, you know, you need to build that lander, all of the launch services from the ground up, a couple of million dollars is very, very attractive for people that want to get their sensor or their experiment to Mars' surface. Red Dragon can get about four tons down to the Martian surface. So if SpaceX uses, you know, two or three tons for their own experiments, you can figure out that in the future they're going to want to run experiments to see how they can harvest resources at Mars, if they can, you know, get resources out of the ground or out of the atmosphere to turn into fuel

for the trip back. All of those different experiments they're going to want to run in the future, that will take up payload space, but they'll probably have an extra one ton, maybe a little more than that, depending on what they're sending on that particular mission. So they start selling off that space at a couple million dollars a pop, and that quickly gets those missions down in cost for SpaceX out of pocket. So this is a really interesting way if they do, you know, That quickly gets those missions down in cost for SpaceX out of pocket. So this is a really interesting way if they do, you know, if this, the way that I'm reading this quote plays out like this, and they start selling this space to Mars' surface as part

of their mission. This is a really interesting way to subsidize their own missions that they're going to be flying and really cut down on their own costs for that mission. Now, certainly none of this would be applicable to the initial Red Dragon mission. That first Red Dragon mission is really to test the EDL concepts, the entry, descent, and landing concepts that SpaceX needs to know in order to land heavier payloads at the surface of Mars. So this won't be applicable until we even have a successful Red Dragon mission, but it is interesting to look at the way that SpaceX is going to use these Red Dragon

missions as precursor to their larger Mars architecture. So those were really the only two tidbits from the interviews that I thought were worth bringing up on the show. But I will put the links to the full interview in the show notes. You can get the show notes at mainenginecutoff.com. And just go there, check out the full interviews. It's really, really worth it if you're interested in this stuff at all. So switching topics a little bit in our grab bag of odds and ends this week, since we don't have any major topic to talk about, I want to follow up a bit on the Vulcan, which I talked about a lot last week.

Vulcan is ULA's next generation rocket, which is due to enter service right now in 2019, maybe 2020. And I got an email from Alistair to the email address anthony at mainenginecutoff.com with a couple of comments about Vulcan's cost and competitiveness, which if you remember from last week was what I was calling into question based on the market that Vulcan will be entering in in the 2020s. And Alistair had four main points as to why the Vulcan could be more cost competitive with things like the Falcon 9 or other competitors when it does enter service.

The first point was the Vulcan's reusability in comparison to the Falcon 9 could make it get more payload to low Earth orbit for a similar or less amount of money than the Falcon 9 would because the Falcon 9 has to cut off a little bit of their payload performance to be able to retro-propulsively land on the barge or at the landing site. In Vulcan's case, it will pop off the engine block once that first stage is burned out, and that engine block would use an inflatable decelerator to fly back through the atmosphere, pop a parachute, and once it's down towards the ocean, a helicopter would arrow capture the parasail and the engine block and bring it back to land to be reused later. So Vulcan itself doesn't have to lose any fuel margin or any payload margin to be able to be reused,

it can use 100% of its potential and then reuse the engine block. And that certainly is true that Vulcan would have a higher mass fraction because it can put all of that fuel towards the payload into orbit so it could be more performant but really we don't know at all yet what the cost would be and we only really know vaguely what the performance of Vulcan would be and that is that it would replace all of ULA's currently flying rockets. So when it starts to fly, it will replace the Atlas V in the full range of the Atlas V's performance, but it won't yet get to that Delta IV heavy performance mark until much later in the 2020s. So we know that the performance would be vaguely similar to the Atlas V, but we have no idea yet on the cost of the

Vulcan itself for those different performance metrics. So it's hard to say, you know, on a dollar per payload basis, which one would be more competitive, but it certainly is possible that dollar per payload Vulcan could be better because it has a better mass fraction for payload to orbit. The second point that Alistair made was that the Vulcan would be built with all American parts, rather than the Atlas, which uses an RD-180 Russian-built engine. So it could be cheaper because of that, because they don't have to deal with the international relations. They don't have to deal with potential issues like the RD-180 is getting banned

from use on military flights. They don't have to deal with that kind of stuff or import taxes, any of those other geopolitical concerns. And it would be a little cheaper to source everything domestically. And that certainly could be the case. I don't really know exactly how much an RD-180 costs or how much a BE-4 would cost or an Aero-1, so we don't really have the greatest metrics to say which one is cheaper and which one is more competitive. The one thing I would say is that the RD-180 as it stands now has the benefit of economies of scale. Since they've been that the RD-180 as it stands now has the benefit of

economies of scale. Since they've been building the RD-180 for so long, they've built so many, ULA orders so many in bulk that the economies of scale really kicks in to make it cost effective to build those engines. Whereas when the BE-4 or the AR-1, which are the two engines that might power the Vulcan's first stage, when those start to be produced, they'll still be very new engines, so they won't have that entire production flow worked out, so they might not be the most cost-effective things up front. Certainly down the road, once they get going and once they get building, that could be the case, and they will certainly benefit from the economies of scale at some point in the future.

