SpaceX Unveils Heavy-Lift Rocket Designs

FleaPlus writes "At the recent Joint Propulsion Conference, SpaceX's rocket development facility director Tom Markusic unveiled conceptual plans for how its current Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 commercial rockets can be evolved into heavy-lift rockets, ranging from a Falcon X capable of lifting 38,000kg to orbit, up to a 140,000kg Falcon XX (more than either the Saturn V or the 75,000kg shuttle-derived rocket Congress currently plans on having NASA spend >$13B building). SpaceX presentations also discuss a new Merlin 2 heavy-lift engine, solar-electric cargo tugs, adapting their current engines for descent/ascent vehicles fueled by Mars-derived methane, and a desire for the government to take the lead on in-space nuclear thermal propulsion while commercial focuses on launchers. In a recent interview, SpaceX CEO/CTO Elon Musk expressed his goal of lowering the price of Mars transportation enough to enable early colonization in 20 years, and his own plans for retiring to Mars."

Comments

Vision

[timeOday]

"I'm planning to retire to Mars"

That, my friends, is vision.

Not, "one day mankind must blah blah blah..." but: 'I'm planning to retire to Mars.'

Re:Vision

[mangu]

"I'm planning to retire to Mars"
  That, my friends, is vision.

I'd say it's marketese.

But well, anyhow, it's awesome marketese.

Re:Vision

[tgd]

That marketese has gotten him a company successfully launching rockets into orbit.

My vision has got me sitting on my couch in my underpants.

Just to put that in perspective.

Re:Shiny!

[jpmorgan]

Well, what I like about SpaceX is they've turned "rocket science" into "rocket engineering." As an interested outsider, they seem to have a strong focus on modular design, which aids in keeping costs down. It's basic bottom-up design, which usually leads to better and cheaper solutions than the top-down design work that government mandated engineering tends to be.

Design should always be a compromise between what you want and what is practical. The space-shuttle is what you get when you'd rather spend billions than be flexible in your requirements. And the worst part about that is you end up with such a bleeding-edge integrated solution, that you don't get to take anything away from it. You're always starting again from scratch.

Re:Retiring to Mars sounds like a good idea....

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Americans are taxed on citizenship, not residency.

That reminds me of an old Monty Python quip: "To boost the British economy I'd tax all foreigners living abroad."

Re:Hahaha!

[Rei]

What's being discussed is not a "colony" in any normal sense of the word. It's a base. "Colony" implies a large degree of self sufficiency, which requires the most massive engineering engineering effort in the history of humankind to even get started. What Musk is doing is working on lower-cost spacecraft. Spacecraft that, IMHO, are still 1-2 orders of magnitude too expensive to make true colonization realistic. If all you do is go there and use some regolith for shielding and make some methane fuel using equipment shipped from Earth, perhaps growing some plants in greenhouses shipped from Earth, etc -- you're not colonizing. Namely, because not only could such a "colony" not independently expand itself, but if the shipments from Earth suddenly stopped, the next time something significant broke, the entire colony would die. You're not going to, say, jury-rig a new compressor out of duct tape and rocks. You couldn't even make duct tape itself without an entire petrochemical industry. A sustainable colony requires a mind-boggling amount of sustainable industry and the use of structures and devices engineered to be produceable by said industrial infrastructure.

But anyway, kudos to Musk for at least doing *something* useful rather than building palm tree islands or city-sized yachts.