SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced the specs of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy at a press conference in Washington today. You can watch a recording of his presentation and Q&A session by linking through from the Falcon Heavy page on the SpaceX website:
http://www.spacex.com/falcon_heavy.php
“This is a rocket of truly huge scale,” said Musk. Ganging together three nine-engine cores, one of which powers the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy will be able to lift some 117,000 pounds to low Earth orbit, said Musk.
“The hundred 117,000 pounds is more than a fully loaded Boeing 737 with 136 passengers, luggage, and fuel, in orbit. So that is really humungous. It’s more payload capability than any vehicle in history apart from the Saturn 5. And so it opens up a range of possibilities for government and commercial customers that simply aren’t present with the current lifting capacity.”
That’s a little less than half the payload to LEO capacity as the Saturn V, so far the most powerful operational rocket in history, which took three men to the moon in a single shot as part of the Apollo program.
Musk said the Heavy could possibly do an Apollo-style moon mission with two launches, one for the crew vehicle, and one for the lunar lander. Double those launches, and it might be possible to do a human mission to Mars, he indicated.
“This is something America can be really proud of, fact that there’s actually going to be vehicle with more than twice the capacity of the space shuttle that’s going to be ready to launch at the end of next year.”
The vehicle will also offer more than twice the payload capacity as its nearest competitor, the Delta IV Heavy, and a third the cost, said Musk. Musk said the Falcon 9 Heavy will be able to deliver a pound to orbit for $1,000, far less than the Shuttle, which retires this year anyway.
One of the keys to creating a truly spacefaring civilization is making space launches much more affordable. If successful the Falcon Heavy will do that not just by providing a cheaper alternative what’s already on the market, but by forcing its competitors to lower their prices as well.
This is one fine looking rocket. Are the rocket clusters liquid or solid fueled?
The engines are the Merlin liquid oxygen/kerosene fueled engine, which was designed initially for the Falcon 1 (one engine in its first stage), and then ganged together in a cluster of nine for the Falcon 9. Now they’re going to gang together three Falcon 9 clusters for a total of 27 Merlins to power the Falcon Heavy. Wow. I was at a test-firing of the Merlin, and even that one engine firing shook the ground pretty good and set a quarter-mile-long swath of Texas prairie on fire. Can’t imagine what the full 27-Merlin blast will be like up close!
Biggest problem I see with this kind of set up is, 27 nodes of failure times the failure rate at each node, this might comeback to hunt the project in the future.
The Russians have to be frowning about this… How does it compare with the big Russian Soyuz rocket? (Which is over fifty years old, right?)
The Soyuz is really closer in class to the Falcon 9 rather than the Heavy (even though the Falcon 9 can carry twice the payload as the Soyuz). Currently the Russians charge around $63 million a seat (3 seats per flight) on Soyuz. Elon says he can charge $20 million on Falcon 9. The Dragon capsule that is designed to go on top will be able to carry 7 astronauts. So if all goes as planned, Falcon 9 flights will be a lot cheaper for greater capacity. Of course the crew version of Dragon won’t fly for at least 3 years, and as you say, the Soyuz has had a huge head start in working out the kinks. It’s currently the most reliable spaceship in the world, and that deserves a premium.
We should be human rating the Dragon capsule so that SpaceX can begin launching our own astronauts to the ISS.
These new Falcon projects are exactly what the US needs in our space exploration ambitions. We have had a tough time figuring out our next steps, and ultimately the biggest challenge was getting the US government and Nasa to “let go” and allow private industry to get involved in the production and manufacturing of private space craft and technologies. To think we will be able to go into space, carry almost as much as the Saturn V, at a cost of 1/10th of the current cost of per pound spending ($1,000 per pound with Space X vs $10,000 per pound with the Shuttle program) is astounding!!! Truly amazing stuff. I personally, can’t WAIT to see the flurry of space activity once this is put into affect. Though, I see more of a “saving money” attitude vs. “more for the same money” attitude. I think they will keep up the same amount of activity, and just save the extra dollars that would have been spent otherwise….so basically, instead of (for example) going to space with 1,000 pounds 10 times in one year and spending $10 Million, they will still go 10 times with 1,000 pounds except only spend $1 Million. Again, my numbers are purely an example and in no way reflect actual numbers.
Even if that is the case where they don’t ramp up activity due to savings, then that is still ok. BUT, I certainly wouldn’t mind if they kept the same budget and increased space activity. I’m tired of waiting for Virgin Galactic to get their stuff going…..need to hear something soon!!!! I’m having space withdrawals!!! 😀
Don’t worry; the SpaceX Dragon is tentatively scheduled for launch to the International Space Station on November 30. We’re going to see a lot more action coming up!