While in university, Elon Reeve Musk (AKA. Elongated Muskrat (AKA. The Second Coming) ) wanted to focus on three things: renewable energy, rocketry and the internet. He created
ome of the first online business directories and co-founded X.com which eventually merged with Confinity
to become PayPal.
Space Exploration Technologies Inc. (SpaceX) was founded in 2002 when Elon Musk sold PayPal to
Ebay. He instantly became 180m richer. He spent all his money on Tesla Inc. and
Solar City investments, and founding SpaceX.
Elon Musk initially wanted to buy repurposed ICBMs off of Russia in order to send a greenhouse to Mars and reignite the spark
of exploration in the general public. When the prices were too high and the Russians told him to bugger off, he decided to found
SpaceX. His goal was to create cheap, reliable access to space. SpaceX does this with reusable rockets.
The way SpaceX achieves reusability is by landing first stage boosters either on land or on an Autonomous Spaceport
Drone Ship (ASDS). There are three of these: Of Course I Still love You (OCISLY), Just Read the Instructions (JRTI)
A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASoG). ASoG is still under construction. All of these droneships are named after spaceships
in Ian M. Banks' "Culture" series of books.
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Falcon 9
Falcon 9 is the workhorse rocket of SpaceX. It has lofted 75 payloads (the things it is launching) to date.
SpaceX has also reused some of it's 1st stage boosters 27 times, reccently launching a
first stage booster for the fourth time (11th November 2019).
The ultimate goal of the Falcon 9 is to be table to reuse the first booster stage
booster 10 times.
SpaceX also wants to reuse the fiarings (the casing at the top that protects the payload). So far one
fairing has been caught and two have been refurbished and relown. The cost of a Falcon 9 is around $60m
and Elon Musk said on twitter that this launch was around 80% reusable. That means that the launch cost around 12m to 15m!
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Falcon Heavy
The falcon Heavy is SpaceX's newest OPERATIONAL rocket. It is "basically" three Falcon 9s strapped together.
Everything except the second stage is reusable.
The side cores (two outer parts of the first stage) and the
centre core (middle part) are capable of return to launch site (RTLS) and droneship landings respectively.
My favourite video from any genre. PERIOD.
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Starship / Superheavy
Starship is SpaceX's latest rocket. When fully developed,
it will be a fully reusable two stage rocket. It is being designed
primarily for manned missions to mars but can actually launch and land
anywhere in the Solar system.
Starship is a beast. The first stage will be 68m tall! That is 2m shorter than
a completely assembled Falcon 9 / Heavy.
It is also 9m in diameter and can lift 100 metric tonnes to earth orbit. If
they can pull off in orbit refueling, that means 100 tonnes to mars! The largest
thing to land on mars to date is the Curiosity rover which is only 899kg.
Just sit on that for a moment.
More Awesome Facts
The goal of Starship is for it have airline like reusability. This can only be solved with 100%
reusability.
Starship will be able to launch up to 1000 times. This is insane, but awesome. This would
make it incredibly cheap. The price of fuel will be around $900,000 and overall a launch will
be hopefully around $2m. Compare this to the price of a Falcon Heavy ($60m)- the next biggest rocket
in their lineup - and you begin to see why this is so transformative.
This truly is a modern Henry
Ford moment.
When Will it Launch?
It already has... sort of. On the 25th July 2019, the Starship prototype, named Starhopper, launched
150m into the air. But wait you say, that's no starship! That's only a prototype. A Starship
prototype is slated to launch in late 2019 or early 2020! What exiting times to live in.
