By reviewing the list of manufactured boosters and their statuses, re-usability of the first stage does not seem to play that big part in the economics of the project. [
Wikipedia] It was bitterly noted during the STS programme that it is very difficult to put the costs associated with recovery and refurbishment below of what is lost into the ocean (or Siberia) when using expendable launch vehicles.
I doubt there are much of data available in dollars about costs and how they distribute. Of course they can quote low launch prices per kg of payload, depending on the economics and the funding of the project, but if any crucial part of that would be due to reusable design of the rockets, I'd have my eyebrows high for a long time. Obviously, reusable design has potentially large benefits in R&D,
as they of course promote themselves.
CAPFlyer wrote:Also, when I was working in Ohio, I had several occasions where our airplanes, capable of flying 30,000+ lbs of cargo, flew less than 2000 for one reason - we could get it there the fastest.
Yes, of course. I am aware of a cargo flight taking a few boxes, that can be carried by hand, of especially important goods from I believe Liège, Belgium, all the way to a location in Africa -
in an MD-11. Of course, these contracts are potential gold mines to the cargo airline, and equivalent to me to launching a 3-tonne payload in a booster capable of doing 30 tonnes. The cases of special circumstances or customers don't follow the sense of economics that well. An attempt of making daily business from such would certainly be eaten for lunch by market forces eventually, because there will always be someone who says that, hey, I can do that minus 20 %. Space launches are hardly a mass product as of today, and have more or less followed the pricing models of one-off services. Any business case getting more 'everyday' necessarily begins to shed its overhead, and pretty often that starts from cool but unnecessary stuff. If SpaceX was able to pull off a business model in which I, as a customer wanting to get my thing up into the orbit and caring the least of whether the boosters sink to the bottom or are recovered, would benefit in dollars
if the launch stage was recovered successfully, then I would be seriously interested.
Edit:
This Adeline concept, btw, specifically targets what is my beef with SpaceX's design. "[...] and for a geostationary flight it would only require around 2,000 kg of fuel to return safely to the ground against an estimated 35,000 kg that Airbus has estimated are needed to return a SpaceX booster to the launch site. Fuel is only a minor cost in the value of the overall launch however to achieve a 21-40% reduction in cost of the launch the Falcon 9 payload is reduced from 8,300kg to 5,500kg pushing cost per kilogram back up by a third and negating much of the savings, the true cost advantage would be when carrying customer payloads significantly below the rockets lift potential where the otherwise unused lift capacity could be used for extra fuel to recycle the rocket." [
Wikipedia]
-Esa