SpaceX headed to the ISS tomorrow

Lastingly transforming the economics, reusability, and safety of rocket and vehicle technology in his short lifetime will be enough.

Musk and Spacex are already on track to benefit humanity 500 years from now and beyond.

I don't know anything solid about this, but I would very much like to know.

"Q. How much does it cost to launch a Space Shuttle? A. The average cost to launch a Space Shuttle is about $450 million per mission." [1]

[1] http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttl...

"The average price of a full-up NASA Dragon cargo mission to the International Space Station is $133 million including inflation, or roughly $115m in today's dollars, and we have a firm, fixed price contract with NASA for 12 missions. This price includes the costs of the Falcon 9 launch, the Dragon spacecraft, all operations, maintenance and overhead, and all of the work required to integrate with the Space Station. If there are cost overruns, SpaceX will cover the difference. (This concept may be foreign to some traditional government space contractors that seem to believe that cost overruns should be the responsibility of the taxpayer.)

The total company expenditures since being founded in 2002 through the 2010 fiscal year were less than $800 million, which includes all the development costs for the Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon. Included in this $800 million are the costs of building launch sites at Vandenberg, Cape Canaveral and Kwajalein, as well as the corporate manufacturing facility that can support up to 12 Falcon 9 and Dragon missions per year. This total also includes the cost of five flights of Falcon 1, two flights of Falcon 9, and one up and back flight of Dragon." [2]

[2] http://www.spacex.com/usa.php

For me however, this in itself is a pretty amazing thing, because SpaceX is a 'company' rather than a 'nation-state' the cost accounting is actually grounded in an independent currency and without hidden funding sources (like much of both the US and Soviet space programs benefited hugely from the investment in inter-continental ballistic missile technology which was 'defense' spending rather than 'space' spending. Such games are not possible at SpaceX.

So it would be accurate to say that the Falcon9 launch system is the first system for which we know the true cost of the system. And that is pretty amazing to my way of thinking.

When you combine that with a fixed price to get various tonnage in LEO or a into a Geo/Lunar transfer orbit, you can make statements like "Getting this into orbit costs $X" with overruns/delays/randomness priced out.

With some newer work being developed for on orbit vehicles, things like Lunar exploitation and Lagrange point stations become an exercise in money rather than politics and money. And that is also a huge shift.

Right now, the price of a Falcon 9 launch is around $50mil, this translates to $4.8/g to LEO or $16.7/g to GTO (which is where most satellites go). This compares very favorably to the price of other western launchers (Atlas V: $18/g, Ariane 5: $21/g, Delta IV: $19.5/g to GTO and around $11-$14/g to LEO) and is very competitive compared to Russian launchers (Soyuz 2: $16.7/g, Proton M: $18.2/g to GTO or $6.4/g and $4.8/g to LEO respectively).

However, keep in mind that these are prices, which include a healthy profit margin for SpaceX, and it's no coincidence that they have priced themselves right at the level of the otherwise cheapest launch vehicles in the world (since that maximizes their profit margin). Also keep in mind that as SpaceX's operations and manufacturing become more streamlined, as they amortize the fixed development costs for the Falcon 9 (which won't take long since the costs are a small multiple of the per flight revenue), as flight rate increases, and as competitive pressure to lower their profit margin increases they will be able to offer launches for considerably less than they are today, at lower prices than the Soyuz or Proton, for example.

However, this is just the beginning, as SpaceX has several development efforts in progress. The Falcon Heavy, for example, represents an incremental evolution of the Falcon 9 design, using 3 1st stage cores (instead of just one) and using a new cross-feed system to improve performance. The thing about the Falcon Heavy is that it uses slightly less than 3x as much hardware at about 2x the cost of a Falcon 9 launch but it will be able to deliver 5x the payload. This will translate into prices around $6.6/g to GTO and $2.4/g to LEO, at the high end ($4.2/g and $1.5/g at the low end). Nobody else in the world can come close to those numbers.

Also, they are working on a fully reusable version of the Falcon 9 which will reduce costs by at least a factor of 5 conservatively and perhaps as much as a factor of 100.

The maiden flight for the Falcon Heavy is slated to be next year. And they have already begun development on the core systems for the reusable Falcon (here's the 1st stage landing gear they've built for one of the test vehicles: http://s3.amazonaws.com/imgly_production/4311966/large.jpg).

May history show this as the beginning of the second space age.

This is how human beings are made great.

The progress of a species does not happen for the benefit of individual members, and that's true for us as humans as well. In that sense, as long as someone makes it, we all make it.

(Which is why it bothers me that so much is apparently riding on this one mission. The job of carrying human spaceflight forward is too much responsibility for one man, one company, or even one government, and Musk might do well to remind everyone of that before the launch.)

[1] http://www.stonekettle.com/2011/07/next-step-americas-future...

I'm sure the odds of anything like that going wrong are extremely low, but not zero, and so I admire the fortitude it would take to give a "yes" decision to this even so.

At the rate SpaceX is going, the students I have now are going to witness an incredible amount of major advancements in space travel and related technologies. I try to make sure they all know this, and some are already coming into the computer lab during break to talk about space exploration, careers in space, etc. These are just 5th graders! It makes me almost as excited to see their interest as I am to about missions like this.