Main Engine Cut Off - T+86: Falcon Heavy Wins AFSPC-52

Episode Date: June 27, 2018

Big news this week: SpaceX won an EELV contract for Falcon Heavy. I talk through what this means for the US launch market, how SpaceX and Falcon Heavy are set up to compete for the next few years. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, Stan, Mike, David, Mints, and seven anonymous—and 175 other supporters on Patreon. Air Force Certifies Falcon Heavy, Awards SpaceX AFSPC-52 Launch - Main Engine Cut Off U.S. Department of Defense - Contracts for June 21, 2018 Capabilities & Services | SpaceX RocketBuilder Air Force awards big launch contracts to SpaceX and ULA - SpaceNews.com Episode T+72: SpaceX’s Motivation for Falcon Heavy - Main Engine Cut Off Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Welcome to the Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo and this week we've got some big news to break down. Last week, SpaceX was awarded a contract from the Air Force that will be flown on Falcon Heavy. So the Air Force has officially certified Falcon Heavy and has awarded it a launch to be launched in September 2020. So this is very big news for the industry at large, especially here within the U.S. A little background, the EELV program, Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Program, not a very apt name for SpaceX launch vehicles. This is the program where the DoD acquires their missions through, that's a terrible sentence, but you get the point. Atlas 5, Delta 4, Falcon 9 are taking

part in that program right now, and now Falcon Heavy is officially part of that program as well. So first, the details of this mission. This is Air Force Space Command 52. That's the satellite that will be carried on this mission. So obviously from the name, it is an Air Force mission. And it was awarded to SpaceX for $130 million, firm fixed price contract. And that amount of money is sent to SpaceX at the time of this award. The launch is not set to happen until September 2020. So we are two years out from when this mission would take off from Cape Canaveral. So we don't know the payload, right?

This is a classified payload, so we don't know all the details about it. But there were some hints in the RFP that was released for this mission. The bidders, they're going to submit their bids for this launch. They get all this information. Some of it is classified. Some of it is public. On the public side, there's a PDF called the Instruction to Offerers, and it shows a reference orbit to be used for calculations to submit your bid with. shows a reference orbit to be used for calculations to submit your bid with. So if we take a look at that, I'll have a link to this in the show notes as always, mainenginecutoff.com. In that PDF, we see this line here. The offeror may utilize the reference orbit for calculations. 27 degrees inclination, 6,350 kilograms to a GTO of at least 35,188 kilometers by 185. So let's talk about the payload mass in a second. But the other parameters there are for a very typical GTO launch. So any of

the communication satellites you see get launched by SpaceX or ULA, when those are heading to GTO, this is exactly the same orbit that is defined in this PDF here. The payload mass is where it gets interesting, 6,350 kilograms. That is an interesting number because of, if you break that down, you can learn a bit about what launch vehicles would be able to carry this mission, and that is what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about how SpaceX decided on Falcon Heavy, but I also want to talk about who the other entrant for this mission was,

because in this Department of Defense announcement, it does say that there were two proposals received. Now, when this news hit all of the space media sites, the storyline that everyone went with was SpaceX, WAMPs, ULAs, triple the price, Delta IV Heavy. And I think that is patently wrong here. I don't think ULA bid Delta IV Heavy. I don't think there's any reason to bid Delta IV Heavy. And we can look at that by checking out that payload mass again, 6,350 kilograms. So if we drop that in to United Launch Alliance Rocket Builder, right? You can go on there. I'll do this right now with you live as we do this.

Go to rocketbuilder.com, pick the GTO orbit, pick your rocket type. We'll say to match with SpaceX's 5-meter diameter payload fairing. We'll pick the 5-meter variant, put 6 6350 in there, and you will see that an Atlas 5 521 can carry this thing up to GTO. And if the payload doesn't need all that 5 meter diameter fairing, an Atlas 5 421 could actually take this there as well. So this payload is well within the capabilities of atlas 5 even one of the lower end variants of the atlas 5 so all this talk about oh they beat out delta 4 heavy for this is just quite frankly nonsense it's a good storyline but you know everyone likes to say falcon heavy versus delta 4 heavy because they're the two heaviest lift rockets out there, and the price difference is very large. Delta 4 Heavy is hundreds of millions of dollars,

and Falcon 9 and Heavy are in the tens of millions to low $100 million, and for a government mission like this, $130 million. The Atlas V, we don't know specific pricing on this they took the real pricing off this rocket builder tool which i understand competitively but as a person who breaks this stuff down i would really like to see a price on this but uh we can make some assumptions and recently ula won a different eelv award where they were awarded two different launches that were actually heading up directly to geostationary orbit. So this was back in March. And reading from this Space News article about these awards, this one, SpaceX received $290 million for three GPS missions, and ULA was awarded $351 million for two different satellites, Air Force Space Command 8 and 12. Both of those

