>Before Elon came up with StarLink, even the Falcon 9 was a relatively boring concept, from the economical perspective.

http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/constellatio...

I'm pretty sure that the idea behind huge fleets of commercial LEO internet communication satellite constellations had existed long before Elon tried his hand at it (first proposed in 1994).

Even starlink was only brought in-house after a cancelled project with OneWeb (formerly WorldVu) https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/elon-musks-next-mission-int...

Iridium (1987) doesn't count as a huge enough fleet to warrant reusable rockets? It took them a LOT of launches...

It's basically a two minima space.

You can get 10 launches per year and pretty high reliability and high cost. Satellite cost is maybe 10x the launch cost. Government and commercial operations are possible. Europe has to maintain this for strategic reasons, no matter the cost.

And then there's the "newspace" strategy. Low cost launch achieved by reuse brings more demand, satellite cost goes down. When price goes low enough, completely new markets become possible. You enter a virtuous spiral. This is at least the theory. Requires a large amount of political capital to do this, as it will be lossy for a long time and there will be high profile failures (because you do so many launches and iterate). So this is probably only doable by mega billionaires who "get it" (the newspace way of thinking), not by public companies or governments.

Even Elon Musk didn't "get it" originally, they were trying to fish the rockets from the sea and refurbish them. At some point he turned around completely. Grasshopper and vertical landing was done.

> Before [anyone showed it could be done] the Falcon 9 was a relatively boring concept, from the economical perspective.

There, I fixed it. The reusable orbital launch vehicle revolution may well reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude when it's all said and done. That's not even relatively boring. It's not boring at all. It's nothing short of amazing. But it was boring when no one knew how to make it happen.

> But with a high-volume market things shift considerably. [...]

That's on the money. Government-owned/operated launchers are in trouble.

Rocket reuse is not a panacea. There is a very real expendable cost advantage in choosing SpaceX but rocket reuse will not reduce rocket costs significantly. There might be another -50% costs to be had once they iron out all the kinks but what Elon musk promises will not happen because he always overhypes everything.

Sure, he overhypes, but already Falcon 9 is cheaper than all others and precisely because of reuse. I don't see how to deny this. Oh sure, SpaceX is a privately held corporation so we don't really know the real numbers and maybe he's just underpricing to convince the world he's right even though he's wrong, or something. But there's a reason ULA and others are getting into the reuse game, and it's that rocket engines are unbelievably expensive, so if you just reuse those you save a huge amount on costs. The evidence is overwhelming that reusing rocket engines is a huge savings. It must follow that reusing the whole launch vehicle would be a bigger savings.

> In fact, many European companies, especially from Germany, are quite agile market leaders.

Can you name a few?

Herrenknecht, Liebherr, BioNTech.

Google for "Hidden Champion".

> But your satellite costs hundreds of millions and it has a very long lead time.

$50m is still a lot, and not every sat costs that much. How does a corporate bean counter justify spending $50m more than they have to?

> SpaceX has slips

Are there launchers that don't??

> and occasionally loses a bioster.

Losing a booster is a risk for SpaceX, not for the customer.

> So you might simply buy the Ariane offering because they will effectively purpose-built the rocket for you.

Nonsense. Unless there's something to do with fairing sizes, $50m is $50m.

> Especially when there are political connections to be maintained.

Ahhh, got it.

> $50m is still a lot, and not every sat costs that much. How does a corporate bean counter justify spending $50m more than they have to?

That's seems pretty easy? The satellite easily has a 2 year lead time, and it's 100s of millions so you can't afford to build a spare 'just in case'. At that point, spending an extra $50M to reduce the (perceived?) chance of a 2-year project delay starts to look pretty cheap.

Of course, this is dependent on there being a material reduction in the probability of RUD. And as SpaceX has accumulated more data on reliability, it starts to get very hard to argue that there is indeed a material reduction.

The Falcon 9 launch cadence is simply incredible right now. You have to start wondering if the uneconomical competitors will be able to stay on schedule while losing business and money. How does one perceive a "chance of a 2-year project delay" with SpaceX under the current circumstances but not with Ariane? It's quite a stretch. Would it stand up in court if shareholders sued over unnecessary spending of an extra $50m/launch?

> Are there launchers that don't??

Naturally, everyone has delays. But a company that purpose-builds the rocket for you does not, for instance, have to deal with a RUD of the booster it wants to use for you.

Selecting launch providers is not just about the sticker price of the rocket. But with more and more launches it obviously becomes ever more important.

> But a company that purpose-builds the rocket for you does not, for instance, have to deal with a RUD of the booster it wants to use for you.

Let's not forget too that EVERY booster for EVERY rocket other than Falcon 9 suffers a rude, if scheduled, disassembly EVERY time. When Falcon 9 suffers an unscheduled one, it's SpaceX's loss, not the customers. How can you possibly think that the occasional loss of a booster post-boost phase is a problem for the customer?!

The problem is not loss of booster, but loss of or damage to payload. In this regard, Falcon is comparable to other rockets.

Starship and the undeveloped Superheavy, not so much.

That's not what u/choeger was saying. A booster loss post-boost does not and cannot damage the payload.

One simple manufacturing mistake can delay your launch by a huge amount. One technical software problem can do so too.

The fact is, Arianespace just had massive month long delays because of production issues.

While SpaceX has 5 flight proven booster ready in the pipeline if one fails, its next one up and very little delay.

Its not even comparable.

The bigger question is how much higher is the chance of the anomaly in the reused booster. If it's comparable or identical to new one, there's literally no problem for SpaceX, big one for everyone else.

Its hard know, but reused boosters have the highest DoD and NASA certification a 100% perfect flight record and the same insurance premium.

IIRC they have re-flown two boosters 9x each.

Anyways, soon enough we'll know what their real reliability story is.

> But a company that purpose-builds the rocket for you does not, for instance, have to deal with a RUD of the booster it wants to use for you.

What?!