
SpaceX Falcon Heavy announced: 53 metric tons to low earth orbit - veastley
http://www.spacex.com/falcon_heavy.php
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garyrichardson
Wow, I like how candid they are about the pricing. It feels like they are
targeting consumers more than governments -- most 'expensive,' enterprise
targeted products are of the 'call us and ask for pricing' variety.

~~~
bradleyland
My thoughts exactly. Space X can quote a price on their website, but if I want
to know what "Infrastructure Monitoring Tool XYZ" costs, I have to call and
talk to some retired used car salesman.

I now have hope for our future.

~~~
modoc
I started a company that sells to enterprise customers and we thought we could
differentiate ourselves by making our pricing public, simple, and affordable.
It was VERY easy for anyone to figure out how much we'd charge them without
having to call. There were no hidden fees, nothing tricky or weird.

This has proven to be a mistake for two main reasons: Firstly, everyone
expects huge discounts (since all their other enterprise contracts give them
big discounts off of the list price). Trying to explain that we're already the
cheapest option they're looking at does help. They all want more off. Secondly
I think we're losing opportunities because we aren't making people call us.
Those phone calls are missed opportunities for us to really pitch our
advantages for their specific situation and needs better than our website ever
could.

~~~
rbanffy
> Secondly I think we're losing opportunities because we aren't making people
> call us

That can be an advantage - you end up spending far less than your competition
on each sale.

~~~
modoc
Not in our case at least. I'd happily spend tens of thousands of dollars to
get a new sale. And a phone call is a really great opportunity for us to
explain our advantages and establish a personal connection with someone.

~~~
rbanffy
That's because your goods are relatively expensive when compared to the call
and you can use the opportunity to upsell when the client phones in.

I said it _could_ be turned into an advantage ;-)

~~~
prawn
What about pumping up the prices somewhat (so you have room to give
discounts), listing a base price, and then saying something about calling to
outline a specific situation and seeing which discounts apply? Add in a few
testimonials about people being glad they called, etc.

That way you give people a ballpark price (while they're doing preliminary
research), give people a real motivation to call, and still give yourself
wriggle room.

I like companies who list pricing and generally avoid enquiring otherwise,
probably because of two reasons; [1] embarrassed if it's going to be way over
my budget, [2] may just be doing early research and don't want a sales guy
following me up every week afterwards.

If that is true for others also, you could easily add wording/checkbox to opt-
out of follow-ups or outline that people just running early budgets are
welcome to call too.

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jasongullickson
Elon Musk seems to be someone who really knows how to do cool things with the
spoils of a successful software company. Are there any other good examples of
people like this that have taken one big win and parlayed it into investing in
seriously futuristic technology?

~~~
arctangent
Richard Branson is a good example of an "adventure capitalist".

Here is his Wikipedia profile:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson>

Here is the Wikipedia page for his space tourism company:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic>

Also worthy of a mention is Mark Shuttleworth, who was the world's second
space tourist (and also the founder of the Ubuntu Foundation):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth>

~~~
benologist
And Richard Garriot aka Lord British -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garriott>

~~~
arctangent
Everyone on the list of space tourists has an interesting past:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism#List_of_flown_spa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism#List_of_flown_space_tourists)

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physcab
With all their partnerships and contracts, SpaceX is now a viable alternative
in the industry. Clearly they can compete on price. What remains to be
determined however is if they can compete on mission success and reliability.
You can bet their competitors are playing the fear card to their customers.

~~~
pavel_lishin
How much does a satellite cost to build? Even with a lower success rate, with
a cheaper launch cost, it might end up being a better bargain launching twice
as many satellites and losing half of them.

Of course, that wouldn't be acceptable for human cargo.

~~~
physcab
I think it depends on the customer. Probably somewhere between $50 and $300
million [1,2]. My guess is that the more successful programs will retain their
current (probably defense) customers, but SpaceX will effectively serve a new
generation of private companies who can take the risk. You also have to keep
in mind that a lot of this is political and regulated. Depending on how a
government contract swings, it might favor SpaceX or their competitors.

[1]
[http://www.aiaa.org/aerospace/images/articleimages/pdf/AA_Ja...](http://www.aiaa.org/aerospace/images/articleimages/pdf/AA_Jan06_II.pdf)
[2]
[http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2010/July/Pag...](http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2010/July/Pages/MilitaryLookstoSmallSatellites.aspx)

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

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

~~~
jessriedel
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.?

~~~
hugh3
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
> 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
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.

------
benl
The table here doesn't give cost comparisons for the other launch vehicles,
but in the press conference Elon Musk said that the Delta IV Heavy costs
roughly 3x the Falcon Heavy, meaning that the FH is approximately 6x cheaper
in $/lb to low earth orbit.

The figures quoted on the page work out to $1,070 per lb to LEO. That's less
than $200k to lift the mass of a 180lb human.

~~~
cstross
Ahem: a Russian Orlan-M spacesuit, about the best available off the shelf
today, weighs 112-120Kg (or up to 250 of your quaint imperial "pounds"). Then
you need to include air, water, and food. The structural mass of the seat the
astronaut sits in isn't insignificant, either. A Mercury capsule -- a can
sized to hold one guy in a space suit -- weighs around 1100Kg at splash-down,
minus retro-rockets, parachutes, escape tower, and most of the heat shield;
the corresponding weight for a Soviet Vostok spacecraft was around 2400Kg,
with the cosmonaut sitting in an ejector capsule weighing around 340Kg (they
ejected before touchdown because it had no soft-landing system).

