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Falcon Heavy - General Discussion

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Gotcha, that is interesting. Guessing they are Block 5 boosters that can be used many times, and the center core uses recycled older version pieces.

Well, with limited re-usability there will be some boosters better than others and there will be end of life.
So once they're on their last legs* they can get RID** of the booster as the expendable core of a Falcon Heavy launch.

* ;)
** Rapid Intentional Disassembly
 
And can we knock off the nit picking at each other, please. I think we're actually all in agreement here.

Please.
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Given the pricing that's been published, I wonder if we won't see many more FH GEO flights than were first anticipated. The price of a fully reusable FH is $5M more than an expendable F9 ($95M vs $90M), but it can put a heavy GEO satellite into a better orbit than the F9 or directly into GSO. That means the satellite is online a lot sooner which means more revenue.

I don't pretend to know how much this is worth, but it's got to be an advantage.
 
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I don't pretend to know how much this is worth, but it's got to be an advantage.

Revenue/month/transponder is a mind boggling number for geocomm.

There’s definitely the ‘better transfer orbit’ from a mass perspective (less fuel to circularize and position), and definitely from a time perspective as well for an increasing number of spacecraft. EP systems are a good way to save/shift mass; More and more customers are looking to EOR (and even zero chemical propulsion) in an effort to maximize revenue producing mass. The downside to that is that transfer time to GSO is measured on the order of months instead of days (like you have with chemical propulsion). As you might imagine, putting a shiney new for-profit asset into a months-long EOR basically means you throw away the best and least degraded few months of that asset’s usefulness...
 
Given the pricing that's been published, I wonder if we won't see many more FH GEO flights than were first anticipated. The price of a fully reusable FH is $5M more than an expendable F9 ($95M vs $90M), but it can put a heavy GEO satellite into a better orbit than the F9 or directly into GSO. That means the satellite is online a lot sooner which means more revenue.

I don't pretend to know how much this is worth, but it's got to be an advantage.

I think it will all come down to the size of the satellite and how much money will be made by not taking the long trip from GTO to GEO. Of course longevity has an effect as well because the satellite can save all that fuel for its intended orbit.

I have no doubt that now the capability is there that companies will be running the numbers to see whether an upgrade to FH is worth it. I expect that now that it exists that telecomm companies are going to be using it.
 
I have no doubt that now the capability is there that companies will be running the numbers to see whether an upgrade to FH is worth it.

Indeed they are...

The problem is that without competition, maxing FH capacity on a large GEOcomm is hard to close financially because the risk of not having FH available is [currently] too high.

There are certainly ‘nice to have’ cases where a generic A5/A5/F9/P enveloped platform could benefit from the extra FH boost, but many of the cases really just affect EOL which, from a revenue perspective, is much less interesting as it is much farther away. Those that affect BOL (like the accelerated EOR example) are hit or miss, because if you built a business plan around 6 months of EOR, you may not see linear financial benefit from reducing that to days or weeks.

That said, when you start talking multi-unit/constellation launches to GEO, some of those ‘nice to have’ cases become much more attractive...
 
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Indeed they are...

The problem is that without competition, maxing FH capacity on a large GEOcomm is hard to close financially because the risk of not having FH available is [currently] too high.

There are certainly ‘nice to have’ cases where a generic A5/A5/F9/P enveloped platform could benefit from the extra FH boost, but many of the cases really just affect EOL which, from a revenue perspective, is much less interesting as it is much farther away. Those that affect BOL (like the accelerated EOR example) are hit or miss, because if you built a business plan around 6 months of EOR, you may not see linear financial benefit from reducing that to days or weeks.

That said, when you start talking multi-unit/constellation launches to GEO, some of those ‘nice to have’ cases become much more attractive...
I can see that as it currently stands, FH probably is not a major priority for SpaceX, so there's a bit of chicken and egg here. If enough customers were seriously interested, SpaceX could probably make timely FH launches a priority, but without that assurance, customers are going to be non-committal, so FH isn't a big deal for SpaceX financially.

However, if FH can get some government launches where they need the capacity and the competition is so expensive, that may build some interest at SpaceX to make FH more of a mainstream product.
 
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I can see that as it currently stands, FH probably is not a major priority for SpaceX, so there's a bit of chicken and egg here. If enough customers were seriously interested, SpaceX could probably make timely FH launches a priority, but without that assurance, customers are going to be non-committal, so FH isn't a big deal for SpaceX financially.

However, if FH can get some government launches where they need the capacity and the competition is so expensive, that may build some interest at SpaceX to make FH more of a mainstream product.

The boosters are just relatively standard F9 cores; only the centre core requires unique, dedicated action on the part of SpaceX.

With the amount of money available to them for heavies, I can't imagine that not being worth their effort. Especially given how well reuse is going nowadays. They really only need one central core in their rotation.
 
I can see that as it currently stands, FH probably is not a major priority for SpaceX, so there's a bit of chicken and egg here. If enough customers were seriously interested, SpaceX could probably make timely FH launches a priority, but without that assurance, customers are going to be non-committal, so FH isn't a big deal for SpaceX financially.

If I might wax a bit more pithy, nobody is going to build a for-profit satellite that can only ride on one launcher. (That was the point of my post you quoted)

So...there's no chicken and the egg; there's no ambiguity on what needs to happen.
 
If I might wax a bit more pithy, nobody is going to build a for-profit satellite that can only ride on one launcher. (That was the point of my post you quoted)

So...there's no chicken and the egg; there's no ambiguity on what needs to happen.
I'm pretty doubtful of that if there is a significant cost advantage to be had. Anyway, it's not like if they can't get a FH ride there are no other options, they just do what they do now and arrive later using the satellite's own fuel.

If they do get the FH ride and arrive on station earlier and with more fuel reserves, they don't stay silent for months and dump the extra fuel into space.
 
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