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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

I'd settle for just seeing things like their delta-V maps. It's one thing for me to make my own for KSP missions, it's another to see one for a real world situation.

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While I'm a mere Kerbalnaut myself, here is some napkin math that almost checks out. For a GTO payload, the Falcon 9 http://www.spaceflight101.com/falcon-9-v11.html has:

  S1 Mass full: 490,300kg (that's both stages, fuel in both, plus the fairing and payload)
  S1 Mass empty: 100,300kg (S1 mass minus stage one fuel)
  S1 ISP: 282s (sea level) to 311s (vacuum)

  S2 Mass full: 82,300kg (second stage, fuel, fairing and payload)
  S2 Mass empty: 11,500kg (S2 mass minus stage two fuel)
  S2 ISP: 340s (unspecified)

According to this delta-v calculator http://www.strout.net/info/science/delta-v/, that would give delta-v values of:

  S1 delta-v: 4388m/s to 4840m/s
  S2 delta-v: 6562m/s

  Total delta-v: 10.8km/s to 11.3km/s

For GTO, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v gives a delta-v value of 11.8km/s to 12.5km/s, so these numbers fall just under the low end of that range. However, maybe the highly elliptical orbit that this launch is aiming for is slightly more efficient than whatever orbit is assumed for that chart on Wikipedia.

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