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Apparently the Saturn V could lift 119 metric tons to LEO.

by paul 16y ago

ceejayoz 16y ago
At $1.11 billion per launch, though. SpaceX is promising $80-$125 million for half the payload.
- paul 16y ago
  Yeah, SpaceX is super-cool. I was just curious how it compared with the most powerful rocket ever built.
- jessriedel 16y ago
  I'm actually surprised things haven't gotten cheaper by more than a factor of 5 in half a century. (If anyone's wondering, $1.11 Billion is in 2011 dollars.) Does anyone know what the primary costs are? People, construction, raw materials, etc.?
  - daniel-cussen 16y ago
    I've heard it's people to make sure nothing goes wrong.
  - InclinedPlane 16y ago
    Fixed costs are usually the biggies, especially R&D and the infrastructure for supporting production. Probably the biggest impediment to lowering launch prices over that time period was the existence of the Shuttle. It was sold with promises of capabilities (especially in terms of flight rate) that it would never have, and that disrupted a lot of other launch vehicle development at the time. Worse yet, it kept billions per year of NASA funds locked up maintaining jobs for the standing army of Shuttle engineers instead of being spent on improving launch systems.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    One interesting thing I read Elon Musk saying the other day is that it's definitely not fuel -- the cost of fuelling a Falcon 9 is actually only about the same as the cost of fuelling a Boeing 747. The problem is that the cost of building a Falcon 9 is still similar to the cost of building a 747, and you throw it away after one flight. So if you could recover and re-use the booster rocket then you'd be looking at a serious cost reduction.
    - Tuna-Fish 16y ago
      > So if you could recover and re-use the booster rocket then you'd be looking at a serious cost reduction. This was the logic behind the space shuttle. But unfortunately, they have to survive to high stresses that inspecting and repairing them between launches costs more than building a simpler disposable launch vehicles. I honestly believe that as long as we will be using rockets, the best cost savings will not come from reuse, but from increasing the launch volumes to the point where launch vehicles stop being hand-built boutique items and start being mass-produced commodities. This announcement gives me hope that this might happen during my lifetime.
      - InclinedPlane 16y ago
        The Shuttle is an excellent example of how an initially good idea (reusable launch vehicles) can become twisted and perverted by excessive compromises and congressional meddling. The Shuttle as it was built was actually a step backward from previous generations. Not only was it not properly reusable (it was at best refurbishable and partially reusable), it's unusual characteristics caused it to require a huge standing army of engineers to keep the program going, regardless of flight rate. As the true limits to the flight-rate of the Shuttle came to light it became obvious that no matter what the Shuttle system was capable of it wasn't capable of lowering launch costs over conventional expendable boosters. It's a good case study in the downfalls of a waterfall type process and of committing too early to a system before it's true character is known.
      - hugh3 16y ago
        I honestly believe that as long as we will be using rockets, the best cost savings will not come from reuse, but from increasing the launch volumes to the point where launch vehicles stop being hand-built boutique items and start being mass-produced commodities. I'm not sure that economies of scale can get you that far when you're talking something as complicated as a rocket. How many jet engines does Rolls Royce make every year? Rolls-Royce and GE make many hundreds (thousands?) of jet engines per year, but they still cost a crapload of money each. You might be right, maybe fully-recoverable rockets aren't possible. On the other hand, being personally unqualified to judge, if I've got some random piscinymous internet commenter telling me that it's not possible on one hand, and Elon Musk telling me that it is possible on the other, I'm more inclined to believe the dude who owns a rocket company.
  - Semiapies 16y ago
    Aside from what's already been mentioned, no real competition. You had NASA or nothing for decades.
  - IDisposableHero 16y ago
    I'm actually surprised things haven't gotten cheaper by more than a factor of 5 in half a century. We're used to electronics getting cheaper as we find ways to make smaller and faster chips. We get change driven by Moore's law. Getting to orbit is governed by simple lifting against gravity, and that hasn't changed at all. ( It's still 9.8 m/s^2 ) A Falcon rocket looks a lot like a Saturn rocket, so desipite a lot of ideas, a radically different and better design hasn't been commericialised yet.
bugsy 16y ago
The Falcon XX is planned to have a 140 metric ton to LEO capacity, but that comes later, for when we need to ship cargo to Mars colony without requiring a space station stop. http://news.discovery.com/space/will-a-commercial-flight-be-first-to-mars.html http://news.discovery.com/space/will-a-commercial-flight-be-...
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Unless you extract fuel from the environment on your stop, it's a very bad idea to make a stop when you are shipping cargo to space. Any change in trajectory spends fuel. If you absolutely have to send the vehicle in pieces, you'd better send them to the lowest energy orbit, assemble them there and blast off. The ISS is not on a particularly useful orbit for this and the only reason I imagine to stop by would be to use the extra helping hands of the resident crew to do the required assembly. And shipping cargo to Mars doesn't need to be very expensive if you are patient - you send the cargo towards a low-perihelion trajectory and deploy a solar sail closest to the Sun. It may take a good couple years for the shipment to get to Mars, but the delta-V on the way up will be free. If you send the shipments well ahead of the landing crews, they'll have lots of toys when they arrive. But I agree with the SpaceX folks. Nuclear is the way to go if we are to even go back to the Moon.
  - ceejayoz 16y ago
    > The ISS is not on a particularly useful orbit for this and the only reason I imagine to stop by would be to use the extra helping hands of the resident crew to do the required assembly. That, and the living quarters. If it's going to take a couple months to put stuff together and test, you don't want to be living out of an Apollo-sized capsule.
  - bugsy 16y ago
    I didn't mean to suggest the ISS in any way. I am talking about the various plans such as von Braun's Das Marsprojekt, where you assemble a fleet of (for example) 3720 ton Mars ships in orbit: http://www.thelivingmoon.com/41pegasus/01archives/Von_Braun_1952.htm http://www.thelivingmoon.com/41pegasus/01archives/Von_Braun_... It's not possible to launch a 3720 ton ship to Mars from the surface in one shot, it has to be assembled in space from parts and fuel shipped up in multiple launches.

