After flying to the edge of space, a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster successfully returned to Earth, deployed its landing legs, and hovered for a moment. The ability, known as a soft landing, could allow the company to dramatically reduce the cost of spaceflight and one day land rockets on Mars.
Because it came down at a spot in the Atlantic Ocean, SpaceX’s rocket had nothing solid to land on. It crashed into the ocean and was lost to large waves from a storm before the company could get a boat out to recover it. But in the next few months, SpaceX hopes to reproduce the achievement.
“We expect to get more and more precise with each landing. If all goes well, I am optimistic that we can land a stage back at Cape Canaveral at the end of the year,” said entrepreneur and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, during a press conference Apr. 25 in Washington D.C.
By recovering the spent stages, SpaceX predicts it could reduce the cost of their launches, currently around $60 million per flight, by as much as 70 percent. Ultimately they target reducing costs by about ten times.
SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell talks at the event last summer and discussed the price points for a reusable Falcon 9. The comments begin at the 13:17 mark.
“If we get this right, and we’re trying very hard to get this right, we’re looking at launches to be in the 5 to 7 million dollar range, which would really change things dramatically,” Shotwell said.
The full transcript of the talk is here
Spacex is developing a reusable launch vehicle where really the only cost associated with that vehicle - the non recurring, excuse me the initial investment in the stages themselves but the cost of fuel and the mission operations. So if we get this right - and were trying really hard to get this right - "we're looking at launches to be in the five to seven million dollar range , which would really change things dramatically.
From a commercial perspective Falcon Heavy, it's an over-sized vehicle. Its got more capacity than folks in this room need - unless we wanna put two of the biggest satellites on this vehicle and fly them both to GTO. That would yield a pretty respectable price for folks. But what we are really trying to do is, push the bounds of technology with respect to size of launch vehicles, and see if we can put some really interesting things into the solar system and hopefully land some things on Mars as well. This will be the largest vehicle flying since the Saturn moon rockets. We're sandbagging the GTO-numbers, actually analytically it looks like were gonna take 19 tons to GTO. But we're being conservative, with the 12 metric tons. And this will be - hopefully - a vehicle that takes many things to Mars.
"Will space travel be as ubiquitous as air travel? [SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell] does not think it will be as ubiquitous. She does not believe the costs will ever get quite as affordable as air travel. But it will increase thousands of thousandfold. Right now the cost to get to the ISS - to LEO - is 67 million dollars per seat and we'd like to see space travel, we'd like to see folks going be able to get to Mars for a couple of hundred thousands, maybe half a million Dollars.
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Because it came down at a spot in the Atlantic Ocean, SpaceX’s rocket had nothing solid to land on. It crashed into the ocean and was lost to large waves from a storm before the company could get a boat out to recover it. But in the next few months, SpaceX hopes to reproduce the achievement.
“We expect to get more and more precise with each landing. If all goes well, I am optimistic that we can land a stage back at Cape Canaveral at the end of the year,” said entrepreneur and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, during a press conference Apr. 25 in Washington D.C.
By recovering the spent stages, SpaceX predicts it could reduce the cost of their launches, currently around $60 million per flight, by as much as 70 percent. Ultimately they target reducing costs by about ten times.
SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell talks at the event last summer and discussed the price points for a reusable Falcon 9. The comments begin at the 13:17 mark.
“If we get this right, and we’re trying very hard to get this right, we’re looking at launches to be in the 5 to 7 million dollar range, which would really change things dramatically,” Shotwell said.
The full transcript of the talk is here
Spacex is developing a reusable launch vehicle where really the only cost associated with that vehicle - the non recurring, excuse me the initial investment in the stages themselves but the cost of fuel and the mission operations. So if we get this right - and were trying really hard to get this right - "we're looking at launches to be in the five to seven million dollar range , which would really change things dramatically.
From a commercial perspective Falcon Heavy, it's an over-sized vehicle. Its got more capacity than folks in this room need - unless we wanna put two of the biggest satellites on this vehicle and fly them both to GTO. That would yield a pretty respectable price for folks. But what we are really trying to do is, push the bounds of technology with respect to size of launch vehicles, and see if we can put some really interesting things into the solar system and hopefully land some things on Mars as well. This will be the largest vehicle flying since the Saturn moon rockets. We're sandbagging the GTO-numbers, actually analytically it looks like were gonna take 19 tons to GTO. But we're being conservative, with the 12 metric tons. And this will be - hopefully - a vehicle that takes many things to Mars.
"Will space travel be as ubiquitous as air travel? [SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell] does not think it will be as ubiquitous. She does not believe the costs will ever get quite as affordable as air travel. But it will increase thousands of thousandfold. Right now the cost to get to the ISS - to LEO - is 67 million dollars per seat and we'd like to see space travel, we'd like to see folks going be able to get to Mars for a couple of hundred thousands, maybe half a million Dollars.
Read more »
