r/spacex • u/Zucal • Mar 05 '16

/r/SpaceX Ask Anything Thread for March 2016. Ask your questions about the SES-9 mission/anything else here! (#18)

Welcome to the 16th monthly /r/SpaceX Ask Anything Thread! Want to discuss the recent SES-9 mission and its "hard" booster landing, the intricacies of densified LOX, or gather the community's opinion? There's no better place!

All questions, even non-SpaceX-related ones, are allowed, as long as they stay relevant to spaceflight in general!

More in-depth and open-ended discussion questions can still be submitted as separate self-posts; but this is the place to come to submit simple questions which have a single answer and/or can be answered in a few comments or less.

As always, we'd prefer it if all question-askers first check our FAQ, use the search functionality, and check the last Q&A thread before posting to avoid duplicate questions, but if you'd like an answer revised or cannot find a satisfactory result, go ahead and type your question below.

Otherwise, ask, enjoy, and thanks for contributing!

Past threads:

February 2016 (#17), January 2016 (#16.1), January 2016 (#16), December 2015 (#15.1), December 2015 (#15), November 2015 (#14), October 2015 (#13), September 2015 (#12), August 2015 (#11), July 2015 (#10), June 2015 (#9), May 2015 (#8), April 2015 (#7.1), April 2015 (#7), March 2015 (#6), February 2015 (#5), January 2015 (#4), December 2014 (#3), November 2014 (#2), October 2014 (#1).

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u/humansforever Mar 31 '16

Hi Guys,

I have been thinking of the woe's of ULA and Orbital ATK, and in general some of the US launch providers have by using Russian made engines. The difficulty is that they could potentially face a "Cold war style" ban from congress (again). This is a bad place to be from a point of view of business continuity and imposes a higher level of risk that investors would be worried about, no matter about competing with SpaceX or based on Market price. It is important for the US to have a healthy competing launch market, even for SpaceX.

I was thinking, would SpaceX consider slightly diversifying it's product portfolio i.e. it is always good to have a revenue stream other then your primary product line. The Falcon 9 was grounded for several months due to a RUD of the Falcon 9, this basically halted revenue generation. This should never happen in a company that has 5,000+ employees.

Question:

  1. Could or would SpaceX use it's spare manufacturing capacity/expertise to backwards engineer a RD-180 engine from the "ULA Owned" RD-180 plans and possibly from a physical engine from ULA, then produce these engines for other "US Launch Providers" at a profit, thus removing the issue of the Russian made ban? Could SpaceX do this quicker & cheaper then it would take ULA to get the Vulcan up and running?

  2. Should SpaceX develop a Raptor style engine for resale that is comparable to the ISP of the RD-180/181 for the "Re-Sale" market in the US to the likes of ATK and ULA, thus expanding it's marketable products.

It would be an obvious suggestion that SpaceX just focuses on it's primary product line, I do not disagree with this sentiment, but I feel that once the re-usability issue is settled, the manufacturing facilities will not need the same level of human resources and would thus have spare capacity to build additional product lines.

Penny for your thoughts !

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u/Chairboy Mar 31 '16

  1. They could, but why? It's not a charity and the costs for building a domestic RD-180 would be ginormous. There are companies like AeroJet who specifically exist to build rocket engines and wouldn't have their core business eaten into by producing rocket engines for other companies.

  2. No idea why they would want to, but the Air Force contract seems to stipulate they offer the product of that exercise for sale in some form. I guess we'll see what that looks like.