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"Payload to Mars" Added to SpaceX Pricelist
- MertsA 11y agoSo the only numbers I can find on price for the Atlas V that delivered Curiosity to Mars is 20% of $2.5 billion. If I'm reading this right, a single Falcon 9 could have launched the same payload (3,893 kg) all the way to Mars for $62 million instead of ~$500 million. Am I reading this right?
- Strom 11y agoNo, as the Falcon Mars capability is theoretical and not before 2018.
- zitterbewegung 11y agoIs the pricelist there to market SpaceX itself because it doesn't seem like you would merely accept the price on the pricelist?
- infogulch 11y ago"Modest discounts are available, for contractually committed, multi-launch purchases." Those are probably the real numbers.
- magila 11y agoAs I understand it, this price list is similar to the list prices you see for large commercial aircraft. That is, these prices have only a vague relation to the actual prices customers end up paying. With deals as large and complex as these, each one is a little different so it's inevitable that they get negotiated individually.
- flyinghamster 11y agoSounds like dealing with Oracle. :)
- daurnimator 11y agoIt's to give a ballpark guideline. You might be thinking about a problem and go "oh actually, if we could send it to mars it might work". and instead of dismissing it out of hand you can say, "well that costs XYZ"
- notatoad 11y agoYeah, the pricelist is there so they can say "look, we have a price list on our website". I'm sure nobodys paying those prices.
- phamilton 11y agoThe price list also serves as a means of showing changes to prices as the result of innovation. Showing a side by side comparison of reused rockets vs new ones is a great marketing ploy.
- rrhyne 11y agoI think it should read: "Call for Pricing" under Mars, as the Standard Payment Plan price is "to GTO"
- 6nf 11y agoFor $90 million you can use their Falcon Heavy to send 8 tonnes to GTO. SpaceX does not yet have a vehicle to take you to Mars. The idea is that your GTO payload would be such a vehicle supplied by the customer. The numbers below just shows the limits of what is possible, i.e. such a Mars Transfer vehicle could weigh up to 22 tonnes and possibly contain up to 13 tonnes of payload.
- vkou 11y agoIt hasn't been added to the pricelist - it's been added to the rocket's capabilities. Doing a bit of napkin math would get you a similar number.
- jonah 11y agoSo is it the same fuel load to LEO, GTO, and Mars? Just less mass to move?
- vmasto 11y agoYes, it's the exact same rocket with the exact same fuel. The further you go the less payload you can carry because heavier means spending more fuel.
- Kequc 11y agoIt is playing off the press they've been getting about their next year launch. They're class and I love it.
- Aelinsaar 11y agoHave issues of long term radiation and micrometeorite impacts been solved while I wasn't looking?
- ceejayoz 11y agoFor unmanned payloads - the only type SpaceX has flown thus far - that's been solved since the 1970s.
- Aelinsaar 11y agoI was thinking about Musk's planned 2018 manned mission.
- mikeash 11y agoIt's not manned.
- wagglycocks 11y agoI do not recall that announcement involved human cargo. I believe a more realistic goal was a large equipment drop.
- rtkwe 11y ago2018 isn't manned it's just tossing an unmanned Dragon variant at Mars and landing it. It's a technology demo and test mostly.
- Aelinsaar 11y agoMy bad!
- nefitty 11y agoWhat would a group want to send to Mars at this point? I can imagine research equipment, but I'm wondering what else besides scientific interests.
- barkingcat 11y agosome extremophiles from underneath the polar ice caps. some billionaire has to be thinking that their ultimate "mark on the universe" would be to start seeding life on mars. Call it the 21st century version of the Carnegie donation program. The Gates Path to Life. Sounds romantic.
- nefitty 11y agoI'm pretty sure cargo like that is at the top of their rejection list in bold letters. Don't space agencies work super hard to disinfect and sterilize equipment that needs to land on other planets? It might actually be illegal to seed life on other planets, if I recall correctly.
- JamilD 11y agoI don't think it's illegal, but it is enforced by COSPAR's recommendations on Planetary Protection. Missions to Mars actually have a much higher threshold for avoiding contamination than, say, missions to the moon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection
- barkingcat 11y agoNobody's gonna be enforcing that rule, even if it's in bold letters. Given enough money and motivation, you can get microbes to mars.
- zipwitch 11y agoFor any sufficiently motivated person or group, it won't take a SpaceX Falcon to get a payload of extremophiles to Mars. A Cubesat (or other cheap, small satellite) on the Interplanetary Transport Network could work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo... For all we know, it may already have been done. If we want to explore an uncontaminated Mars for native life, we have a very narrow window in which to do so. The ability to deliberately seed Mars with life is already amazingly cheap, and is swiftly become cheaper and more accessible.
