Kingfish said:
dV,
The lift capacity quoted is not accurate my friend. The Falcon 9 is near the top of the high-middle weights, and very comparible to Atlas 5 versions. I am quite happy for them
Are you possibly confusing the Falcon 9 with a "future rocket" from SpaceX ???
The Falcon 9 lift capacity I quoted directly from their website: 10,450 kg to LEO.
The Atlas 5 (Atlas V) can do 18,810 kg to LEO. That's a whole different class of rocket that's far more powerful than the Falcon 9.
I'm very keen on the cost of these government payloads coming way down on the total cost of operations. But until that happens & is actually proven with cost analysis, I'm very skeptical. SpaceX is getting most of its funding & support directly from you & me by way of our taxes directly supporting this private company to a huge percentage of their business. Both ends of our candle are lit for SpaceX. We the taxpayer are their biggest customer by far & away, and we are also paying for them to launch our payloads into space with our tax dollars.
Hopefully, their profit margins & business model will work to drive costs down much lower than before. I'm very skeptical about that, since it's damned expensive to get anything into orbit by way of a rocket.
Slinging payloads by rail-gun or flying to high altitude to launch a rocket might be more innovative ways to cut costs, but hell if I know.
Even Burt Rutan & Virgin Galactic are only offering Sub-Orbital flights into space, which I don't know how appealing that will be if you can't orbit the Earth many times & get a higher vantage-point to see the Earth from a more distant perspective.
No billionaires have taken the Russians up on their offer to fly them around the moon for 100 million dollars. That price is affordable for a billionaire, but it seems no billionaires want to do that yet.
I personally think we should have a small colony of mankind on the Moon IF there is enough water there to do it on a permanent or self-sufficient basis. It should be an International sponsored colony, Independent of any nationhood, so there can be no "border wars" in space. Then eventually go to Mars from the Moon, if cheaper & easier to do, but no need to do that in a hundred years (except for a colony on our Moon). A thousand years would be grand to establish permanence on Mars or its Moon, and it's very low risk that a cosmic event would wipe-out mankind on Earth in the meantime. Sending unmanned forward basing & bio-seeding Mars can be done over hundreds of years in the meantime. If billionaire dreamers & their supporters want to do that without my tax money getting them there within a faster timeline, then be my guest Mr. Billionaire on YOUR money PLUS your volunteer collective of supporter's money but not on my "forced" tax dollars. Just raise the money independently, & I'm all for it.
I'm still waiting for the amazing promised windfalls in discoveries for science & medicine to reach the masses in saving lives or some fantastic discovery to justify the enormous Space Station expense! Show me the payback! Where is it?
Elon Musk thinks we're going to Mars in 20 years or less. He wants to colonize Mars using his rockets, of course. Show me YOUR
money. He is worth a couple of billion dollars, and that is a miniscule tiny fraction of what it will cost just to get there *not* counting landing & safely returning. Evolution took billions of years to do "man" on spaceship earth. I think at least a thousand years will be needed for Mars living in self-contained dome enclosed atmospheres. It will take tens or hundreds of thousands of years at a minimum to produce a livable open atmosphere on Mars. It's just total BS that Elon Musk runs a private rocket space company, when he is 100% dependent on government funding, meaning your money, to do anything in space. This is what is known as media hype & slick PR that NASA & your government, including Musk, is doing to meet their agendas to get your taxes, your money, your funding of their space agendas. The space hustle shuffle.
