The evolution of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket

SpaceX has tinkered with its Falcon 9 rocket for a decade. Now, it says it's done with Block 5 (i.e. 9 Merlin engine boosters) which was used successfully on May 12, 2018 to launch a satellite for the Govt of Bangladesh.

Block 5 rocket launch marks the end of the beginning for SpaceX

Eric Berger - 5/3/2018

Less than eight years after its maiden launch, the Falcon 9 booster has become the most dominant rocket in the world. Modern and efficient, no rocket launched more than the 70m Falcon 9 booster launched last year. Barring catastrophe, no rocket seems likely to launch more this year.

In part, SpaceX has achieved this level of efficiency by bringing a Silicon Valley mindset to the aerospace industry. The company seeks to disrupt, take chances, and, like so many relentless start-up companies, drive employees to work long hours to meet demanding engineering goals.

While founder Elon Musk’s ambitions to settle Mars get most of the public’s attention, the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which almost never leaves Earth orbit, is the reason SpaceX has soared to date. And on this vehicle, Musk’s company has imprinted its ethos of disruption and innovation by seeking every opportunity to improve the rocket.

Although this has caused headaches for customers like NASA and some suppliers, constant tinkering has allowed SpaceX to maximize performance of this rocket. By regularly upgrading the Merlin engines, shedding weight with lighter materials, and using super-chilled rocket fuel to maximize density, the Falcon 9 rocket now is about twice as powerful as it was during its initial flight. Rarely during its more than 50 launches since June 2010 has a Falcon 9 rocket not had a handful or more changes from the previous edition.

All the while, SpaceX has had a singular goal for the Falcon 9 rocket: to build the most perfect and efficient orbital rocket it could. Now, finally, the company seems close to taking a final step toward that goal by closing the loop on first-stage reusability. As soon as next Monday, but more likely a bit later this month, SpaceX intends to launch the “Block 5” variant of the Falcon 9 rocket for the first time. Musk has said this fifth revision of the Falcon 9 should mark the final major change for the booster.

The company has a lot riding on the revamped booster. SpaceX intends to fly each Block 5 first stage it builds a minimum of 10 times and—depending on your willingness to accept Musk’s enthusiastic outlook—perhaps many more. Ten flights would be hugely significant, as SpaceX has thus far only ever reused each of its Falcon 9 rockets a single time. Additionally, the company hopes to reduce the turnaround time between launches of a Falcon 9 booster, now several months, to a matter of weeks.

Achieving such a nirvana of low-cost, rapid access to space would represent a tremendous feat for SpaceX. For a company that aspires to one day land humans on Mars, this is the essential first step. Moreover, by freezing the design of the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX can free up its engineering talent to focus on the “Big Falcon Rocket” and its upper stage spaceship. And by flying each Block 5 booster multiple times, it can release its skilled workers to assemble that much, much larger booster.

The upcoming launch of the Block 5 rocket, therefore, marks the end of the beginning for SpaceX.

Close calls

To find a Falcon 9 launch of comparable magnitude to the forthcoming Block 5 launch, one probably has to go back to December 2015. The stakes were incredibly high then, too. Six months before, in June, SpaceX had suffered the first failure of the Falcon 9 booster, a catastrophic break-up of the second stage at about 150 seconds into the flight. The Dragon spacecraft ascending into space, laden with NASA cargo valued at more than $100 million, was lost.

SpaceX spent nearly half a year assessing and fixing the problem before returning to the launch pad. For that December flight, SpaceX doubled-down on its philosophy of taking risks. The Falcon 9 booster standing at the pad three days before Christmas was the first one using a much more powerful variant of the rocket, known as the Falcon 9 Full Thrust, or Block 3.

This ambitious booster had about 30 percent more capability than its predecessor, with more powerful engines and slightly larger tanks that accommodated super-cooled liquid oxygen and highly refined kerosene. Other modifications included upgraded grid fins to steer the rocket on its return through Earth’s atmosphere and landing legs.

But with this return to flight mission, it was not enough to debut an entirely revamped rocket. For the first time, SpaceX would also attempt to return a booster to Earth for a vertical landing along the Florida coast. Always be innovating, pushing.

Later that night, after the successful flight and landing, Musk held a teleconference with reporters. Ars asked Musk how confident he had been in success of the mission, both launching the new booster and sticking the landing.