Apparently the Saturn V could lift 119 metric tons to LEO.

by paul 16y ago

Apparently the Saturn V could lift 119 metric tons to LEO.

ceejayoz 16y ago

At $1.11 billion per launch, though. SpaceX is promising $80-$125 million for half the payload.

paul 16y ago
Yeah, SpaceX is super-cool. I was just curious how it compared with the most powerful rocket ever built.
jessriedel 16y ago
I'm actually surprised things haven't gotten cheaper by more than a factor of 5 in half a century. (If anyone's wondering, $1.11 Billion is in 2011 dollars.) Does anyone know what the primary costs are? People, construction, raw materials, etc.?
- daniel-cussen 16y ago
  I've heard it's people to make sure nothing goes wrong.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  Fixed costs are usually the biggies, especially R&D and the infrastructure for supporting production. Probably the biggest impediment to lowering launch prices over that time period was the existence of the Shuttle. It was sold with promises of capabilities (especially in terms of flight rate) that it would never have, and that disrupted a lot of other launch vehicle development at the time. Worse yet, it kept billions per year of NASA funds locked up maintaining jobs for the standing army of Shuttle engineers instead of being spent on improving launch systems.
- hugh3 16y ago
  One interesting thing I read Elon Musk saying the other day is that it's definitely not fuel -- the cost of fuelling a Falcon 9 is actually only about the same as the cost of fuelling a Boeing 747. The problem is that the cost of building a Falcon 9 is still similar to the cost of building a 747, and you throw it away after one flight. So if you could recover and re-use the booster rocket then you'd be looking at a serious cost reduction.
  - Tuna-Fish 16y ago
    > So if you could recover and re-use the booster rocket then you'd be looking at a serious cost reduction. This was the logic behind the space shuttle. But unfortunately, they have to survive to high stresses that inspecting and repairing them between launches costs more than building a simpler disposable launch vehicles. I honestly believe that as long as we will be using rockets, the best cost savings will not come from reuse, but from increasing the launch volumes to the point where launch vehicles stop being hand-built boutique items and start being mass-produced commodities. This announcement gives me hope that this might happen during my lifetime.
    - InclinedPlane 16y ago
      The Shuttle is an excellent example of how an initially good idea (reusable launch vehicles) can become twisted and perverted by excessive compromises and congressional meddling. The Shuttle as it was built was actually a step backward from previous generations. Not only was it not properly reusable (it was at best refurbishable and partially reusable), it's unusual characteristics caused it to require a huge standing army of engineers to keep the program going, regardless of flight rate. As the true limits to the flight-rate of the Shuttle came to light it became obvious that no matter what the Shuttle system was capable of it wasn't capable of lowering launch costs over conventional expendable boosters. It's a good case study in the downfalls of a waterfall type process and of committing too early to a system before it's true character is known.
    - hugh3 16y ago
