SpaceX Is Raising $500M at a $30.5B Valuation

Re:SpaceX Is Raising $500M at a $30.5B Valuation by ChuckMcM on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @12:59PM (#18708789)

I was going to say something similar. I love Electron, they have an awesome rocket and have made it to orbit so they are winners in my book. That said, they are poking at a different market than SpaceX is, which is the small rocket, small payload to orbit. Yes it's a market, no it isn't particularly high margin (at this time, these tend to be cube sats with more modest budgets).

What is worse, they still throw away the rocket once they launch. A "gas only" Falcon 9 rocket (which is to say they have the means to launch and relaunch over 10 times) is ultimately going to be the most cost effective path to space. Not sure Electron can get there from here.

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Re:SpaceX Is Raising $500M at a $30.5B Valuation by curtis on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:32PM (#18709742)

I don't know if a re-usable Electron will ever make sense, but it's an interesting engineering problem to think about.

As lithium-ion batteries improve the potential mass fraction for each Electron stage gets better: lighter batteries mean more propellant. In a decade (maybe sooner) it might become feasible for the first stage to retain enough propellant for a propulsive landing like the Falcon 9. And in this case I think there's a big pay-off with the electric pumps: there's no need for a hoverslam, since the engines should be able to deep throttle to an extreme degree that's not practical with conventional rocket engines.

In a shorter time-frame the Electron first stage, because it is so small, is probably air-recoverable using the same approach that ULA is considering for recovering Vulcan engines.

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Re:SpaceX Is Raising $500M at a $30.5B Valuation by ChuckMcM on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @04:28PM (#18710752)

Along those lines I think the hypersonic parachute work is also a potential game changer. High strength, low mass, materials with high thermal coefficients (like graphene) might one day be able to spread enough of the re-entry energy across a large enough surface to make it something you could do to recover. The steerable parafoils that SpaceX is putting on the payload fairings for terminal guidance.

A fun engineering problem to be sure.

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