Now, hopefully, if their reusability concerns work out, they won't need to be buying that many engines, which is the benefit of their reusability, is that the largest cost for that rocket is in the first-stage engines, and they'll be getting those pieces back. So that does cut down how much they'll have to buy engines, but again, that does limit the economies of scale benefits that the BE-4 or AR-1 would get because they have to produce less of them. So it's all really a balance of how these production flows and different things will work out once we start flying with the Vulcan. Now, those are all very good points that Alistair brought up for the case for Vulcan's cost and competitiveness. So I thought it'd be a good idea to look at what we know now about Vulcan and what we don't know yet that could be, you know, the variables that make it a lot cheaper than Atlas V or maybe the same price. In an interview with Tori Bruno last year, he stated

that they were aiming for the bare-bones Vulcan rocket to be half of today's price for a basic Atlas V. Now we know that the basic Atlas V, which is the 401 configuration, which means a 4 meter fairing, no solid rocket boosters, and one RL-10 upper stage engine, that goes for around $164 million. So the bare bones Vulcan would be, you know, if his stat was right, it would be $82 million. Elsewhere in that interview, it sounds like $100 million is the goal right now for that rocket. So somewhere around the $80 to $100 million range, which is a pretty good price. The Falcon 9 is $62 million, and the Falcon Heavy will be around $90 million if it flies in its current configuration. So definitely a competitive price and much, much better than the $164 that the

Atlas V base variant is as of today. Now, that is the bare-bones Vulcan, which means no solid rocket boosters. And when you add those in, it gets a little more interesting. You know, right now they're using an Aerojet Rocketdyne solid rocket booster for the Atlas V. They are switching to an Orville ATK-built solid rocket motor for the Atlas V, and those will be the same solid rocket motors they use for Vulcan. So they're in a bit of a shifting period in terms of solid rocket motors. But as of right now, the Aerojet Rocketdyne ones they currently fly are sitting around $10 million per booster.

So for the Atlas V now, when they go from, you know, they add a booster, it's $10 million. So once you start going into the Atlas 451 or 551 variants, you've got, you know, $50 million tacked on to your launch price just for those boosters alone. Now they've been touting the Orbital ATK replacements, which are the GEM-63 and the GEM-63XL for the Vulcan. They've been saying that those will be a lot more cost efficient than the Aerojet Rocketdyne ones right now. But again, we have no idea what that means. We have no idea if that means, you know, $7 million is certainly a lot more cost effective than $10 million. So is it in the range of $7 million? Or is it in the range of three or four? That's a big variable that we don't know, which could affect the cost in a pretty big way. Because you take a bare bones

Vulcan for 100 million and add six boosters onto it, you could get right back up to an Atlas V price in no time at all. You know, no matter what the price is, you're taking that price and multiplying it by potentially four or six, depending on what variant of the Vulcan you're flying. So that's a pretty big cost variable that we don't yet know. Now the other piece of the Vulcan's plan is the ACES upper stage, which is a brand new upper stage that would be a pretty amazing piece of hardware for interplanetary flights and even for heavier payloads, but that's not currently slated until 2023. And it's not until ACES flies that Vulcan would achieve the payload capacity of the Delta

IV Heavy. And that's important to note of the Delta IV Heavy. And that's important to note because the Delta IV Heavy currently occupies the most unique position in the market for ULA. Until Falcon Heavy flies, that is the most performant rocket flying in the world today, so that can lift the heaviest payloads that anyone can. And it also has pretty giant fairings, which is great for a lot of military satellites, like the NRO launch, which is slated to happen in just a lot of military satellites, like the NRO launch, which is slated to happen in just a couple of days here. So the Delta IV Heavy is a very unique launch vehicle. Its payload size is unmatched until later this year when Falcon Heavy flies,

if it's later this year, maybe next year. And Falcon Heavy doesn't have big enough fairings to support some heavier military satellites and bigger military satellites that Delta IV Heavy does. And additionally, Falcon Heavy will not support vertical integration, which is necessary for most military satellites. That's something that Falcon Heavy does not do. So in a lot of ways, Delta IV Heavy has the upper hand against Falcon Heavy or anything else close. And really, no one can compete with it right now. And the fact that Vulcan won't get that capability until the mid 2020s cuts a lot of its potential launch market out because of all that business that goes to ULA these days. Now, as I said, reusability is the third tier. So we kind of have these three tiers, we have engine reusability, the solid rocket

motors, and the aces upper stage. Those are the three things that we don't really know enough about yet to be able to do a good cost calculation. Reusability isn't slated until the mid-2020s right now, but we have no idea if that means they'll be operationally using reusability by the mid-2020s, or if that's when they're starting to test the system and work out all the kinks. We don't know yet when that falls. So as it looks now, the fully realized Vulcan with a reusable engine block, with the advanced upper stage, and with these new solid rocket motors, that full configuration will not be flying until the mid 2020s, probably late 2020s, considering there'll probably be a delay somewhere in the process. So that's 10 years from now, or potentially 10 years from now,

