By Encouraging the Private Rocket Industry to Step Up, Private Public Partnerships Can Lead to Great Success.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Launch Brings Humanity One Giant Leap Closer To Mars

If you want to send humans to Mars, and have them stay there for more than a couple of weeks, there are a number of challenges to overcome. You have to first land, successfully, a slew of equipment on the martian surface.

From article, (The first successful launch of the Falcon Heavy occurred on February 6, 2018, and was a spectacular demonstration of what the rocket is capable of. While it only went to low-Earth orbit, it's quite capable of heading to geosynchronous orbits or even escaping Earth's gravity, headed to the Moon, Mars, or even beyond. Best of all, both the first and second stages are capable of being fully recovered, with the heavy launch boosters successfully landing at Cape Kennedy on the Falcon Heavy's first test launch. 

 You'll have to expend the central core to go to Mars, but that is an extremely small price to pay. The cost of launch has always been a fixed and spectacularly high one for any space-based mission. The farther you want to go into the Universe, the less you can take with you, as escaping from Earth's gravity requires a tremendous expenditure of energy. For every kilogram of mass you want to send to another world, it costs you 63 million Joules of energy, meaning a full-loaded Falcon Heavy designed for launch to Mars would require a small atomic bomb's worth of energy to get it there. That's what's happening with every rocket launch. Yet this time, we'll recover the overwhelming majority of the rocket for reuse.

Going to Mars will still require a tremendous amount of investment, development, and a slew of obstacles to overcome. But the most prohibitive one has always been cost. The reason Mars timelines have always been pushed out to many decades is because, based on the current, paltry NASA budget, there simply isn't enough money going into the agency to accomplish a grand mission like this in 10 years or less.

The Augustine Commission, seven years ago, claimed it would take an investment of $36 billion to build a heavy launch vehicle capable of taking humans to Mars. SpaceX did it for less than $2 billion.

There are still a slew of obstacles to overcome when it comes to taking on the challenge of Mars. But the journey to another planet was always set to begin with a single launch. There were many naysayers out there to a commercial hand in the spaceflight industry, but NASA staked their hopes of future long-distance space missions on the idea of public-private partnerships. The successful launch, deployment, and recovery of the Falcon Heavy is the proof-of-concept that settles the issue. For a cost that looks to be lower than it's ever been, Mars is within reach.)

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