are, I believe, heading directly to geosynchronous orbit. So not exactly the same mission, actually a little more taxing of a mission, and we don't know the exact configuration that Atlas 5 is going to fly in. I haven't been able to find it from Air Force Space Command 8 and 12, but from this, we can draw some conclusions. If we just say that both are flying on a base model, Atlas 5, you know, 401 or something, the $350 million puts it at about $170-something million per Atlas V. If we be conservative and say that's the base model, that gives us a little bit of baseline,

and you can add your solid rocket boosters on top of there and add a couple of tens of millions for the upgrading of the configuration here to an Atlas V 521, for our example, you'll end up somewhere around the $200 million range. So all the talk about SpaceX, you know, was a third of the price of the other proposal is quite frankly nonsense. I think they probably want it by somewhere in the range of $50 to $70 million if we're conservative on the expensive end for ULA. So I thought that was worth bringing up that, you know, Falcon Heavy here was going up against an Atlas V variant, one of the lower end Atlas V variants. Now that said,

in this case, Falcon Heavy beat Atlas V. But that doesn't mean that in every single contract that goes out, Falcon Heavy is going to beat Atlas V. There are certain things that Atlas V can do that Falcon Heavy cannot. Notably, the payload fairing of Atlas V can be up to like twice as long as Falcon Heavy. The Falcon Heavy payload fairing, as we talked about back when the demo mission flew, is very tiny for the payload class that the launch vehicle is in. And ULA in both the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 has very long payload fairings. So if one of the Department of Defense agencies is going to fly a very large, long payload, I don't know, something like an NRO satellite that is a telescope that with a huge focal length, that's going to have to fly

on an Atlas V or a Delta IV because of that payload length. And that is why the Air Force and DoD has purchased Delta IV heavies going into the future. That is a model that's going to be retired, but they do want to have some of those in storage so that they can use them in the early part of the 2020s. And that is exactly what has happened. They have already ordered a certain amount of Delta IV heavies to carry them over the next couple years because ULA would like to produce all those now to fly them later. So there is still unique value in both the Atlas V and Delta IV over Falcon Heavy. On price, Falcon Heavy is going to win almost every time.

But if you think about Vulcan and the future of ULA, they've talked about trying to bring those costs down quite a bit. They've already done a lot of cost cutting on the Atlas V side. If they continue to bring that price down, SpaceX still has margin in their pricing, but it does get a lot closer. And if an Atlas V 521 was even this close to Falcon Heavy in this bid, things it does get a lot closer. And if an Atlas 5521 was even this close to Falcon Heavy in this bid, things are tightening up a little bit. As SpaceX learns what it actually

costs to fly a government mission, all that extra overhead that they need to charge for, we see that in the Dragon flights that they've contracted with NASA, this second round, CRS-2, their price actually went up because they learned it's actually kind of expensive to do all that stuff that they need to do to facilitate a government customer. So as they learn that and ULA cuts their prices, the gap is closing a bit. And I think that's what we see in this proposal here. Now, I started this little rant by saying that the payload for Air Force Space Command 52 is well within the capability of Atlas V, that also means that it's well within the capability of Falcon 9.

And that's the part I want to break down next. But before I get into that piece, I do want to say a big thank you to all the supporters of Main Engine Cutoff over at patreon.com slash miko. There are 211 of you supporting this show every single week, and I could not be more thankful for your support. This episode of Managing Cutoff was produced by 36 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, Stan, Mike, David, Mintz, and seven anonymous executive producers.

Grant, Barbara, Stan, Mike, David, Mintz, and seven anonymous executive producers. They made this episode possible, and I could not do it without them and everybody else over at patreon.com slash Miko. If you want to help support the show, if you want access to the headline show I do every Friday, head over to patreon.com slash Miko. Join up there, help support the show, get yourself some space headlines on Fridays, and I will be forever thankful for your support. All right, so let's talk a little bit about SpaceX's decision here. Back when the Falcon Heavy demo mission went off, I had a show where I talked about

SpaceX's motivation to build Falcon Heavy, and I was theorizing when they would fly it, what kind of missions would be flown on it. And one of those pieces that I talked about there, and others had talked about this too, this wasn't a unique thing that I came up with, but one of the things we were talking about was that Falcon Heavy could fly missions that are outside of the Falcon 9's payload range and do so recoverably. So sometimes we see Falcon 9 fly and they have to expend a booster because they're taking a particularly heavy payload to GTO. Falcon Heavy extends that range up quite a bit. The capability listed on SpaceX.com is that it can take eight metric tons to GTO in its

recoverable configuration. Expendably, it can do, you know, what is this, 26 metric tons? But reusable is what SpaceX really wants to do, obviously. It's probably why a lot of you are listening to this show. So the theory was that for these heavier payloads, you know, not the ridiculously heavy ones, but for these heavier payloads that SpaceX flies from time to time, they might shift those to a Falcon Heavy and be able to fly it in a recoverable format rather than losing a booster. And this will become extra important as they get into flying Block 5. They really want to hold on to those things if they're able to reuse them 10 times. That's going to be a very big deal if they have

