This really looks good for launch costs long-term.<p>The Heavy costs $90 million per reusable launch with a 64,000 kg payload, or $1400 per kilogram.[1]<p>Current versions of the Falcon 9 and Heavy can fly ten times with virtually no refurbishment between flights.[2] The only part they throw away is the $7.5 million upper stage.[3] Their expendable cost is $150M and they haven't really started reusing yet, so if they actually reuse each rocket ten times, they have a lot of room to lower prices; ten launches would be $($150M - $7.5M) + ($7.5M * 10) = $21.75M per launch, or $334/kg for the rocket itself. Launch cost won't be quite that low because they also have labor, fuel, and so on, but it looks like they can get well under $1000/kg just with the Falcon Heavy.<p>The larger and fully-reusable BFR should do even better.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.space.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-triple-rocket-landing-success.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.space.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-triple-rocket-land...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/04/spacex-recovered-6-million-fairings-so-falcon-heavy-will-be-92-reusable.html#more-155979" rel="nofollow">https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/04/spacex-recovered-6-mil...</a>
Not only that, but apparently they recovered both fairings: <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-heavy-fairing-recovery-starlink/amp/&ved=2ahUKEwjojrSJwsrhAhVkiOAKHdmCDVYQyM8BMAB6BAgFEAQ&usg=AOvVaw1M3yDSNH7xzYKQG9Hcdd1Z&ampcf=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...</a><p>So 5 out of 5...
There's a great media thread on reddit where people post their own photos and videos: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/bbhz9a/rspacex_arabsat6a_media_thread_videos_images_gifs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/bbhz9a/rspacex_arab...</a><p>Here's a great video of the entire flight and landing of the side boosters in one shot, made with custom tracking software: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEZZkEXAD6Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEZZkEXAD6Q</a>
Nice video capturing the sonic booms from the booster landings here:
<a href="https://twitter.com/jefffwilliams/status/1116486329284595717" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jefffwilliams/status/1116486329284595717</a>
I was at Kennedy Space Center's Apollo/Saturn V viewing site for this launch and it was amazing. If you ever have the opportunity to be there for a Falcon Heavy launch, do yourself a favor and go. It's quite an experience and totally worth the money.
Here's the video cued up to the booster landings: <a href="https://youtu.be/TXMGu2d8c8g?t=1643" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/TXMGu2d8c8g?t=1643</a> with the main core landing a few minutes later.<p>If it's not obvious, the main core landing was much harder this time around, because of how fast it was going due to the two boosters imparting a lot of extra speed on it before they separated. If you think about it, it'll have somewhere between 1x and 3x the velocity of a normal Falcon 9 core
Can we finally stop having sci-fi films in which the whole outcome of the movie is solely determined on some heroic manual flying of a spaceship while simultaneously using manually aimed weapons like it's World War II?
I find this, and SpaceX, so inspiring. It's easy to feel that technology just moves itself forward. After all there are billions of people on Earth with people working on a countless array of different problems. And each day things seem to move forward, almost inexorably so. And so it's easy to feel that the value of the individual is really relatively low.<p>Yet imagine a world where Elon did not exist and thus SpaceX did not. Much of what he's done is stuff that we could have been working on decades ago. For some time we were. NASA as early as the 70s had already laid out plans for a Mars expedition including a tremendous space ship that would be assembled and fueled in orbit to take 5 man crew on a 600 day manned expedition to Mars, including landing of rovers similar to the moon.<p>Those plans got canned by Nixon, and space never really recovered. Not only did we not "inexorably advance" in space, we regressed. Today we're struggling to do a manned flyby of the Moon - when we went to having barely put a man in orbit in 1962, to putting a man on the moon in 1969. The point of this is that technology does not advance by itself, let alone inexorably so. I think it's extremely likely that had SpaceX not come to exist, it's entirely possible that we would still be effectively where we were at near the turn of the century.<p>Progress of our species, in spite of there being billions of us, is still dependent upon the individual. And SpaceX's plans have very much followed the old quote of Gandhi, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." But of course we've not yet won. As remarkable as this achievement is, it's but the starting line for where we need to be. And that line will not move forward unless we move it forward. But "we" does not mean waiting for somebody else to do so. As SpaceX and Musk have demonstrated, it's ultimately up to the individual to get up and move that line forward -- for the betterment of all.
Large existing discussion at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639965" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19639965</a>
The way the text appears with a downward-drawing red line really steals my attention. There are rockets on screen and I kept having my eyes avert to the fragmented text in the bottom left corner. I had to watch the video twice to keep my eyes on the rockets. I'm thinking of the UI/UX implications, subtle and effective.