SpaceX reaches milestone in rocket launch from Cape Canaveral

[Valin]

LA Times

Hawthorne rocket maker SpaceX lifts a satellite into orbit nearly 50,000 miles above the Earth, the first time the company has reached such a distance.

W.J. Hennigan

December 3, 2013, 6:01 p.m.

 

With a thunderous roar, a 224-foot rocket carrying a massive satellite launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and blasted into outer space, hurtling over the Atlantic Ocean as it cut across the night sky.

 

On Tuesday, Hawthorne rocket maker SpaceX lifted the SES-8 telecommunications satellite into orbit nearly 50,000 miles above the Earth. It was the first time that the company reached such a distance, which is about one-quarter of the way to the moon.

 

Before the launch attempt, SpaceX said it would be the most challenging mission to date and technical issues cropped up early.

 

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[Valin]

The Dinosaurs of the Launch Industry

They were just hit by an asteroid, whether they realize it or not.

Rand Simberg

12/8/13

 

Tuesdays communications-satellite launch from Cape Canaveral didnt get much attention from the mainstream media, but it will be viewed as an historic event. Delivered by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), it represented several firsts. It was the first launch of their new version of the Falcon from that location, it was the first successful restart of its upper-stage engine (it failed to do so in the previous, first flight, though it wasnt mission critical), it was the first commercial payload for the vehicle, it was the first delivery of a satellite to geostationary orbit by the company, and it was the first commercial geostationary delivery of a foreign satellite by any U.S. launcher in many years.

 

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The high prices of the American heavy Delta IV and Atlas V launchers, developed in the 1990s for the Air Force, combined with restrictions related to the International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR) had kept the American vehicles out of the foreign launch market for years, so SpaceXs success in wooing SES is a watershed event that could restore America as the leader in this industry. And ULA doesnt have any good prospects for reducing their prices much, particularly if their flight rate declines as the Air Force starts to award some of its launches to SpaceX as it proves its reliability over the next several flights. Moreover, the Atlas is dependent on the Russians for its RD-180 engines (which theyve been threatening to cut off), and building them domestically would increase their costs even more. As Martin Halliwell, SESs chief technology officer, said, SpaceXs success would shake the industry to its roots.

 

Moreover, things are only likely to get worse for SpaceXs competitors. If they start to reuse their hardware, as planned, their costs will come down even further, allowing them to drop prices even more. If the companys Falcon Heavy flies in the next year or two, it will put further pressure on the competition, with costs potentially going below a thousand dollars per pound of payload, long considered a holy grail for the industry. A reusable heavy could drop costs by an order of magnitude below that, to a range that many have long predicted would create whole new launch markets from price-demand elasticity, including tickets to orbit for mere tens of thousands of dollars.

 

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