Why NASA Could Use a Rocket like the Falcon Heavy and Save a Lot of Money

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, (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. You have to have that equipment self-assemble to create a shielded habitat, protecting any humans from the harsh radiation, dust storms, and extreme temperatures that pervade Mars. And you have to have enough of it so that when the humans arrive, they have the 6-18 months of supplies necessary to sustain them until they can make a return trip. An endeavor like this was previously estimated to cost $50-150 billion: a prohibitive number for getting to Mars with NASA's current budget. But with the first successful SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, sending humans to Mars might just become a reality.

Since the 1980s, after the retirement of the Saturn V rocket and the beginning of the Space Shuttle era, one of the biggest challenges for Earth's space program has been to send large payloads long distances. The situation becomes even more dire when we consider what it takes to land on the surface of another world; there's a big technical leap from sending a satellite into orbit around a world and safely landing a spacecraft on a planet's surface. While multi-ton satellites around Mars and off into deep space are commonplace, like Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Rosetta and Juno, we've never even landed a one-ton payload on Mars or a world beyond it. The Curiosity rover holds the record, and spectacular as it is, there's no way a crewed mission could work with the same level of technology.

But this is where the dream of commercial spaceflight comes in. When we were launching Saturn V rockets, they were 3-stage behemoths. At 110 meters tall and weighing 3 million kilograms, the vehicle that brought humanity to the Moon was capable of taking up to 48,600 kg of mass beyond the gravitational bonds of Earth. But the cost of a single Saturn V launch was exorbitant: $1.16 billion per launch, with no reusable parts. The best commercial heavy lift vehicle, the 2-stage Falcon Heavy, is somewhat less impressive by comparison. It's smaller (70 meters tall), lighter (half the mass of the Saturn V), and can only carry about a third as much mass: a payload of 16,800 kg.

However, the commercial Falcon Heavy has a huge advantage: cost. Instead of the $1,160,000,000 per launch of the Saturn V, a single Falcon Heavy launch costs a mere $90,000,000. With its engines built out of three Falcon 9 cores stitched together, it will be relatively easy to mass produce. And price-wise, that's 7.8% the cost of a Saturn V launch; in other words, you can launch 13 Falcon Heavy rockets for the price of one Saturn V.)

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