      I honestly believe that as long as we will be using rockets, the best cost savings will not come from reuse, but from increasing the launch volumes to the point where launch vehicles stop being hand-built boutique items and start being mass-produced commodities. I'm not sure that economies of scale can get you that far when you're talking something as complicated as a rocket. How many jet engines does Rolls Royce make every year? Rolls-Royce and GE make many hundreds (thousands?) of jet engines per year, but they still cost a crapload of money each. You might be right, maybe fully-recoverable rockets aren't possible. On the other hand, being personally unqualified to judge, if I've got some random piscinymous internet commenter telling me that it's not possible on one hand, and Elon Musk telling me that it is possible on the other, I'm more inclined to believe the dude who owns a rocket company.
- Semiapies 16y ago
  Aside from what's already been mentioned, no real competition. You had NASA or nothing for decades.
- IDisposableHero 16y ago
  I'm actually surprised things haven't gotten cheaper by more than a factor of 5 in half a century. We're used to electronics getting cheaper as we find ways to make smaller and faster chips. We get change driven by Moore's law. Getting to orbit is governed by simple lifting against gravity, and that hasn't changed at all. ( It's still 9.8 m/s^2 ) A Falcon rocket looks a lot like a Saturn rocket, so desipite a lot of ideas, a radically different and better design hasn't been commericialised yet.

bugsy 16y ago

The Falcon XX is planned to have a 140 metric ton to LEO capacity, but that comes later, for when we need to ship cargo to Mars colony without requiring a space station stop. http://news.discovery.com/space/will-a-commercial-flight-be-first-to-mars.html http://news.discovery.com/space/will-a-commercial-flight-be-...

rbanffy 16y ago
Unless you extract fuel from the environment on your stop, it's a very bad idea to make a stop when you are shipping cargo to space. Any change in trajectory spends fuel. If you absolutely have to send the vehicle in pieces, you'd better send them to the lowest energy orbit, assemble them there and blast off. The ISS is not on a particularly useful orbit for this and the only reason I imagine to stop by would be to use the extra helping hands of the resident crew to do the required assembly. And shipping cargo to Mars doesn't need to be very expensive if you are patient - you send the cargo towards a low-perihelion trajectory and deploy a solar sail closest to the Sun. It may take a good couple years for the shipment to get to Mars, but the delta-V on the way up will be free. If you send the shipments well ahead of the landing crews, they'll have lots of toys when they arrive. But I agree with the SpaceX folks. Nuclear is the way to go if we are to even go back to the Moon.
- ceejayoz 16y ago
  > The ISS is not on a particularly useful orbit for this and the only reason I imagine to stop by would be to use the extra helping hands of the resident crew to do the required assembly. That, and the living quarters. If it's going to take a couple months to put stuff together and test, you don't want to be living out of an Apollo-sized capsule.
- bugsy 16y ago
  I didn't mean to suggest the ISS in any way. I am talking about the various plans such as von Braun's Das Marsprojekt, where you assemble a fleet of (for example) 3720 ton Mars ships in orbit: http://www.thelivingmoon.com/41pegasus/01archives/Von_Braun_1952.htm http://www.thelivingmoon.com/41pegasus/01archives/Von_Braun_... It's not possible to launch a 3720 ton ship to Mars from the surface in one shot, it has to be assembled in space from parts and fuel shipped up in multiple launches.