to expend a booster before the end of its life. And this contract here for the Air Force is the first time that we're seeing that scenario come to play where a payload that is very much within Falcon 9's capabilities is being flown on a Falcon Heavy to be able to recover that booster. Because Falcon 9 can do up to eight metric tons expendably. This payload is about six and a half if we go off one of the public info that we have. So this is the first scenario we're seeing there. And that's a big deal for SpaceX because, you know, as they, as I said, are they getting into block five now? The lifetime of those boosters is going to be a very important use case. So to be able to shift these heavy payloads up to Falcon Heavy, that's a big deal. And they can do it right now because the price for Falcon Heavy

is still well below the Atlas V price. Say the Atlas V price was able to drop to $100 million. Well, SpaceX would then still have a couple of million dollars of leeway. Well, SpaceX would then still have a couple of million dollars of leeway. So it's a big deal for SpaceX that they are able to use this strategy. And it's a big deal that the Air Force went for it. You know, factoring in the Falcon Heavy launch price and all of that extra overhead that we talked about that drives the price up quite a bit. They're able to win this kind of contract and fly it on a Falcon Heavy rather than being stuck with a Falcon 9. Now, obviously, if they were going to go on cost alone, they could fly this on a Falcon 9, charge a little bit of a premium for expending that launch vehicle, and probably still win this contract a little under $130 million.

And that's kind of what they have to do a lot of times on the commercial side of things, because they don't have the kind of leeway that you see here in this contract process to be able to shift the payload to Falcon Heavy, charge the customer double what they were going to pay, right? Because a commercial market Falcon 9 is $60- dollars, that's where the price starts at, you can't convince somebody to spend twice that so that you can get your own booster back. But when they have this headroom, when they know they're going up against an Atlas 5, they have the headroom to be able to do that on these Department of Defense missions. On the commercial market, that's going to be a lot harder. And that's where

what came about during the Falcon Heavy demo and the discussion around that was, that's where that thing comes in that Elon Musk was talking about, that the goal is to get a reusable Falcon Heavy to be lower than the price of an expendable Falcon 9. So that if somebody has a payload that's in the 7 or 8 metric ton class, that it's economically sensible for them to choose a recoverable Falcon Heavy rather than flying on expendable Falcon 9. That is the goal of Block 5 as much as the goal is to have that very easy turnaround. That very easy turnaround is ideally there to unlock even lower prices and that makes this all the more possible that they can have people flying on

falcon heavy instead of a falcon 9 now this is a good example of that happening a little bit of a leading indicator just for what we might see in the future but you can see with that price that there's still you know obviously there's some government price picked in there but uh even if you take that government price out and go by the list price on the website 90 million dollars you still can't convince somebody to spend 150 of what they were planning on to upgrade to a Falcon Heavy to let you get your boosters back. So as we see Falcon Heavy get more use on the commercial side, or really any use on the commercial side, that's a thing that I'm going to be watching for when we see payload masses that are being flown on Falcon 9s versus Falcon Heavies. I want to see that trend happen on the commercial side the way they have the ability to do it now on the governmental side. So that's my take on SpaceX and the way they played this particular proposal. There are still a few contracts remaining on this Phase 1A of the EELV

program. There are a couple contracts there that Falcon Heavy could be in the running for. There's a few missions coming up that will be awarded soon that involve going directly to geostationary orbit. If SpaceX were to win one of those, that would be a pretty big deal too, because while they've demoed it on the Falcon Heavy demo mission, the ability to restart the upper stage six hours after launch, they haven't yet had a contract to do that. If the Air Force shows confidence in SpaceX's ability to pull one of those missions off,

that's just about the most complex mission that they could ask for. So that would be a pretty big step if they are able to pull off one of those victories as well. And if they're able to land something that is incredibly high value, where right now the Atlas V and its track record might have more sway in the proposal process, if they're able to pull one of those missions away from the ever-reliable Atlas V,

that'll be another big statement. So there's a couple left, as I said. I'm sure we'll be talking about them throughout the summer. And then we're into phase two of the EELV program. And that's where we're going to see Vulcan and New Glenn and maybe even Northrop Grumman's Omega. And those awards, I think, are supposed to be announced in July or August. And that's a whole nother set of missions that will be announced in the future. the future. So we'll be keeping track of how these things shake out in the future. But for now, Falcon Heavy, flying one at a launch pad near you, September 2020. That's about it for this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you've got any thoughts, as always, anthony at managingcutoff.com or at wehavemiko on Twitter. Thanks again to everybody for your support over at patreon.com slash miko. I could not do it without you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening, as always, and I'll talk to it without you. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Thanks for listening as always, and I'll talk to you next week.