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

Posted by BeauHD on from the long-time-coming dept.

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.

12 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Lucky.... by beheaderaswp · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Another consultant who stuck it out.

    "We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
    1. Re:Lucky.... by SharpFang · · Score: 4, Funny

      I think it was cancer that most diminished Jobs.

      --
      45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
    2. Re:Lucky.... by Megane · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We remember Henry Ford more than we remember Karl Benz. This is a rocket that almost does what another one did a few times 50 years ago in a skunk works project with strong financial backing from a large government, a level of financial backing that only lasted a decade or so. SpaceX also is starting to account for a major fraction of all space launches as of 2017.

      Oh yeah, and there's that minor detail about getting an orbital rocket's first stage to land on its tail like some 1950s space opera flick, then nailing all the next 20 attempts in a row after the first success. They didn't do that 50 years ago. So F9 certainly has made history. But if you're saying FH won't be historic, I won't disagree with that, it seems destined to become a footnote between F9 and BFR.

      --
      #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
  2. Re:Elon Musk will fail on this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    If it were a public company, you'd be right. Which is why it's not.

  3. Re:So much thrust by taiwanjohn · · Score: 4, Funny

    So basically it's like a Beowulf cluster of Falcon 9s.

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
  4. Re: Is this the one that is sending a roadseter i by dvbrizzi · · Score: 3, Informative

    Looks like it can take some serious payload... https://imgur.com/a/dtJIf

  5. Re: how about the water problem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    He plans to use his Amazon prime membership to get water shipped for free.

  6. Vertical (sic) Integration? by ytene · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Vertical (sic) Integration? by hackertourist · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Gun launch (incl rail guns, hyperloop etc.) is a dead end. Getting to orbit is about speed - and you can only gain a (relatively) small amount of speed using a gun, because you're limited by air resistance in the lower atmosphere.
      Going to a vacuum tunnel removes the speed problem, and introduces a new one: you have to exit the tunnel at some point. Even if you can create a vacuum seal that the rocket can pass through, it'll slam into the atmosphere at 5 km altitude - which is still significant. Building the tunnel exit at higher altitude isn't possible either (building cost is prohibitive).
      Going by your own numbers, you could save 300 m/s of delta-V out of about 9000 m/s. 3% savings would make the rocket a few meters shorter, and you might be able to remove 1 engine, but the rocket doesn't become significantly cheaper.

  7. Not the Mars Rocket by duckintheface · · Score: 4, Informative

    The intro in not correct in calling the Falcon Heavy the rocket that will take humans to Mars. This is just a heavy payload version of Falcon which still uses the Merlin engine. The BFR (Big Fucking Rocket) will have 31 Raptor engines (more powerful) and a completely redesigned booster and second stage. It's the BFR that will go to Mars. https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...

    --
    "He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
  8. Re:Elon Musk will fail on this by gatkinso · · Score: 3, Informative

    Funding is coming from successful launches.

    --
    I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
  9. The old joke is new again. by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 3, Funny

    As the story goes, German-born rocket guru Werner Von Braun asked his ( mostly-german) rocket engineers whether the Saturn 5 was going to meet it's 99.999% reliability goal, and they said down the line "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!

    Actually, it did really well, with 13 successful or at least survivable launches.

    Now with Elon's 9 engines, again it's time to ask, and even more so, the likely answer is "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!