From PayPal to Planetary Travel

furnk writes "PayPal founder Elon Musk muses about his plans to send rockets to space and his eventual hopes for making life 'multi-planetary.' 'I said I wanted to take a large fortune and make it a small one, so I started a rocket business,' Musk said. SpaceX is not new, but in a speech at Virginia Tech, Musk talked about the company's troubles and its lawsuit against Boeing and Lockheed as he tries to get a slice of the valuable Air Force contracts."

Comments

Re:Price?

[Rei]

Huh? Lets start from the beginning.

Small payload rockets are much more expensive per kilogram than large rockets - $15-30k/kg typically. Falcon 1 is $9k. Very, very cheap for this market.

For midsized and large rockets, costs typically range from $7k-15k/kg. Energia was $8.6k/kg. Falcon V is predicted to be $2.9k/kg. Falcon 9 is predicted to be $2.9k/kg. Falcon 9-S5 is predicted to be $3k/kg. Falcon 9-S9 is predicted to be $3.1k/kg. Again, very, very cheap. And the size of a Falcon 9-S9, if they make it that far, is monstrous. A regular Falcon 9 would compete with an Ariane 5, but a 9-S9 would be a shuttle competitor. Real heavy lift.

If Musk can really pull this off, he deserves a medal. And a fat roster of contracts ;)