Is SpaceX The Future?

Binoy Peries
4 min readOct 30, 2020

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On July 20th, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin became the first humans ever to land on the moon. It really was one giant leap for mankind. Thus began the journey, of humans becoming interplanetary civilization but fast-forwarding 50 years and we are still dreaming of going to mars. What went wrong?

Why didn’t we keep going?

Even though Apollo 11 mission was successful. The total cost of the apollo mission was 25.4 billion dollars at that time (152 billion in today’s dollars). The rocket Saturn V along cost 49.9 billion dollars in today’s currency, and at that time we were not capable of reusing these rockets. This was a cost that was to be incurred per launch, which made governments unwilling to spend that amount of money without a clear motive. Moreover, no individual was bold enough to invest that amount of money in a high-risk field like space travel. Thus, the dream of going to Mars came to a halt.

Elon Musk & SpaceX

SpaceX arrived on the scene as a rising Aerospace company hell-bent on resuming humanity’s natural tendency for exploration. Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, with a simple goal: reduce space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars. However, there was one major problem; the technology already available could not even come close to the specifications required to achieve this goal.

The biggest technology bottleneck was the use of traditional boosters, which propel the rocket before getting detached and discarded on falling back to Earth. This made it impossible for the rockets to return from orbit back to earth. It is estimated that over 80% of rocket launch costs go into building the rocket.

What made SpaceX so special?

Falcon 9

The Falcon 9 was the first key innovation introduced by SpaceX that introduced the extremely complicated concept of reusability of rockets. As the world’s first orbital reusable rocket, it has the capability of transporting people and payloads safely into the earth’s orbit and return. Traditional boosters were replaced with a self-landing booster, granting the Falcon 9 rocket the capability of landing autonomously, with an accuracy no man ever could achieve. Furthermore, this reusability reduced the cost per launch by a significant amount.

Falcon Heavy

Falcon Heavy

The second key innovation was their gigantic rocket Falcon Heavy. Heavy is currently the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two. It is composed of 3 Falcon 9 engine cores, which consist of 27 Merlin engines, that together generate more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.

It is capable of sending astronauts to the ISS, the Moon, Mars, and beyond, all whilst being completely reusable and having a lower cost. Moreover, The Heavy has the ability to lift more than the weight of a 737 jet, loaded with passengers, luggage, and fuel. This sort of payload capacity will allow us to carry an incredible amount of supplies that are needed to build a human civilization on Mars.

On February 6th, 2018, FH was launched successfully with a dummy payload. What made this event more mind-blowing was that despite being the most powerful operational rocket, it only cost appr. $90 million per launch, whereas the closest competitor, the Delta iv Heavy would cost appr. $435 million per launch.

Crew Dragon Capsule

Their latest innovation, which made space-traveling trend again. This became the first space vehicle to launch humans from American soil after 9 years and the first step towards commercialized space traveling.

Crew Dragon Capsule

key features:

·It is equipped with an innovative abort system. launch escape system (LES). It consists of a set of SpaceX-designed Super Draco engines that fire in the event of an emergency to propel the capsule and its crew safely away from the rocket.

· The capsule is also designed to be “two faults tolerant”. i.e. even if any two things fail, such as a flight computer and a thruster, the capsule can still bring the crew home safely.

· The vehicle is designed to dock with the space stations (ISS) autonomously.

Future of SpaceX

  1. Mission Mars

SpaceX's ultimate goal is to make Humans an Interplanetary Species. There is a common belief that humans cannot survive on earth indefinitely. Human civilization will go extinct if we do not become a multi-planetary species. Mission to Mars aims to achieve that by taking the first step by colonizing Mars.

2. Private space services

With SpaceX’s next big rocket, the Starship, which is supposed to be the world’s most powerful launch vehicle ever developed. SpaceX is planning to launch private space services which will promote space tourism. Which could lead us to a huge economical change. the first private journey is planned to take place in the year 2023.

Conclusion

This is just a glimpse of what SpaceX, holds for us in the future. SpaceX single-handedly reignited the aerospace industry for the better and certainly, the future will be bright and full of surprises.

“You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than in the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”

-Elon Musk

Binoy Peries

October 2020

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Binoy Peries
Binoy Peries

Written by Binoy Peries

Computer Science and Engineering undergraduate at University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

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