^ You know, we laugh about this but in the next decade we may very well be able to deploy payloads into space just by clicking a few buttons like any other online shopping. They may even pick up the shipment right from our facilities with their drones.
I think they have a payment plan, at least. It says there's a standard payment plan, but it doesn't say how long you have to pay it off or what the interest is.
Arianespace does that with their Ariane V, but it comes with organizational headaches, because you need two payloads of appropriate mass, that are ready at the same time, and that go into the same orbital plane. If one payload is delayed (happens often enough), you can't shuffle the other one around on short notice.
>It's interesting that Falcon Heavy costs 1.5x as much as Falcon 9, but carries 4x the payload.
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 guess the reason for that discrepancy is that for the $90m price tag, SpaceX wants to re-use the first stage cores. In re-usable configuration, quite a bit of the fuel has to be used for the re-entry burns.
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).
saw that a little while ago. it's fun you can now purchase a lift in LEO and with a direct quote even!
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)
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.
Some people seem to unironically agree with this, so I'll say the obvious: I don't think the absence of a meaning to life has anything to do with the wastefulness of sending your ashes into orbit. It's more wasteful than spreading them over the sea, for example. Unless you're actually saying that you don't believe in the concept of waste, which would be really sad for you and for everyone around you.
many, if not most, find meaning of life in kids. for me, it's a bit more more broad - kids and future generations as part of mankind.
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 :))
Oh that is just the tip of the iceberg when you start studying philosophy. I love Philosophy but the starting questions of what is life and meaning can be over whelming.
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)
There are many small and light relics of Jesus, both Marys etc around. How about a kickstarter campaign to send one into low earth orbit to watch over us all?
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?
>> 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.
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.
> Falcon Heavy is ultimately intended to take a vehicle to Mars.
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.
The different payload masses are most likely for different grades of reusability: all cores expendable, center core expendable + boosters reusable, fully reusable.
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
So it's listing the min and max masses to GTO for Falcon Heavy? But why wouldn't they list the same thing for regular Falcon? Can't you also choose if that is reusable or not?
The concensus among several people on the nasaspaceflight.com forum who simulated the numbers, is that 13 mT is already the estimated capability of the reusable F9 v1.1; the full capability of the expendable configuration is approx. 16 mT to LEO.
Using the smaller Falcon 9 you could send approximately 1500 people's ashes in to space (assuming an average of 3kg left after cremation for each person), at a cost of $39,000 each.
Uh, if you go with the falcon heavy you can transport 17,666 people's ashes at $5,094 a pop. But you may be waiting a lot longer to accumulate that many buyers.
Strangely this was a topic of discussion with my family the other day.
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.
If you can settle for the Sun, and be patient... Just wait ~8 billion years for the sun to turn into a red giant (engulfing the earth, along with your remains). You may even get lucky and some of your remains may be swept away in the solar wind.
If you found this interesting, I would recommend taking a look at https://www.astrobotic.com/configure-mission, another "space travel pricing page" - this one gives tweakable parameters that change the price, which is nice.
Sidenote: It's absolutely amazing that we can now get a satellite orbiting the Moon for $200k.
Well, it's a hell of a lot more than just a pretty website and speculation - they've got NASA contracts worth tens of millions and have reserved a Falcon 9 launch for late 2016.
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.
It is completely standard to seek to launch over the ocean. The spaceports in Florida and Guiana are where they are because of that and because it is easier to launch towards the east. Where launches aren't over the ocean they are usually over very sparsely populated territory (as is the case for Baikonur).
I think it's almost standard (save for Rusia) to launch near the ocean. If the rocket fails, it's easier and less dangerous to sink in in water than have it crash on land go boom over any kind of structure (civilian, military, cities, etc).
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.
No; all US launches are over ocean to satisfy FAA that you have a very small chance of damaging something on the ground. You could launch over land if you could prove that your rocket was about as likely to fail as an airliner, but there's currently no such thing.
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.
If you buy a launch ticket with your chase sapphire card, you can get free travel insurance with coverage for baggage losses. Do telecom satellites count as baggage? Some cards also offer warranty-type protections on your purchases. Seems like a smart move.
Judging from the landings legs on heavy center stage, they are planning to land it, but where? It will be flying much higher and faster than the side boosters I believe.
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.
Is there an easy to understand resource somewhere that covers issues related to the rocket equation, inclination angles, low and geosynchronous orbit requirements?
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.
Not the answer you are looking for, but KSP[1] taught me about rockets, orbits and whatnot more than schools did. It's fun, accessible.. but won't really teach you exact math and physics (but might encourage you to do so).
