SpaceX in Texas

At it's core, the SpaceX facility is aimed at developing the Kestrel, Merlin
and the stage functional verification.
They have had about a 100 people working
about 7 years to pump out 2 engines
and 4 stages.

That's about 2-3 hundred million....
That's the test work force too.
The design and fab force are just as big.

Posted by anon at 12/03/09 11:15:30

Seven years ago they had zero employees, zero facilities, and zero legacy hardware. It took seven years to build up to where they are now with two rockets competitive with systems around the world that took decades and billions of dollars to develop.

SpaceX is now in the process of pumping out hundreds of Merlin engines.

What SpaceX has accomplished is truly remarkable. The Augustine panel would never have recommended the commercial crew option if there had been only EELVs and no SpaceX.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 12/03/09 12:30:41

All i'm pointing out is the relative staff effort to do medium sized engines.

Posted by anon at 12/03/09 18:46:52

Just wait till engine production hits it's stride of more rocket engines produced a year then the rest of the World Combined and individual and ship set testing comes up to speed.

Posted by Michael Antoniewicz II at 12/03/09 20:28:00

Some people think you can do an engine with 10 people, if it's a decent sized engine it's going to take headcount and that means money

Posted by anon at 12/04/09 00:04:17

I've mentioned this in earlier postings, but I think it is appropriate here as well:

SpaceX has effectively lowered the marginal costs for getting into space, especially on a cost of payload pounds to orbit per dollar. The strides that SpaceX is making to reduce costs on actual vehicles (not just random junk "designed" on paper in theory and never built) is amazing.

Can SpaceX be able to capture emerging markets that will open up due to reduced costs of going into space? More significantly, are there customers that would be willing to buy SpaceX rockets at the new lower prices they are offering (compared to their major competitors like Boeing, Lock-Mart, Russia, China, and the ESA) that would not have purchased orbital launch services before hand?

If SpaceX is expanding the pie, so to say, of the overall launcher market and is bringing new blood and ideas into spaceflight, they may be onto something genuinely new and will be a major player in the future. If all that ends up happening is that SpaceX has slashed the profit out of the commercial launcher industry and to get substantially more customers they need to get another order or two cheaper, it may be an exercise in futility.

I'm hoping that more customers are going to be found and that the "new space" community will be proven correct that even slightly reduced costs into space will make everybody much more wealthy. The traditional launcher companies are betting that SpaceX will eventually see the error of their ways and start charging more for each of the only occasional launches that have been typical of this past decade.

Posted by Robert Horning at 12/04/09 11:37:57

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