you know, between eight and 10 years from where we're sitting today, until we have a fully realized Vulcan with all these cost savings built in. So once that configuration does fly, then yeah, maybe it'll be cost effective and competitive with the other providers in the market. But there's also a very important gap between here and there to jump. And that is how do you get the Vulcan up and flying and flying enough payloads competitively to be able to be tested and to get all these things worked out and worked into the system to be able to become cost effective in the mid 2020s. And in that same interview that I was talking about that Tory Bruno did last year on the topic of Vulcan, he stated

that the Vulcan must fly at least 10 times per year to keep the factory and launch crews operating at the efficiencies they need to get to that $100 million per mission price goal that they have in mind. Now, 10 times a year is a lot, especially for United Launch Alliance. Just looking at what they've launched the past two years, in 2014, they launched nine Atlas Vs and three Delta IV mediums. In 2015 they launched nine Atlas Vs again and two Delta IV mediums. So just between those two launch vehicles, which are the things that Vulcan is replacing directly, so that's a better comparison, we're kind of excluding any Delta IV heavy flights from this list and even a Delta II that was in there, which is, you know, being phased out. There's one launch of that left. So I'm only looking at these two models because that is the most directly applicable to what the Vulcan will be flying.

So how do they expect to fly 10 missions on a Vulcan when Atlas V is still going to be operating at that time? Delta IV is being phased out, and the only thing that will stay around is Delta IV Heavy as long as the government needs it. But the Atlas 5 is going to operate alongside the Vulcan for at least the first year or two of Vulcan's operations. So I'm not sure how they expect to fly 10 missions with another handful of Atlas 5 missions, especially considering two important things. They've said multiple times that the national security payloads are going to dip a little bit in the five years between 2018 and 2023 there's not going to be as many launches in those years

at least right now there's not that many slated for those years as there have in the past and again military flights are the bulk of ULA's launches and by bulk I mean nearly all of their launches so if those are dipping right around the time Vulcan's coming online, I don't know where they're going to get these payloads from. You could say they would get these payloads from commercial companies, but again, they're not going to have the fully realized cost efficiency of Vulcan when it starts flying and they really need those commercial flights in the early 2020s. So that puts them in a very tough place where they need a rocket that is going to fly a lot. They need commercial partners to fly on their rocket,

but they're not yet at the cost they need to be able to launch at a price that fits those commercial partners. So you can see how this is going to be a really interesting predicament that ULA gets themselves into as they try to transition to this new era of spaceflight and space launch. Now I'm not saying it's all doom and gloom for ULA because they certainly have reliability on their side and there's people that are always going to value the reliability over everything else. But again, there's a lot of years between here and there and that's a lot of years for Falcon 9 to get more and more reliable as we go. Falcon 9 is only six years old this week, and they're already landing these stages and about to reuse them. So six years from now is when the

Vulcan could hope to be operating fully. Where does that leave Falcon 9 in six years? It's a very tricky spot that ULA is going to be in if they want to be really competitive. A couple of more odds and ends before I'm done today, and these I don't have too much to talk about, but I just wanted to bring them up because we'll probably be talking about these more in the weeks ahead. Orbital ATK completed a 30 second test firing of the upgraded Antares rocket. This has new engines from the last time that they flew, and that ended in a launch failure back in October of 2014. So they've got new engines on this stage. They've just successfully fired it for 30 seconds. It was a pretty cool test to watch,

so in the show notes, I'll have a link to some of the videos. You can check the show notes out at mainenginecutoff.com if you want to see those. Right now, Orbital ATK is targeting July 6th for their next launch of Antares, that rocket that they just test fired, and that will send Cygnus up to the space station for a resupply mission. I'm particularly excited about this launch because I'm planning on being down there for it. This is a launch out of Wallops Island, which is in Virginia, on the eastern shore there, and it's just about a three-hour drive south of Philadelphia, so I'm excited to take the trip down and see the upgraded Antares launch, hopefully July 6th, maybe sometime in that week, if there's a delay here or there. If you're planning on attending the launch as well, let me know, because I'll probably be flying solo down to the launch itself, unless my brother wants to hop in the car with me.

So let me know, we can meet up and hang out and wait for the launch of Antares. up and hang out and wait for the launch of Antares. The other interesting story is that at the beginning of this week, Jeff Williams successfully entered BEAM, which is the expandable module, on the space station. After a bit of struggle, they finally got it expanded and inflated and pressurized, and they finally entered it after a weekend long of checkouts and tests to make sure that all was well with that module before they even attempted to open that on the space station. BEAM is a two-year mission. They'll enter it occasionally, but mostly it's just along for the ride to test out the long-duration effects of expandable modules in space, to test out some of the materials that Bigelow is using on BEAM, and see how they hold up for future use on human spaceflight missions. So we'll keep an eye on

that to see if anything interesting happens in that regard. But it's just something really cool to follow along because we've never done an inflatable module with humans inside until this point. And with that, that's all I've got for you this week. Thank you very much for listening to the show. If you've got any feedback like Alistair did, I would love to hear it in the email anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. Otherwise, a rating or review in the iTunes store would be great, or a recommendation on Overcast or whatever platform you use. Or just spread the word to a fellow spaceflight nerd.

Thanks, and I'll talk to you soon. Thank you.