All told, I reckon 1000Kg of spacecraft deadweight plus 200-250Kg of supplies
per astronaut is as low as you're going to get. So once you add your notional
85Kg astronaut, you're talking about 1500Kg at US $2300/Kg, or around US $4M
per person for a ride into orbit. If you're really slick you might be able to
shave that by 50%. 90%? I don't think so.

Done right, this will cut the cost of space tourism by nearly an order of
magnitude and will open up the possibility of the private sector actually
being able to send folks to do stuff in orbit -- like fix or upgrade comsats.
But it's not a magic wand and it's not going to reduce the cost per person to
orbit to the rough order of a year's salary for an engineer.

~~~
benl
Of course, I fully agree. Please don't read any implication about space
tourism into a simple FYI calculation. But a 6x cost reduction is a big deal,
and this figure illustrates that very well. See the follow up comment I'd
already posted here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2412096>

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ck2
This really is impressive news.

Out of curiosity, is there a plan by any government to clean up the ever
increasing mess of space junk in LEO ?

~~~
kahirsch
[http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Russia_To_Spend_2_Bln_Doll...](http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Russia_To_Spend_2_Bln_Dollars_For_Space_Clean_Up_999.html)

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jcasman
Great details, got a chuckle out of the address for questions.
sales@spacex.com "Uh, it says here prices range from $80M to $125M. Would you
consider going down to $75M?"

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aidenn0
I don't see GTO mentioned in this paper. I know the falcon 9 has GTO specs; is
the theory that you won't want to put something that large in GEO?

~~~
InclinedPlane
Haha, nooooo. GEO will actually probably be the major market for the Falcon
Heavy. I suspect specs weren't in there due to the fact that they would be
heavily dependent on the performance of the upper stage, which I think is
still being developed. I think the current estimate of GTO capacity for Falcon
Heavy is 19,500kg.

Which ironically would make the Falcon Heavy the best choice for launching a
lot of the most secretive NRO payloads (due to bloated satellite size). For
servicing the commercial satellite market it's likely that a lot of launches
would be 2 or 3 comm-sats at once.

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iwwr
Finally, some stats on payloads and orbit altitudes. Why is it so hard to get
these sorts of numbers?

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jasongullickson
This is extremely cool but I have one question about the website design;
what's with using Flash for the headings (I only noticed because I have click-
to-flash turned on)?

~~~
burgerbrain
The build rocket ships, who cares about their website?

~~~
iwwr
This is HN, we care about the website almost as much as the product itself.

~~~
robryan
Not in this case, would rather they spend the time money making the rockets
than the website.

~~~
wanderful
They're not mutually exclusive. Most web designers can't make rockets.

~~~
burgerbrain
_"Most web designers can't make rockets."_

Probably explains why they're not too into hiring web developers...

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nikcub
I am totally blown away by how a private company has done this, especially at
a cost much lower to what government programs have managed to achieve.

I was recently watching a documentary about the early jet era and I remember
being amazed at the innovation showed by those at De Havilland, Boeing, DC and
thinking 'this would never happen again, everything is too expensive' - and
here we have a private company getting us into space at 20% of the cost.

~~~
Adam503
You better not let a US military-industrial corporation like Boeing acquire
SpaceX. Those low cost launches will disappear instantly.

~~~
nikcub
That is a great point. I hope it is structured in such a way so that post-IPO
(I assume there will be one) there would be a poison pill of some description
to prevent a hostile takeover.

They have a number of government contracts now, in the value of billions of
dollars. They have only raised $125M total, so they may not need to raise much
in an IPO.

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bfe
This is excellent. Isn't 53 tonnes to LEO also somewhere around 12 tonnes to
the surface of Mars?

~~~
hugh3
Wouldn't be surprised. That'd probably be enough for a sizeable unmanned
sample-return mission, though not nearly enough for a manned mission.

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Vitaly
It might be the most powerful that can be used now, but it is not the most
powerful ever ;)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energia> could lift up to 100 tons to LEO in the
tested configuration and up to 200 tons in Hercules configuration (which never
tested though).

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portentint
Can this eventually carry people into orbit, I wonder?

~~~
ceejayoz
Yes.

<https://twitter.com/spacexer/status/55291286919454720>

> Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are designed to meet all published NASA standards
> to carry crew.

(disclaimer: you must weigh less than 53 metric tons)

~~~
StavrosK
> (disclaimer: you must weigh less than 53 metric tons)

Damnit!

~~~
hugh3
If you're going to get modded down anyway, you should have gone with a "your
mom" joke here instead.

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hugh3
There's only one thing I don't like about this, and that's the name. Falcon
Heavy? Doesn't sound cool.

SpaceX has done an excellent job of coming up with cool-sounding names for
everything they do, second only to US muscle car manufacturers of the 1960s.
Falcon! Merlin! Draco! They even skipped straight from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9
because the numbers in between just don't sound nearly as cool.

But "heavy"? Sure, it's descriptive, but it's boring. Falcon X would be much
better. Or Super-Falcon. Or ThunderCougarFalconBird...

~~~
JshWright
Skipped the boring numbers? Count the number of engines on first stage of the
Falcon 1... now count the number of engines on the first stage of the Falcon
9...

~~~
Unseelie
Is it our fault that their engineers decided 8 engines just wasn't a cool
enough number of engines?

