The Boeing Starliner

This week we talk about the Falcon 9, the Saturn V, and NASA’s bureaucracy.
We also discuss Boeing’s mishaps, the Scout system, and the Zenit 2.
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Transcript
In 1961, the cost to launch a kilogram of something into low Earth orbit-and a kilogram is about 2.2 pounds, and this figure is adjusted for inflation-was about $118,500, using the Scout, or Solid Controlled Orbital Utility Test system of rockets, which were developed by the US government in collaboration with LTV Aerospace.
This price tag dropped substantially just a handful of years later in 1967 with the launch of the Saturn V, which was a staggeringly large launch vehicle, for the time but also to this day, with a carrying capacity of more than 300,000 pounds, which is more than 136,000 kg, and a height of 363 feet, which is around 111 meters and is about as tall as a 36-story building and 60 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.
Because of that size, the Saturn V was able to get stuff, and people, into orbit and beyond-this was the vehicle that got humans to the Moon-at a dramatically reduced cost, compared to other options at the time, typically weighing in at something like $5,400 per kg; and again, that’s compared to $118,500 per kg just 6 years earlier, with the Scout platform.
So one of the key approaches to reducing the cost of lifting stuff out of Earth’s gravity well so it could be shuffled around in space, in some rare cases beyond Earth orbit, but usually to somewhere within that orbit, as is the case with satellites and space stations, has been to just lift more stuff all at once. And in this context, using the currently available and time-tested methods for chucking things into space, at least, that means using larger rockets, or big rocket arrays composed of many smaller rockets, which then boost a huge vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well, usually by utilizing several stages which can burn up some volume of fuel before breaking off the spacecraft, which reduces the amount of weight it’s carrying and allows secondary and in some cases tertiary boosters to then kick in and burn their own fuel.
The Soviet Union briefly managed to usurp the Saturn V’s record for being the cheapest rocket platform in the mid-1980s with its Zenit 2 medium-sized rocket, but the Zenit 2 was notoriously fault-ridden and it suffered a large number of errors and explosions, which made it less than ideal for most use-cases.
The Long March 3B, built by the Chinese in the mid-1990s got close to the Saturn V’s cost-efficiency record, managing about $6,200 per kg, but it wasn’t until 2010 that a true usurper to that cost-efficiency crown arrived on the scene in the shape of the Falcon 9, built by US-based private space company SpaceX.
The Falcon 9 was also notable, in part, because it was partially reusable from the beginning: it had a somewhat rocky start, and if the US government hadn’t been there to keep giving SpaceX contracts as it worked through its early glitches, the Falcon 9 may not have survived to become the industry-changing product that it eventually became, but once it got its legs under it and stopped blowing up all the time, the Falcon 9 showed itself capable of carrying payloads of around 15,000 pounds, which is just over 7000 kgs into orbit using a two-stage setup, and remarkably, and this also took a little while to master, but SpaceX did eventually make it common enough to be an everyday thing, the Falcon 9’s booster, which decouples from the rocket after the first stage of the launch, can land, vertically, intact and ready for refurbishment.
That means these components, which are incredibly expensive, could be reused rather than discarded, as had been the case with every other rocket throughout history. And again, while it took SpaceX some time to figure out how to make that work, they’ve reached a point, today, where at least one booster has been used 22 times, which represents an astonishing savings for the company, which it’s then able to pass on to its customers, which in turn allows it to outcompete pretty much everyone else operating in the private space industry, as of the second-half of 2024.
The cost to lift stuff into orbit using a Falcon 9 is consequently something like $2,700 per kg, about half of what the Saturn V could claim for the same.
SpaceX is not the only company using reusable spacecraft, though.
Probably the most well-known reusable spacecraft was NASA’s Space Shuttle, which was built by Rockwell International and flown from the early 1980s until 2011, when the last shuttle was retired.
These craft were just orbiters, not really capable of sending anyone or anything beyond low Earth orbit, and many space industry experts and researchers consider them to be a failure, the consequence of bureaucratic expediency and NASA budget cuts, rather than solid engineering or made-for-purpose utility-but they did come to symbolize the...