Capabilities and Services
spacex.com
spacex.com
Either way - I'd wait it out. They'll drop the price for black friday
Why doesn't SpaceX offer the Falcon Heavy exclusively and launch multiple payloads per launch, thus more than halving costs?
Are there payload volume or orbit separation limitations or is the pricing info not complete?
where did you get that numbers from? the page says $60m for ~4.85t to GTO for F9 and $90m for 6.4t to GTO for FH. price for maximum performance isn't quoted; i believe without reusability it'll be about 3x F9 (there's three F9's in the FH, after all).
The pricing subtext for the FH says 6.4mT to GTO, but lower on the page the FH specs say 21,200kg to GTO.
For the F9, it's clear that 4.85mT to GTO is the same as listed below. So I'm assuming the 21,200kg to GTO for the FH is incorrect. Or there is something I'm missing? (additional weight required for GTO and which subtracts from the 21,200kg?)
I.e. 21 tons is the max payload, and the guide price they're giving is just for 6.5 tons.
Still interesting that they advertise the re-use price, while not having successfully landed a single core yet (admittedly, they came really close to a successful landing a couple of times).
1. 12 million per tonne to GTO on Falcon 9 with a maximum load of 4.85 tonnes
2. 14 million per tonne to GTO on Falcon Heavy with a maximum load of 21.2 tonnes
If you buy the 6.4 tonnes to GTO on Falcon Heavy package, Space X will sell the additional space to another two customers on same launch.
so, doing some weird math, you can get about 5000 person ashes in LEO for about 62M, so one could theoretically (I think law forbids it) run a kickstarter campaign to get people ashes in space for 15k each.
Just think of the possibilities! private launch space with a price allows all people a fair access to space (still pricey, but fair)
BTW I named my son Soren for Soren Kierkegaard and man he can be extremely bleak. It kind of goes everything is not understandable till you lose yourself in the madness of nothing being certain AKA Leap of Faith (Which is Leap to Faith but translations screwed it up)
your selfish behavior would pollute planet unnecessarily, taking away precious resources, giving back more pollution. you might not care what will happen after you pass away, but I do.
(I say this as a space lover whose biggest dream is to get to space one time... but there are far more important things in life than polishing one's ego, which can be anyway achieved in many, many ways. climbed Matterhorn last week, that's a good starter I can recommend to some :))
I think they only send up a small sample of the ashes rather than the whole urn though. They charge $2k so there's probably some good margins if you can do the same with SpaceX.
And these prices may go down dramatically after the first stages prove themselves reusable (depending on SpaceX's strategy).
But down below we see 4850kg and 21,200kg which seems more likely.
it says $90m for 6.5t. it doesn't say how much it costs to put 21t on GTO. i'd expect that price to be in the 'call us' area.
Good point. The later figure does not include a price. OTOH since the price is given for the lower payload which covers all/most the cost of the hardware, one may be a bit angry if the price per kg doesn't drop a lot after that. But they are the only game in town at those prices right?
That's not necessarily true. The Falcon 9 has the potential to be reused, but requires additional fuel reserves in order to handle the return procedure. I'm not certain, but it's possible that a full 21t payload wouldn't allow for that additional fuel capacity and therefore your single launch would have to account for the entire cost of the rocket, whereas smaller payloads would be able to spread the cost of the rocket across multiple launches.
No, it's not; the business model for the Falcon Heavy is heavy comsats (communication satellites) to GEO with reusability of all three cores. The Mars science mission idea is a nice use-case, but more of an every-once-in-a-while kind of thing.
For their Mars colonization effort, SpaceX is currently developing a fully reusable rocket with a larger payload capacity than any rocket that ever existed; Falcon Heavy is too small for that.
"In expendable mode, Falcon Heavy can send a fully loaded Dragon to Mars or a light Dragon to Jupiter's moons. Europa mission wd be cool." -Elon Musk
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_transfer_orbit
Hard to tell for sure, because SpaceX has, to the best of my knowledge, never provided details regarding which Falcon Heavy configuration delivers the 6.4 mT to GTO.*
* probably a 1800 m/s to GSO, 26° inclination orbit
I wonder if that could be a viable business.
Two-tier model? :-P
It's definitely selfish, but I need a way to get to space somehow. We could justify it as aiding the budding commercial space industry :)
It would have mass market appeal at ~12k USD a pop. The question becomes where would you send it?
Personally, I would love to drift into deep space, but could settle for the sun. Possibly a remembrance countdown on the web with clips of everyone to be sent off until launch.
Sidenote: It's absolutely amazing that we can now get a satellite orbiting the Moon for $200k.
It'll be amazing when they manage it. Right now it's a pretty website and a speculative and much-delayed first mission.
I agree - there's no guarantee they can achieve their target even with all of that - but the fact that they've gotten much closer than others is still extraordinary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
I guess that makes sense, if your super secret launch payload is going to fail, better that it falls in the ocean?
Edit: also avoids "dog leg maneuvers". Like countries such as India are forced to do.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/pslvc16-puts-3-satelli...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceport#Placement_considerat...
You may not want another nation's ground-based radars tracking your launch, for instance.
Though I suspect that superpower nations have satellites in orbit intended to detect rocket launches, for the obvious nuclear war reasons. They all have an interest in knowing whether the payload is bound for orbit or for ballistic re-entry within their borders.
I think the main concern is that a payload that might fall into the ocean can be guarded by heavily armed naval vessels, whereas one that falls on land might have bits stolen by locals before the soldiers get there, in such a way that no one could be sure whether those bits were destroyed or captured.
Military payloads are also probably more likely to want to be in polar orbits. That doesn't have much to do with launching over the ocean so much as the direction of the launch from California being southward.
Vandenburg AFB's launch facilities are good for defense sats because (1) they're from a DoD facility and (2) that's the premier US site for polar orbits. Most surveillance sats do polar or polar-ish orbits because that can put any particular part of the planet directly underneath it several times a day.
SpaceX also has an Air Force pad at Cape Canaveral, but that site is suited only for equatorial orbits, again due to geography. Those are mostly for comm sats, science (incl. interplanetary), and human missions.
Unless you're flying into space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy
the Saturn V, the rocket that sent men to the moon could send 140,000 kg to LEO and 48,600 kg on a translunar injection, which is a higher orbit (i.e. takes more energy) than a geostationary transfer. It's estimated that it cost upwards of a billion dollars per Saturn V launch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V
Basically, this is a powerful and freaking cheap rocket.
I would like a better understanding of the math and physics of what it takes to get a vehicle up to various altitudes and orbits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v#/media/File:Delta-Vs_f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit
edit: More in-depth: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-3...