Quote from: deadman1204 on 05/23/2022 04:07 pmPeople are laboring under this false idea that starship will replace falcon 9 in a couple years - which totally ignores spaceX saying on multiple occasions that this is not true.Falcon 9 will fly for as long as customers want it... Almost correct. It is in fact not up to the customers.SpaceX fully intends to switch over to Starship, as soon as committed obligations allow it. Outyear look: Falcon 9 will fly until roughly 2030, because NASA has committed SpaceX to flying Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon until 2030. But with Starship operational by then, even for crewed launches, the retirement of ISS drops the sole remaining prime customer for F9 by then. Only FH will soldier on a few more years, after ISS retirement, because of running DoD and NASA commitments. But by 2035 FH will absolutely be gone as well. Rationale behind this: The coming situation where FH is the only heavy lifter, available to NASA and DoD, will be short-lived, due to the arrival of Starship, the Heavy variant of Vulcan and New Glenn. A little further out there will be the heavy variant of Neutron as well. Lots of options becoming available to NASA and DoD in the next 5 years.
People are laboring under this false idea that starship will replace falcon 9 in a couple years - which totally ignores spaceX saying on multiple occasions that this is not true.Falcon 9 will fly for as long as customers want it...
Quote from: woods170 on 06/30/2022 08:05 amQuote from: deadman1204 on 05/23/2022 04:07 pmPeople are laboring under this false idea that starship will replace falcon 9 in a couple years - which totally ignores spaceX saying on multiple occasions that this is not true.Falcon 9 will fly for as long as customers want it... Almost correct. It is in fact not up to the customers.SpaceX fully intends to switch over to Starship, as soon as committed obligations allow it. Outyear look: Falcon 9 will fly until roughly 2030, because NASA has committed SpaceX to flying Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon until 2030. But with Starship operational by then, even for crewed launches, the retirement of ISS drops the sole remaining prime customer for F9 by then. Only FH will soldier on a few more years, after ISS retirement, because of running DoD and NASA commitments. But by 2035 FH will absolutely be gone as well. Rationale behind this: The coming situation where FH is the only heavy lifter, available to NASA and DoD, will be short-lived, due to the arrival of Starship, the Heavy variant of Vulcan and New Glenn. A little further out there will be the heavy variant of Neutron as well. Lots of options becoming available to NASA and DoD in the next 5 years.FH flies to 2035 without F9? Yikes...I sure hope they can replace FH with Starship much earlier than this. Flying FH without F9, at a much lower flight rate is not only a waste of SpaceX's resources, it'll also have significant negative impact on its reliability.
The government likes redundant suppliers. Could one company offering two different launchers fill that requirement since FH and Starship won't have much in common?
Quote from: Nomadd on 07/03/2022 04:50 am The government likes redundant suppliers. Could one company offering two different launchers fill that requirement since FH and Starship won't have much in common?If FH is only operating to satisfy the government, then SpaceX should spin it off into a separate company. This makes the accounting easier and avoids awkward negotiations when the government tries to exert pressure on the Starship vendor to force them to sustain the FH.
If the U.S. Government prefers to use the Falcon Heavy longer than SpaceX was planning, I'm sure SpaceX would be open to a solution both can live with.
If the government is the sole F9/FH customer, the launch rate will be very low and SpaceX will need to charge a lot of money to make a reasonable profit. This is likely to be several times as much as a Starship launch. If SpaceX does not spin the F9/FH business out, the government (and specifically NSSL) can pressure SpaceX to change the pricing to lower the price for F9/FH in return for raising the price for Starship, in the name of "redundancy". This would artificially extend the life of F9/FH. Also by spinning off F9/FH, The separate companies can fulfill both halves of the NSSL "two companies" goal.
Vulcan
In addition to launching Starlinks, I suspect another reason to get Starship going is because FH is a labor intensive platform that they'd rather not have to maintain any long than they have to.
None of the US providers (exclusive of Taurus) in the last 40 years. ADTA doesn’t count nor does PSLV or Naro
Quote from: DanClemmensen on 07/03/2022 05:18 amQuote from: Nomadd on 07/03/2022 04:50 am The government likes redundant suppliers. Could one company offering two different launchers fill that requirement since FH and Starship won't have much in common?If FH is only operating to satisfy the government, then SpaceX should spin it off into a separate company. This makes the accounting easier and avoids awkward negotiations when the government tries to exert pressure on the Starship vendor to force them to sustain the FH.No, it doesn't make the accounting easier, and I don't know why you think negotiations with SpaceX would be "awkward".SpaceX is a private company, and they can decide if they want to pursue a market or not. If SpaceX did not want to provide launch services, and the U.S. Government needed them to, then political options would be available.But this whole line of questioning requires the belief that SpaceX would want to ignore the U.S. Government marketspace, and from what we have seen they want to actually increase the services they provide to the U.S. Government.If the U.S. Government prefers to use the Falcon Heavy longer than SpaceX was planning, I'm sure SpaceX would be open to a solution both can live with.
QuoteVulcanDude, where's your engines?
Quote from: alugobi on 07/03/2022 10:21 pmQuoteVulcanDude, where's your engines?That is getting really stale. Yes, the BE-4 is very late, but they are clearly finally on their way. As evidenced by the images released by Tory on some bird site recently.