polyill wrote:Well, somehow I doubt the 1964 data for a Government-Mil project is still valid in 2013 for a commercial company employing an IT-like standards in management, development and testing, led mostly by a single person's will, which person is not much less than an Engineering/Management prodigy with a proven success record (as opposed to the gov-mil bureaucracy of the X-15 project, IMBW here, apologies if I am).
You're probably off base here. Government aerospace in the '60s was like commercial is today, but better funded. As for the "gov-mil bureaucracy" not having a proven success record... you're joking, right? WWII, Manhattan project, breaking the sound barrier, guided missiles, nuclear submarines, ICBMs, artificial satellites... the B-52 itself had seen just four years of service when it was first used to carry an X-15 to operational altitude...
On the other hand, the X-15 program was a research program. Fast, cheap turnaround for commercially viable operation was pretty low on their list of priorities...
The DC-X program was also research, but in this case the objective was specifically fast, cheap turnaround. The vehicle wasn't orbital or even particularly high-speed, but it was still a VTOL rocket of significant size and delta-V, and despite the deep-cryo fuel it once managed a 26-hour turnaround.
Reaction Engines Ltd. estimates a two-day turnaround for Skylon, dominated by heat shield inspection. This is admittedly not historical data...
At least I'd like to think things have changed. You can argue that a rocket is a rocket, but, to my understanding, the technology itself has made some progress since 1964 in manufacturing as well as in design and modeling and in sensors and data acquisition (computers, etc.), has it not?
Definitely. For example, the SSME underwent continuous development over its lifetime. The early models ran a noticeable risk of catastrophic turbopump failure and had to be disassembled, inspected, and refurbished piecemeal after every flight. Later models were easier to maintain and didn't need disassembly every time; the Block II was much more robust, with a final version apparently estimated to be four times safer than the original engine. The Block III (never completed and flown, probably due to the fallout from STS-107, but a lot of the work is applicable to the RS-25E) would have been several times safer and much easier to manufacture than the Block II, and the improved robustness combined with advanced health monitoring (which the Block II eventually got) would have allowed it to stay in the orbiter for perhaps ten flights without significant maintenance.
The RS-83 (hydrolox GG, 750 klbf, 446 s, cancelled 2005) was supposed to last 100 flights, with probably a much better chance of actually achieving its original goal due to lessons learned from the SSME (combustion chamber failure modes, for example).
In any case, SpaceX is not using SSMEs or even hydrolox. Merlins should be much less highly stressed than RS-25s, though coking could be an issue over the long term (IIRC they've gotten one engine past 20 full-duration test firings), and while they don't have the flight experience yet, they use ten of the things on each flight and recover nine of them, so it should build up pretty fast...