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by Tuna-Fish
2893 days ago
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This is not just about having makework jobs. In order for the engines to be both cheap an reliable, there needs to be continuous line production. An engine put together by workers who build rocket engines for their living is better than one built by people who make rocket engines 1 month of a year, and for the line to work properly there are limits on how slowly things can be built. This means that if your engine demand goes too low, the quality suffers or price skyrockets. The financial basis of SpaceX reusability is conditioned on having access to a lot of launches, and increasing the market even further by making launches cheaper. If SpaceX ended up only doing 12 launches a year each year from now on, they would lose money from reusability instead of saving it, because they would have pay ~as much to maintain the Merlin line as they do today, and that is probably most of the cost of making rockets. In order for them to make bank, they need to be able to maintain the line, and grow launches to consume all of it. (Hence, StarLink.) Alternatively, they can produce all the first stages they ever intend to make, a good enough stockpile of Merlins for the second stages, and then shut down the line and get paid for launches without the expense of making rockets. This is what I suspect they'll do, except that at that point they will not shut down the line but will change it to make Raptors instead. Both for Raptor engined upper stages on Falcon 9:s, and eventually BFR. In any case, Arianespace probably doesn't believe they can raise the launch count enough for reusability to be useful. |
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This is all aside from the reliability/engine out gains.