After one year, reusable rockets becoming routine for SpaceX

As if writing on a dirty car window, Iridium Communications CEO Matt Desch recently scribbled his name and “Iridium rocks!!” on the side of a soot-covered rocket stage.

The grimy state of the SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, weeks before today's launch of 10 Iridium NEXT satellites from California, was not alarming but a symbol of progress in the launch industry.

The rocket had delivered another Iridium mission to orbit last October, then landed on a ship in the Pacific Ocean. It remained coated with exhaust from engine firings that had slowed its tail-first plunge from space.

“Who cares whether it’s perfectly clean?” said Desch. “The long-term vision should be that these rockets are able to be landed and reused within days, so why waste the time to get paper towels and clean it?”

SpaceX on Monday continues its pursuit of that vision with a planned 4:30 p.m. blastoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station by a previously flown — or “flight proven,” as the company calls it — Falcon 9 lifting a Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station for NASA.

[Weather looks good for SpaceX Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral to ISS]

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The mission, following today's successful launch for Iridium, would mark the 11th time SpaceX has re-launched a rocket since its history-making first re-flight of an orbital booster a year ago.

“I don’t want to get complacent, but I think we understand reusable boosters,” CEO Elon Musk said Feb. 6, after two recycled boosters assisted the successful debut of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.

What seemed very risky a year ago has quickly won buy-in from customers.

Six of SpaceX’s last nine launches have used pre-flown boosters, not including the Falcon Heavy test flight.

“It’s becoming de rigueur now,” said Martin Halliwell, chief technology officer of Luxembourg-based SES, the first company to take a chance launching on a pre-flown Falcon. “It’s becoming commonplace, which is quite extraordinary in the time of a year.”

What has come less quickly is long-promised savings on launches. But it’s still early days in an experiment to make rocket flight more like air travel, opening doors to new endeavors in space and ultimately enabling Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars.

“The big surprise to me is how seamlessly customers have accepted this concept of a reused rocket,” said Chris Quilty, president of Quilty Analytics in St. Petersburg. “What hasn’t happened, maybe to the disappointment of a lot of SpaceX fans, is that they haven’t driven down pricing dramatically.”

Blasting stuff into space is expensive. The traditional "use-it-and-lose-it" approach — firing a payload into space on a multi-million-dollar rocket, only to see it fall back to Earth — plays a major role in driving costs.

A long-repeated assertion by Musk and others is that if rockets can be used over and over, spaceflight could become much cheaper and create demand for many more launches.

So far, discounts for SpaceX’s used rockets have been small, not the 30 percent or more once forecast. At $62 million for a new rocket, SpaceX already offers the lowest price in its class.

SpaceX has said it must first recoup its billion-dollar investment in reusable systems before further cutting the cost of flight. It also needs money to develop a new system Musk envisions as humanity’s ride to Mars, the “Big Falcon Rocket,” or BFR.

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As soon as April, an improved Falcon 9 that could launch 10 times or more is expected to bring greater cost efficiencies. The current model is retired after two flights.

For now, customers say reusing rockets gives them more certainty about when they can get to space and start generating revenue from their satellites, without having to wait for a new rocket to roll off a production line and complete tests.

Lower-cost launches are key to ambitions for mega-constellations of small satellites to observe Earth or beam global internet access, but no guarantee of their success.

“You still need to make business cases work and find ways of making money,” said Desch. “People who are waiting for three rockets to launch every day of the year, I’m not sure we’re quite there yet.”

Space industry consultant Jim Muncy, founder of PoliSpace, is bullish, predicting it won't be long before Cape Canaveral hosts 50 to 100 launches a year, thanks to SpaceX’s reusable rockets and another being designed by Blue Origin, the firm backed by Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos.

“They didn’t do this as a science experiment,” said Muncy. “They did it because it’s the right answer economically and financially for the industry, for their customers, for themselves as venture.”

After SpaceX, Blue Origin is the most committed to resuability. Its suborbital New Shepard has launched and landed five times, and could begin flying people later this year. The much larger New Glenn will be built at Kennedy Space Center, targeting a first launch in 2020.

But others in the industry appear to be taking their time pursuing reusability, perhaps not convinced it is as fundamental to the future as Musk believes. United Launch Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture, has eventual plans to recover the main engines from its Vulcan rocket, now under development, by dropping them to a mid-air capture by an aircraft.

From the beginning, SpaceX’s focus was not on satellites but a grander vision — reaching the Red Planet.

“Elon Musk is working from a different playbook than everybody else,” said Quilty. “The fact that he was working outside the box that everybody else was living in is what has enabled SpaceX to basically change the rules of the game.”

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 or jdean@floridatoday.com. And follow on Twitter at @flatoday_jdean and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/SpaceTeamGo.

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Get ready for the live 321 LAUNCH experience on Monday when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket heads to the International Space Station. Targeted liftoff: 4:30 p.m.

Launch Monday

Rocket: SpaceX Falcon 9 (previously flown on CRS-12)

Mission: CRS-14, SpaceX's 14th International Space Station supply mission for NASA

Launch Time: 4:30 p.m.

Launch Window: Instantaneous

Launch Complex: 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

Weather: 80 percent "go"

Join floridatoday.com at 3:30 p.m. for countdown chat and updates, including streaming of NASA TV launch coverage starting at 4 p.m.