it has the potential to lift 119,000 pounds into space...
Good.
Now we can get rid of Rosie for good.
What a machine this is. Elon Musk is doing what most only dream about.
By comparison, the Saturn V had a Payload to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) of 310,000 lbs, and a Payload to TLI (Trans Lunar Injection, whatever that is) of 107,100 lbs.
But it was not reusable.
Along with the thousand other reasons for appropriations reform, which have all had zero effect on appropriations.
“I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage”.
WTF ? Why are we supporting this type of logic. Astronauts read this and say, not me.
This is all reasonable steps toward major progress. And yes, Musk IS making progress on all fronts, at a good rate. There will be failures. There will be delays. There will be cost overruns. He’s playing all those as part of the game, and winning.
Yes SpaceX is launching a Falcon Heavy with novelty cargo. You don’t do the first launch of a gigantic controlled explosion with expensive/irreplaceable cargo, you just put something in it so the payload bay isn’t completely empty, and send it up.
Yes the Falcon Heavy may soon be abandoned in favor of the BFR. It’s a necessary step in developing the long-term technology.
Remember: just re-using the first (very expensive) stage was impossible a couple years ago. Now it’s normal enough it’s almost boring. That’s a HUGE breakthrough, and Musk made it happen.
Etc.
If you want such progress to happen AT ALL, someone has to do it - would you rather a team of bored bureaucrats be tasked with putting a city on Mars, or someone who’s so enthused about it he’s willing to risk putting his own high-value custom car on it as a test subject?
It’s a pretty open secret that Lowest Price Technically Acceptable (LPTA) just means Lowest Price.
The federal government doesn’t actually care if most of this stuff works. Technically Acceptable? The Program Manager who gets the contract awarded will get a promotion and move on. When the government realizes that this result is not technically acceptable, there will be no one who can be held accountable, so no one will care. Get the Lowest Price, get promoted. Nothing else matters in many cases.
So, what’s the authors alternative? NASA’s heavy lift rocket, the Space Launch System, which is a completely different rocket from the cancelled Aries V NASA heavy launch system? After 15 years and tens of billions of dollars, NASA and Congress haven’t even gotten started on building one of those.
Whoever invests with Elon Musk will ultimately lose money.
Mr. Rogers, there is no assurance by anyone (NASA included) that any chemically-fueled launch vehicle will not explode on ignition. That the FH might explode and damage the facilities, delaying other launches is a weak argument.
Best to leave expensive things like space exploration to our betters, the Chinese, since we’d have more money to buy stuff from them; and they are projected to overtake the US economically in a handful of years, why wait?
So where is this record any worse than NASA’s?
So make insurance part of the contract. If the launch does not proceed as planned, then Musk pays out the cost of the satellite. Doing that will exclude unreliable low-bidders (at least after the first failure).
The Saturn 5 was 310,000 lbs including sending 107,100 lbs of that payload to Trans Lunar Insertion (TLI). If it had been all just to LEO then the payload could have been higher still. A trans-lunar injection (TLI) is a propulsive maneuver used to set a spacecraft on a trajectory that will cause it to arrive at the Moon.
The consequence of adding reusable technology will mean that the Falcon Heavy will have a reduced payload to GTO. But, that will mean it will take longer to get a particular project assembled in orbit.
If we are going to go into space at all Musky's vehicles will actually save many millions of dollars on what would otherwise be all taxpayer funded. Cutting off incentives such as matching funds, grants, prizes just disincentives private businesses in the first place, leaving the tax payers to foot the bill, else vacate the whole notion that the US is great, or will be anything at all in the future other than a dumping ground for Chinese goods.
Space is expensive - especially when new things are being developed and only gets cheaper when the tech is mature.
Of course if you really want to go cheap, there is always the 1963 Project Orion, which had not there been a total failure of political will, would have by now have explored all the planets in the system, colonized some of them, and had a return mission from Alpha Centuri as the ships were capable of 50% light speed. See this FR article for more on OrionStudy: Martian Surface Water Was Absorbed by Planet’s Crust
SpaceX says the Falcon Heavy will debut in January 2018, but in reality, who knows – it also said it would launch in 2013 or 2014, Spring of 2016, and late 2017. Earlier this year, SpaceX was estimated to have a $10 billion backlog of over 70 missions, and it continues to experience regular mission delays. The Falcon Heavy seems to be just another chapter in the textbook of the company’s broken promises, and a long one at that.
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The author is either ignorant or deceptive. The single core Falcon 9 has been upgraded over the years and has already carried payloads originally intended for the Falcon Heavy.
And in spite of not meeting his usually optimistic forecasts Musk is still way ahead of the competition.
Wow, what an aggregation of negative connotations. From this article, you’d think SpaceX has never accomplished a thing, or that nobody else’s rockets ever blew up. Despite NASA’s judgment that landing a rocket on its tailfins was forever impossible, SpaceX spent billions of taxpayer dollars and crashed rocket after rocket. Yep. And now SpaceX has landed 20 consecutive rockets.
NASA is proud that there has been NOT ONE launch failure of the Space Launch System after 15 years of development.
Needs more Mooselimb outreach, yippie cat-yea! ...