- programminggeek 11y agoCan we stake a claim on Mars yet? I figure it'd be relatively cheap to fly something to Mars, say you own the whole planet and recoup more than the $60 million to get there...
- Tuna-Fish 11y agoWhy would anyone respect your claim?
- JamilD 11y agoYou would have a hard time finding a court to enforce your claim too, since the Outer Space Treaty states: Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
- zaroth 11y agoSeriously, depending on how long your game is, it might make sense. You would expect at first the claim would be completely disregarded, and then in some number of centuries enough inter-planetary infrastructure could develop that includes a legal framework under which you could sue for damages. Or, something... I wonder if you could send over some type of networking equipment, and then anticipate charging one heck of a bandwidth premium?
- kiba 11y agoI have a feeling that those claims aren't valid if you, or your robots aren't standing on them.
- lionyo 11y agoIf you can defend it, you can keep it
- kirrent 11y agoThe outer space treaty says you can't stake a claim but your property rights are still respected under the treaty. That is, if you have a habitat on the surface of Mars, for all intents and purposes that land is yours though there is an obligation to provide for visits from representatives other countries on a reciprocal basis.
- paulvs 11y agoOne Apollo astronaut when criticised by a commentator that the NASA moon budget would be better spent on other humanitarian causes such as feeding the poor in Africa, his response was along the lines of: The money spent annually on cosmetics in the USA dwarfs the amount spent on the NASA space program. (Can't find reference on the net.) In 2015, the global cosmetics market was $61B USD [1], that's a roughly the cost of one thousand trips to Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) with a 5,500 Kg payload, or a grand total of 5.5 mega tons to GTO. We have the resources to become a spacefaring race (at least to the neighbouring planets in the solar system), we simply need to prioritise what's really important. [1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/259217/global-make-up-market-size/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/259217/global-make-up-mar...
- sandworm101 11y agoWhy cosmetics? Why not pick on smoking, drinking, or even religion? Anyone can pick some thing they don't do/like and claim those wasted resources could be better spent on their dreams. Frankly, I'm betting that a great many people would rather have makeup than a men on Mars. Every time someone buys a fashion mag instead of mailing cash to NASA they make that choice.
- manaskarekar 11y agoFunny that some Apollo astronauts weren't fans of privatization of Space Exploration (and in turn, presumably, SpaceX). Here's one of my favorite Elon Musk interviews (2012 CBS 60 minutes) that has a reference to the topic (at 11:40): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmyT9y568Bc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmyT9y568Bc
- kaendfinger 11y agoSpaceX fan btw. I think they have since rebounded, and Musk has met them :) Buzz Aldrin was invited to the CRS-8 launch I believe.
- tunap 11y agoAccording to Buzz's book, "Mission To Mars", he has done a complete 180 to support private enterprise(I was not aware of his opposition to private exploration). He even said it is essential, IIRC.
- magicbuzz 11y agoAbout $6600 to get 1kg to Mars "-)
- freditup 11y agoThat seems... surprisingly cheap. $6600 could also get you a small apartment for two months in NYC, about 10% of the way to the TSA randomizer app, or a lawyer for a day. Sending something to Mars is by far the most incredible of those things!
- kabdib 11y ago... but no delivery mode specified. Mars orbit insertion or any landing is up to your 4020 kg of payload, I'm assuming. Wonder what delta-v you need to handle?
- schwarrrtz 11y agoAssuming they'll deliver you onto a Mars transfer orbit, you need ~2 km/s for the Mars capture maneuver. Assuming you have an engine with ~300s Isp, you need a mass fraction of exp(-2/3) ~ 0.5. So you need your payload to be about 50% fuel by mass. Also, this doesn't account for any aerobraking, which should save you some fuel. http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12660/delta-v-to-low-mars-orbit http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12660/delta-v-to-lo...
- the8472 11y ago> Assuming you have an engine with ~300s Isp, you need a mass fraction of exp(-2/3) ~ 0.5. So would taking a longer earth-mars route that allowed the use of some more efficient drive (e.g. ion engine) improve the amount of payload that could be delivered?
- schwarrrtz 11y agoYes, definitely. If you had an engine with 3000s Isp, which according to Wikipedia wouldn't be unreasonable for an ion thruster, then your mass fraction would be about exp(-2/30) ~ 0.94. So you'd only need 6% of your payload for fuel in that case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse#Examples
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Taniwha 11y agoWhere are the "to the moon" prices? I assume they're about halfway between GEO and Mars (or does aerobraking on Mars save you enough mass that they are practically the same?)
