World's Most Powerful Rocket Ready In 2012, SpaceX Says

Velcroman1 writes "Elon Musk, the millionaire founder of private space company Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX for short) said the long-planned Falcon Heavy vehicle would be ready for lift off at the end of 2012. The rocket, which he called the most powerful in the world, would be capable of taking men to the International Space Station, dropping vehicles and astronauts on the moon — and maybe even cruising to Mars and back."

Comments

Re:Leave it Fox..

[usul294]

I don't see how it's Fox's fault, all TFA said was that Elon Musk said the craft could be used to complete the Mars mission. Summary was way off from reality, but the article seemed to be done without hyperbole or bias.

His designs are in NASA archives at Marshall SFC

[alispguru]

Urban legends aside, NASA did not throw the plans for the Saturn V away.

Falcon Heavy is cool, but it's still a factor of two away from the LEO capacity of a Saturn V.

Re:But smaller then the Saturn V from the 1960s

[ravenspear]

$1000/lb not $1000/ton.

But yes this is MUCH cheaper than the Saturn V, Shuttle, or anything else really.

Details from press conference

[FleaPlus]

The Fox article is a little sparse on info, so for the curious, there was some pretty good liveblogging (live-foruming?) of the press conference here. You can see official details (and a neat video) on SpaceX's site here.

Looking through the forum and the website, here's a summary of all the most interesting stuff:

• Falcon 9 (F9) able to lift much more than estimated with engine upgrades, Falcon Heavy (FH) estimates upgraded
• FH: 3 nine-engine cores attached to each other
  paying development costs internally, strong commercial + gov customer interest
• FH will arrive at Vandenberg pad in 2012, launch in early 2013
• testing upgraded engines now at McGregor facility
• estimating 117K lbs (53mt) to orbit for FH, possibly >120K lbs
• double payload of Shuttle and Delta IV Heavy
• launching from Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral
• once in full operation expecting ~10 F9 flights a year, ~10 FH flights a year
• increasing rate of engine production to 400 each year (currently 50/year)
• FH price sets new world record at $1000/lb
• first rocket in history to feature propellant crossfeed, allowing for earlier separation of emptied side boosters (== much more efficiency)
• multi-engine-out capability for more reliability
• meets published NASA human rating standards, not sure yet about "unpublished" standards
• lower cost than current EELVs could save DOD alone $1.7B-$2.2B each year
• could do Mars sample return mission in a single flight
• payload to Mars 1/4 LEO payload, so 30K lbs to Mars
• could go to Moon or NEO with only 2 launches
• could do lunar flyby with a single launch of Dragon capsule
• in response to Q&A, mentioned follow-up design capable of >150mt (Saturn V was 119mt)

As an aside, it'll be quite fascinating to see what impact this has on the heavy-lift debate currently going on in Congress. For those unfamiliar with it, Congress is currently trying to pressure NASA to spend several billion dollars of its funding over several years into building a 70mt rocket from shuttle-legacy components/infrastructure. It's now looking like SpaceX will build a rocket with nearly the same capability using its own funding, which will be ready to launch several years before the Congress-mandated rocket. Hmm.

Re:Leave it Fox..

[ravenspear]

He stated that the rocket will be ready i.e. ready to launch by the end of 2012.

But the actual launch would probably be in 2013 depending on final regulatory hurdles plus any final technical issues encountered with the pad integration.

Re:Vaguely remember...

[IICV]

...but NASA also needed $12 billion and a decade to make a pen that worked in 0 gravity... and the Russians just used a pencil, classic.

There's pretty much nothing true in that statement besides the claim that "the Russians just used pencils" - NASA did too, until after Fisher developed the space pen (without government funding) and asked NASA to try it. In fact, after NASA adopted the space pen, so did the Russians.

And there's problems with using pencils in space - wood pencils are flammable, and the graphite in mechanical pencils can snap off more easily and damage vulnerable equipment (it's conducive, after all) or the astronauts themselves, if they accidentally inhale it.