Comment by demallien | Hacker News Reader

Comment by demallien | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You know, SpaceX has made such a huge difference to launch costs, that it is imaginable that the US could do a solo Mars mission. To give a real-world example (well, sort of):

Juno was recently launched aboard an Atlas V, which launches for roughly the same price as the Falcon Heavy will in a year or so's time. Juno gets placed into an orbit that will take it out beyond Mars' orbit, before returning to the Earth for a gravity-assist flyby. The flyby is necessary to double the payload that they could otherwise send to Jupiter.

Falcon Heavy can left 3 times the payload of an Atlas V, so Juno could have increased in size, and avoided the 2 and a half years it will take to execute the Earth flyby manoeuvre, all for the same price. Alternatively, a spacecraft 3 times the weight of Juno (which weighed in at 8000 pounds / 3500Kg) could be sent direct to Mars.

What could you do with all of that? Well, the Mars Direct mission requires about 140 000kg, to be assembled in orbit. That's about 14 Falcon Heavy launches, which has a total price tag of about US$1.4 billion. Of course, on top of that there are in-orbit assembly costs, and the costs of the actual Mars-bound hardware, - which would roughly double the price tag to US$3 billion. Without Falcon Heavy, that mission cost is doubled to US$ 6 billion.

I wonder what Juno would have looked like if it had three times the payload to play with...

One thing that is too common in these aerospace related budget estimates is that they go up. I am trying not to be pessimistic, but I have a feeling that their launch costs might go up a little bit. Even if it does it, their prices would still be groundbreaking nonetheless. I bought Dr. Zubrin's book on mars direct (its great!) and lets say that somehow the cost to send three spacecraft with the capability to come back (including development costs) is $10 billion (which I am pretty sure is a super under estimate but the spacex way might say otherwise). To put that into perspective google could have funded a full fledged manned mars mission and still save $2 billion to spare by not buying motorola...

But this is definitely possible even with nasa's reduced budget now that the shuttle is retired.

I doubt NASA will get to keep the money they were using for the shuttle given the austerity-crazed culture that's overtaken Congress.

Austerity? They planned to reduce the deficit by 10% in ten years and only 1% next year. Call me when they touch the debt. As it is they are still spending extravagantly.

Can we not get into that here? It always degrades into a political slugfest, and it's worse on HN because too many believe they're above politics.

You raised the subject, now you're just being rude.

I didn't say anything about the debt ceiling deal.

edit: Pointing out that NASA is not likely to keep the funding is not the same as bringing up politics. Pointing out the likely factions responsible for it would be bringing up politics, but I didn't. Because it would be better suited for a whole new submission, not a long tree here.

NASA will keep the money. If NASA was actually a space program you'd probably be right. But it's not - it's a jobs program. Did you ever wonder why "mission control" is in Houston instead of the cape, or why SRBs, which could have been much safer transported by ship, were built in land-locked Utah?

It seems like there might be an exciting "Moore's Law" like rubicon that will be crossed in space exploration. Eventually spacecraft launched later, for cheaper, start arriving before their predecessors.

Dozens of science fiction stories have been written about that, though most involve interstellar travel.

Could you list a few? (genuinely interested)

Plays a big role in the final battles of Ender's Game. It's not quite to the point where the newer ships arrive before the older ones, but the attack is planned so the ships arrive at similar times IIRC.

Er, spoiler?

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

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).

...which are exactly the numbers I used. 3 x (53,000kg/80-125M$) = 159,000kg/240-375M$.

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.)

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com