- nathancahill 11y ago┗(°0°)┛
- blazespin 11y agoProbably not a lot of market demand for it. Good question though.
- Hondor 11y agoReusing the 1st stage seems to impose a massive penalty on the payload. Chopping it down to 1/3 for the Falcon Heavy to GTO (8000 kg vs 22000 kg). In case I'm misunderstanding, do these term have these meanings? mT = metric tonne? The standard symbol is "t". It's odd that they also use kg on the same table for the same quantity so maybe it really means something else? Not millitesla I'm sure :P "fully expendable vehicle" means dumping the 1st stage into the sea instead of landing and recovering it?
- rtkwe 11y agoYes fully expendable means dumping the whole rocket like other launches. It takes a good amount of fuel to kill all the horizontal velocity the first stage built up before detaching and then a bit more for landing. Due to just the physics you're losing some of the most effective (in terms of dV per unit mass of fuel) burn in the first stage.
- Klathmon 11y agoSo hopefully someone can answer this, but what's the reason they don't put the droneships WAY down range of the rockets? So instead of having to fully stop and reverse, they position them so they can arc back down and only has to stop its momentum.
- rtkwe 11y agoCRS-8 which was the one that successfully landed on the barge recently was going 6600 kmph at 71 km when the first stage cut off, most of that was horizontal speed. They have to reduce that speed to both not break apart in the atmosphere. They can't have a lot of horizontal momentum low in the atmosphere and still land straight up on the barge. The rocket has hard limits on how much it can control it's orientation inside the atmosphere because it only has small cold gas thrusters and the grid fins to really control roll pitch and yaw.
- rm445 11y agoYes, apart from the coincidental sharing a name with Elon Musk's car company, a moderate amount of magnetic field strength is an odd thing to care about putting into orbit. I think it's just some poor, ad-hoc made-up notation. I have a little bit of sympathy with Te (occasionally pronounced 'tunny') to distinguish ton from tonne, but really if you want other people to understand your units you have to go with what the BIPM recommend.
- wichsen 11y agoHonest question: Why do space rockets and rockets in general always so closely resemble penises?
- fabulist 11y agoMaybe it's more interesting to ask, "why are penises so aerodynamic?"
- wnevets 11y agobecause they're aerodynamic
- jloughry 11y agoHonest answer: to get to orbit, you've got to go really fast (like Mach 25) and there's a lot of air between you and outer space. Air resistance goes up as the cube of velocity, so you want to minimize frontal area. Balloons or propellers can't get you up to the necessary speed; you've got to use rocket engines. For aerodynamic stability reasons, those need to go at the other end of the vehicle; they also require lots and lots of fuel, and the aerodynamically best place to put that fuel is in a long cylinder behind the nose and atop the engines. The nose of a rocket is shaped the way it is because of a trade-off between aerodynamic drag at slow speeds through thick air near the ground and very high speeds through thin air higher up. The reason some rockets have a thicker section near the tip is because it turns out to be aerodynamically permissible to make the forward section fat, yielding more space for a physically larger payload while keeping the design of the engines and fuel tank section unchanged. Rockets with lots of weight up front are dynamically stable, too.
- avivo 11y agoSo the Falcon Heavy can get 13,600 kg to Mars for $90M. By comparison, the Apollo 11 lunar (landing) module was 11,900 kg and the command/service module was 28,800 kg at launch. There were also other components that added at least 6000 kg. (according to some quick Wikipediaing) So > 46,700 kg total.
- wyattpeak 11y agoYes, the Saturn 5 was a truly ludicrously powerful rocket.
- GunboatDiplomat 11y agoA single Rocketdyne F-1 engine from the bottom of the Saturn V had about the same thrust (about 1.5 million lbs.) as the whole first stage of a Falcon 9. And it had 5 of those. A proposed new version of the F-1 would produce even more thrust, 1.8 million lbs.
- wdr1 11y agoDo the prices include tax?
- Strom 11y agoIt's customary in the US to list prices without tax, so I would guess not.
- drivingmenuts 11y agoSince SpaceX has a presence in Texas, I wonder if they pay state sales tax?
- grey-area 11y agoAlso payload to Pluto: 2,900kg http://www.spacex.com/falcon-heavy http://www.spacex.com/falcon-heavy
- curiousgal 11y agoJust curious, what happens if a rocket fails and the client's payload is destroyed?
- JshWright 11y agoThat depends on the customer. In the case of most commercial launches, the insurance policy that was required by the investors financing the launch pays out. In the case of government launches (who didn't need to borrow money for the specific purpose of the launch), they just eat the cost of the payload.
- nraynaud 11y agoIt's all fun and game to put the price online until you actually want to place an order and can't find the paypal button.