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SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit

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Re: SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit

#31

Post by InclinedPlane »

jessriedel wrote: post #21
ceejayoz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $1.11 billion per launch, though. SpaceX is promising $80-$125 million for half the payload.

I'm actually surprised things haven't gotten cheaper by more than a factor of 5 in half a century. (If anyone's wondering, $1.11 Billion is in 2011 dollars.) Does anyone know what the primary costs are? People, construction, raw materials, etc.?

Fixed costs are usually the biggies, especially R&D and the infrastructure for supporting production.

Probably the biggest impediment to lowering launch prices over that time period was the existence of the Shuttle. It was sold with promises of capabilities (especially in terms of flight rate) that it would never have, and that disrupted a lot of other launch vehicle development at the time. Worse yet, it kept billions per year of NASA funds locked up maintaining jobs for the standing army of Shuttle engineers instead of being spent on improving launch systems.

Re: SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit

#32

Post by bdonlan »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #4
portentint wrote: post #2

Can this eventually carry people into orbit, I wonder?

Both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy are planned to carry humans to orbit. In fact, the 2nd ever test of the Falcon 9 used the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX's in house developed capsule spacecraft capable of being manned, as a payload.

I'm pretty sure they lifted a non-functional mockup with similar weight characteristics, not the final functional Dragon model...

Re: SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit

#33

Post by ugh »

bdonlan wrote: post #32
InclinedPlane wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy are planned to carry humans to orbit. In fact, the 2nd ever test of the Falcon 9 used the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX's in house developed capsule spacecraft capable of being manned, as a payload.

I'm pretty sure they lifted a non-functional mockup with similar weight characteristics, not the final functional Dragon model...

No, they did lift a real and functional Dragon capsule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon#Maiden_flight

Re: SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit

#34

Post by edge17 »

ugh wrote: post #33
bdonlan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they lifted a non-functional mockup with similar weight characteristics, not the final functional Dragon model...

No, they did lift a real and functional Dragon capsule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon#Maiden_flight

yep, i saw it back in jan, burned from the reentry heat and all :)

Re: SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit

#35

Post by hugh3 »

There's only one thing I don't like about this, and that's the name. Falcon Heavy? Doesn't sound cool.

SpaceX has done an excellent job of coming up with cool-sounding names for everything they do, second only to US muscle car manufacturers of the 1960s. Falcon! Merlin! Draco! They even skipped straight from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 because the numbers in between just don't sound nearly as cool.

But "heavy"? Sure, it's descriptive, but it's boring. Falcon X would be much better. Or Super-Falcon. Or ThunderCougarFalconBird...

Re: SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit

#36

Post by InclinedPlane »

ugh wrote: post #33
bdonlan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they lifted a non-functional mockup with similar weight characteristics, not the final functional Dragon model...

No, they did lift a real and functional Dragon capsule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon#Maiden_flight

Yup!

If it had been a country doing it instead of SpaceX they probably would have already put a human into orbit in a Dragon capsule.

Re: SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit

#37

Post by hugh3 »

jessriedel wrote: post #21
ceejayoz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $1.11 billion per launch, though. SpaceX is promising $80-$125 million for half the payload.

I'm actually surprised things haven't gotten cheaper by more than a factor of 5 in half a century. (If anyone's wondering, $1.11 Billion is in 2011 dollars.) Does anyone know what the primary costs are? People, construction, raw materials, etc.?

One interesting thing I read Elon Musk saying the other day is that it's definitely not fuel -- the cost of fuelling a Falcon 9 is actually only about the same as the cost of fuelling a Boeing 747.

The problem is that the cost of building a Falcon 9 is still similar to the cost of building a 747, and you throw it away after one flight. So if you could recover and re-use the booster rocket then you'd be looking at a serious cost reduction.

Re: SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit

#38

Post by cstross »

benl wrote: post #14

The table here doesn't give cost comparisons for the other launch vehicles, but in the press conference Elon Musk said that the Delta IV Heavy costs roughly 3x the Falcon Heavy, meaning that the FH is approximately 6x cheaper in $/lb to low earth orbit. The figures quoted on the page work out to $1,070 per lb to LEO. That's less than $200k to lift the mass of a 180lb human.

Ahem: a Russian Orlan-M spacesuit, about the best available off the shelf today, weighs 112-120Kg (or up to 250 of your quaint imperial "pounds"). Then you need to include air, water, and food. The structural mass of the seat the astronaut sits in isn't insignificant, either. A Mercury capsule -- a can sized to hold one guy in a space suit -- weighs around 1100Kg at splash-down, minus retro-rockets, parachutes, escape tower, and most of the heat shield; the corresponding weight for a Soviet Vostok spacecraft was around 2400Kg, with the cosmonaut sitting in an ejector capsule weighing around 340Kg (they ejected before touchdown because it had no soft-landing system).

All told, I reckon 1000Kg of spacecraft deadweight plus 200-250Kg of supplies per astronaut is as low as you're going to get. So once you add your notional 85Kg astronaut, you're talking about 1500Kg at US $2300/Kg, or around US $4M per person for a ride into orbit. If you're really slick you might be able to shave that by 50%. 90%? I don't think so.

Done right, this will cut the cost of space tourism by nearly an order of magnitude and will open up the possibility of the private sector actually being able to send folks to do stuff in orbit -- like fix or upgrade comsats. But it's not a magic wand and it's not going to reduce the cost per person to orbit to the rough order of a year's salary for an engineer.

Re: SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit

#39

Post by sbierwagen »

hugh3 wrote: post #35

There's only one thing I don't like about this, and that's the name. Falcon Heavy? Doesn't sound cool. SpaceX has done an excellent job of coming up with cool-sounding names for everything they do, second only to US muscle car manufacturers of the 1960s. Falcon! Merlin! Draco! They even skipped straight from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 because the numbers in between just don't sound nearly as cool. But "heavy"? Sure, it's d…

"Rocket name"-heavy is standard aerospace nomenclature for uprated rockets, derived from such launch systems being described as "heavy lift" rockets. Since there is no such thing as a casual buyer of a 80 million dollar rocket, how cool the name is doesn't matter at all.

It also puzzles me why they're "announcing" this, since a heavy lift version of the Falcon 9 has been planned since day one.

Re: SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit

#40

Post by arctangent »

jasongullickson wrote: post #29

Elon Musk seems to be someone who really knows how to do cool things with the spoils of a successful software company. Are there any other good examples of people like this that have taken one big win and parlayed it into investing in seriously futuristic technology?

Richard Branson is a good example of an "adventure capitalist".

Here is his Wikipedia profile:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson

Here is the Wikipedia page for his space tourism company:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic

Also worthy of a mention is Mark Shuttleworth, who was the world's second space tourist (and also the founder of the Ubuntu Foundation):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth

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