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What numbers are you using? Falcon Heavy could launch 140 000kg in 3 launches, costing 240-375$MM (estimated).

• vela 15y ago
  That's the super-heavy, which they have proposed as a competitor to a shuttle-derived (super-expensive) super-heavy. The Falcon Heavy can throw ~ 53 t into a low-Earth orbit, and its list price is 80–125 M$ (http://www.spacex.com/falcon_heavy.php http://www.spacex.com/falcon_heavy.php).
  • maaku 15y ago
    ...which are exactly the numbers I used. 3 x (53,000kg/80-125M$) = 159,000kg/240-375M$.
    • vela 15y ago
      Oops, sorry, I read too quickly and thought you meant 140 t to LEO per launch, and three launches for the full mission. (I also had NASA's DRM 5 in my head, which requires three deliveries of roughly that size per mission, rather than Mars Direct which requires two.)
• demallien 15y ago
  Ah yes, I got sidetracked halfway through writing that :) What I was thinking (as opposed to writing) was that Falcon could launch 10 000kg to Mars orbit, being three times more than what an Atlas V could launch on Juno's orbit, which actually goes beyond Mars. So yes, three launches, not 14, making the total cost for Mars Direct less than US$2 billion. But I made the same mistake for Atlas calculations, so it still ends up costing 3 times as much in launch costs...