"I wasn't at all confident that we would succeed, but I'm really glad of it," he replied. "It's been 13 years since SpaceX was started. We've had a lot of close calls. I think people here are overjoyed."

Musk has since told confidants that it was this Block 3 version of the Falcon 9 rocket that put SpaceX on top of the commercial satellite launch competition, elbowing out Russia, China, and Europe’s state-run rocket companies for a lot of this business. The more powerful Block 3 rocket also allowed SpaceX to begin launching heavier payloads for the US military. With Block 3, Musk felt as though he had the best rocket in the world.

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And now, the Block 5

Musk wasn't wrong. It is true that SpaceX suffered another serious setback in September 2016 with the loss of a Falcon 9 during a launch pad test. Within the industry, there were murmurs that SpaceX was all hype, that it played too fast and loose to ever build a safe and reliable rocket. What good were low prices, competitors said, if the rocket had a non-trivial chance of blowing up, and customers had to wait years to get into space?

But then, the Block 3 rocket and its successor, the Block 4, began to shine. In 2017, SpaceX finally unleashed the “steamroller”—an industry buzzword for the company's ability to fly the low-cost Falcon 9 rocket more frequently. SpaceX flew 18 missions last year with the Block 3 and Block 4 versions of its rocket, and the company has completed seven flights of the Falcon 9 rocket through April of this year.

Now comes the Block 5. This new version includes myriad changes and upgrades that SpaceX anticipates will optimize the Falcon 9 for reusability. (Although the company has not released any official information, the reddit community has created a list based upon various statements made by Musk and the company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell).

The changes reflect what SpaceX has learned after that fateful December 2015 landing. The company has since recovered more than 20 rockets by land and sea, meticulously studying the wear and tear on the first stage booster structure, engines, and fuel tanks. The Block 5 version will therefore include modifications such as improved thermal shielding around the Merlin engines, unpainted components to save mass, and changes to the octaweb structure that holds the engines so they can be inspected, refurbished, and tested more quickly.

Shotwell and other company officials have said their initial goal with the Block 5 rocket is to fly each booster 10 times before significant refurbishment and to bring down the time between a rocket launch from months to weeks. In the aerospace industry, such rapid reusability of a rocket’s first stage is unheard of. But it is not a stretch to say that SpaceX may well pull this off.

“My experience with SpaceX has been that it has achieved its engineering goals,” said Carissa Christensen, an expert in commercial space analysis and founder and chief executive of Bryce Space and Technology. “They have set audacious, ambitious, and exciting goals before. And if SpaceX is saying that is the engineering goal, just based on past experience, it would be foolhardy to say they won’t get there.”

But given that SpaceX has already grabbed a significant chunk of the commercial launch industry with a booster that flies at most twice, what extra impact would an ultra-reusable rocket have?

How much it will cost

The answer depends on several questions. How much will SpaceX charge for launching on the Block 5 rocket over time? How much will it cost SpaceX to refurbish the Block 5 rocket? And if SpaceX reduces the price of launch, will demand over time increase?

In regard to price, SpaceX does not intend to discount the price of a Falcon 9 launch on the Block 5 rocket right away. “There’s no change,” company spokesman James Gleeson told Ars. There is speculation that eventually SpaceX may drop the price by 20 to 40 percent for Block 5 launches, from $62 million for a standard Falcon 9 launch down to around $40 million.

But for now, there is no immediate incentive for SpaceX to drop the price of a Falcon 9 launch. The company already has the lowest-cost orbital rocket in its class flying today. In dropping the price, Musk would be undercutting himself.

Down the line, one potential incentive for SpaceX to cut prices for the Falcon 9 rocket would be to increase the overall pool of customers. If it costs less to get into space, does that lower the barrier to more applications?

Dramatically cheaper launch costs may help close the business case for other ventures in space beyond traditional science, television, and observational satellites. Several companies, including SpaceX, are developing constellations of hundreds to thousands of satellites that could deliver Internet access from low-Earth orbit. Cheap launches might also help close the business case for space-based solar power, but that technology remains a ways off.

David Alexander, the director of the Rice Space Institute, noted that Japan has announced a nearly $1 billion space technology innovation fund and that countries such as China, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Europe are pushing for more data from remote sensing observations in low-Earth orbit.

