Elon Musk Shows Off Near-Complete Falcon Heavy Rocket (newatlas.com)

Eloking quotes a report from New Atlas: SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket has been a long time coming. The successor to its Falcon 9 and the vehicle hoped to carry humans to Mars, this booster will be one of the most powerful ever. And we've just gotten our best look at it yet, with CEO Elon Musk tweeting out photos of an almost complete Falcon 9 Heavy in the hangar ahead of a planned maiden launch next month. The Falcon Heavy is essentially three Falcon 9 first stages rolled into one, with a second stage sat atop the middle one. The nine engine cores in each first stage work together to provide thrust equal to eighteen 747 aircraft, making it the most powerful rocket currently in operation and the most powerful since the Saturn V rocket last lifted off in 1973. In a series of tweets, Musk revealed that when the Falcon Heavy does lift off for the first time, it will do so from the same pad used by the Saturn V rocket at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Musk has said recently that the Falcon Heavy will carry his own cherry-red Tesla Roadster as its first payload, but as an earlier tweet professing his love for floors has shown, it's not always easy to tell how serious he is about such matters.

Comments

Lucky....

[beheaderaswp]

If you are a live now, have been born from 1960 onwards, you are privileged. As am I.

We've seen the computer revolution, Internet revolution, and now a space revolution.

Jobs will be diminished, Musk will be remembered.

Re:Lucky....

[drinkypoo]

Jobs are diminishing, all right. And people get paid under $15/hr to work in the Tesla plant, assembling their $40k+ cars.

For 80% of world's population that is a lot of $/hr.

For people who live near the Tesla plant, it's barely enough money to be able to afford to live in your car. Which, at that level of pay, will not be a Tesla.

Re:Lucky....

[Kjella]

We've seen the computer revolution, Internet revolution, and now a space revolution.

Because of a rocket that almost does what a bigger rocket did ~50 years ago? Replacing crew and cargo supplies to the ISS? Cheaper satellite launches? Sorry, but the world remembers the first guy who climbed Mount Everest not the first guy who climbed it on a budget. To be a revolution you'd have to be able to one-up the guy who says "Well, our generation put a man on the Moon" and to be honest I think we're well short of that. Maybe in another ten years with the BFR and a plan for Mars that isn't just on the drawing board we can say it's a space revolution. Maybe we can point back to the first rocket that landed and say that's the spark, but honestly I feel we're in the slump before the space revival.

Twelve people have walked on the moon, six are dead and the remainder are between 82 and 87 years old. Even with everything Musk is doing it's quite likely we'll see the last of them die before we see anyone new set foot on a stellar object other than Earth. Right now the US doesn't even have a man-rated vehicle of their own. I mean it's easy to get excited about Musk because to be honest there hasn't been much to get excited about for decades but in the grand scheme of things, this is not a rocket that will make history. Maybe the next one will, the one that's still on the drawing board but then it is quite premature to say that the revolution is here and now. Nobody has left Earth orbit yet...

how about the water problem?

[OppMan29]

Wonder how Elon plans to solve the water issue in Mars.. unless he plans to go and quickly come back.

Cue the Musk haters.

[Gravis Zero]

Right about now is when you people claiming things about people being part of the "Cult of Elon" and bullshit about how it's all a scam. I just like that he's advancing technology to help humanity advance rather than simply exploit it.

Vertical (sic) Integration?

[ytene]

If we look at the various different market sectors that Elon Musk has developed businesses for, then with the possible exception of Tesla, all of them, potentially even The Boring Company and Hyperlook [granted he isn't directly investing in this now] would seem to have the potential to be integrated at some future time.

For example, if mankind were to use "Boring Company" technology to cut an access tunnel up to a point near the 5,980-metre peak of the mountain, then use Hyperloop technology to provide a platform on which a rocket could be placed, put a stack of Solar City panels in the vicinity [to power the super-conducting magnets used by the maglev technology and perhaps also to synethsise the Methylox fuel, then essentially he has most of the components needed for a launch system that grabs another order of magnitude of cost savings/efficiency gains - because potentially the vehicle itself could do away with a potentially significant amount of fuel.

I took a quick look at the most recent launch, CRS-13, in which at 6km of altitude, the vehicle had achieved a speed of 938km/h, a little shy of MaxQ. I would have to concede that we are still a long way short, engineering-wise, of being able to achieve that even with a maglev track in an evacuated hyperloop tunnel. But Musk is all about continual, iterative improvement.

I would be the first to concede that all I've done here is borrow ideas postulated by science fiction writers for many years now: but if you go back to the 1950s and 1960s and look at the writing of Heinlein-era sci-fi writers, rockets that landed on their tails and took off again were a staple fare. It took real life 60-70 years to catch up, but SpaceX did it. With our rate of development increasing, what I outline here could be as little as 20-30 years away.

Which I guess leads to a question - which would be the most cost-effective solution: Falcon Heavy or a ballistic launcher? FH has massively lower development costs, but the operating expenses will be higher. A launcher will cost several metric f@ktons of money to develop, but, once done, should be significantly cheaper to operate.
br? Which would you go for?