It’s a Four-Stage Wonder
Get ready to blast off:
The Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX will soon have a launch site.The company–better known as SpaceX than by its official name, Space Exploration Technologies–announced earlier this week that it has broken ground in Southern California at the Vandenberg Air Force Base, which is a Department of Defense space launch and missile testing site.
SpaceX has high hopes for the Falcon Heavy, which will be used by NASA to bring cargo to the International Space Station.The rocket is the first to break the $1,000-per-pound-to-orbit barrier, a feat that many in the space industry thought wouldn’t happen for quite some time.
That’s a remarkable price, and even more remarkable if it can hit as small a “box” in orbit as ULA hits regularly, putting satellites into orbit. Getting a bird into the sweet spot greatly extends its service life. Getting it up there so cheaply would save million — billions? — more.
We can do that former. Doing the latter would go a long way towards getting customers back from the Russians.
Go, Falcon Heavy!
When your employment base is 500 [/handwave] people rather than NASA’s cast of thousands, not even including the contractor base, it’s real easy to offer prices NASA could never meet.
Delos D. Harriman lives.
Are the Russians still playing the “We’re not going to let anything dock with the ISS until it can demonstrate its safety by docking with the ISS” game?
I am sure there is some confusion here, because one cannot use the Vandenberg Air Force Base to launch anything to the ISS. The reason, you have to launch East not North or South or West, which are the only directions you can launch from Vandenberg since if you launch East, you will overfly California during the critical powered part causing significant down range safety problems to the people living under the launch path. Someone hasn’t done their homework.
Or perhaps they have. Lost of empty east of VAFB. Not as empty as Kazakhstan but not like they’d be launching over LA.
They already launched 2 Falcon 9s from Canaveral, they are probably building at Vandenberg so they can do polar launches.