“I think the biggest benefit is the broader access it would provide to a wide range of space entrepreneurs,” Alexander said of the potential for the Block 5 rocket to lower the cost of launch. “Cheaper access to space will only accelerate this.”

However, this seems unlikely to push demand for launches right away. Several experts Ars spoke to noted that the market for the launch of large satellites to low-Earth and geostationary orbit has remained fairly static. Because these satellites cost so much, saving $10 million or $20 million on launch costs probably won’t significantly increase the number of them being launched.

“I don’t think halving the launch cost makes a huge difference,” Christensen said. “Demand might be somewhat stimulated by lower prices, but space is expensive, and launch is a small part of it.”

Profit-taking, maybe

Several sources suggested SpaceX may reduce the price of the Falcon 9 rocket to further pressure its beleaguered competitors, including US-based United Launch Alliance as well as international providers in China, Russia, Europe, and elsewhere. However, none of these competitors is likely to go away, at least not soon. In the United States, United Launch Alliance remains a trusted partner of government agencies, and none of the other global space powers is likely to abandon its launch industries soon.

Despite these potential incentives, SpaceX will probably keep the Falcon 9 at more or less the same price point for a while and seek to profit from a decade of investing in innovations such as reusability. This makes sense, because it is not clear whether SpaceX is profitable at the current price point of a Falcon 9 rocket used once or twice.

The company now has in excess of 6,000 employees, and just meeting that payroll and keeping large facilities in California, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere operating probably costs on the order of $1 to $1.25 billion, experts told Ars. At a rate of $62 million per launch, it would take 20 launches a year just to cover these expenses. And this assumes that vehicle production costs are zero, which of course is not true.

This over-simplistic calculation suggests that the privately held SpaceX has been able to sustain its low launch prices to date thanks to development contracts from NASA for commercial cargo and crew services. It stands to reason therefore that, for a time at least, the company may just pocket any reuse “dividend.” Certainly, as SpaceX ramps up production of the Big Falcon Rocket—for which it has already acquired land for a manufacturing plant—it will need fistfuls of money.

Musk's madness

Every orbital rocket since the dawn of the Space Age, except for components of the space shuttle, has been thrown away after a single flight. The space shuttle mastered the art of re-flying a spacecraft, with Discovery launching and landing a record 39 times. However, NASA was never able to substantially cut the turnaround time between the landing and launch of an orbiter, a period that typically lasted six to 12 months. (The record is 54 days, between the first and second flight of Atlantis in 1985). More importantly, shuttle refurbishments were costly. Over the entire lifetime of the program, the incremental, per-flight cost of a space shuttle mission came to about $1 billion.

SpaceX has an opportunity to change this paradigm—to truly achieve rapid, reusable, low-cost spaceflight. And it has done so quickly. Should the Block 5 succeed in under a decade, SpaceX will have gone from a company that had never flown a rocket into space to having developed the most efficient orbital booster ever flown.

Because of this success, and its growing share of the commercial launch market, the Falcon 9 rocket has sent virtually all of SpaceX’s competitors scrambling to develop new boosters to try to compete. The Falcon 9 has pushed many of them to look into reusability, too.

For SpaceX, however, having caught and largely surpassed its orbital competitors, it is now time to move on. Sure, it will maintain a skeleton crew to continue fabricating a few Block 5 rockets. But if you really can fly a rocket like this 10 times, how many do you need to build a year?

So the company plans to turn its sights toward the larger Big Falcon Rocket that may one day enable human settlement elsewhere in the Solar System. In reporting this article, one source expressed amazement at this apparent madness. Why would SpaceX want to obsolete its own, dominant products?

A bit of history helps answer this. In the early 2000s, Musk was told he could never privately finance an orbital rocket. Then, he was told it was madness to try to land them on a boat. And then, he heard how foolhardy it was to try to strap three rockets together and light 27 engines at the same time. Elon Musk does not care all that much to hear about his madness.

Perhaps it is mad for SpaceX to work feverishly to obsolete its Falcon 9 rocket, which it has spent a decade perfecting. But this was not a company founded to appease shareholders, plural. It was founded to appease a single shareholder. And he wants to go to Mars, damn it.