What makes Falcon-9 so special?
Apart from Elon Musk’s joke about a Nuclear Alien UFO from North Korea...
Before we answer what makes Falcon 9 so special, let's talk about what normal rockets do.
During the ascent of a rocket, the weight of the rocket will constantly change as fuel continues to burn off. As a result, most space-bound rockets use a technique called staging to reduce deadweight and increase efficiency. The method involves breaking off a large rocket into two or three smaller rockets that fall away at different stages of the launch. Most of these smaller rockets that get ejected fall into the ocean and it’s parts become unusable.
So what does Falcon-9 do so differently?
After the ejection of the first stage, the ejected rocket stabilizes itself using thrusters and fires up its engine once more guiding itself for a safe landing. This way, most of the parts of the first stage become reusable and save millions of dollars making space travel a hell of a lot cheaper.
Until the year 2000, the average cost to launch a kilogram in space was USD 18,500. But the SpaceX Falcon 9 was able to do the same thing with just USD 2,720 per kilogram.
Apart from landing the first stage, the Falcon 9 is powered by Merlin Engines. It’s one of the most efficient booster engines ever built with its thrust-to-weight ratio exceeding 150. It has a starting thrust of 190,000 pounds and goes up to 205,500 pounds out of the atmosphere. And even with such power, it follows all safety margins required to carry astronauts to space.
This makes Falcon 9 nothing less than an engineering marvel.
The Makings of Falcon 9 :
Falcon 9, gets its name from the fictional Star Wars spaceship Millennium Falcon and it’s Nine Merlin engines in its first phase.
Falcon 9 is a two-stage rocket and has 9 Merlin engines in its first stage and a Merlin 1D Vacuum engine in its second stage. The Falcon 9 has seen a lot of advancements over the period.
The v1.0 was used during 2010-2013. (Launched 5 times)
The v1.1 was used during 2013-2016. (Launched 15 times)
The Falcon 9 v1.2 (Full thrust) was used for the first time in December 2015 and this was the variant that made the first landing in the family of Falcon 9 rockets. It has been launched 64 times until now, 26 of which were using a re-flown first stage booster.
Recently, SpaceX started launching Falcon Heavy which used three Falcon 9s and costs around USD 90 million per launch. It can take a payload of 26,700 kg to GTO (Geostationary Transfer Orbit) whereas Falcon 9 would take only 8,300 kg to GTO.
As of now, Falcon 9 has completed 83 launches, 44 landings, and has re-flown 31 rockets. It has achieved a success rate of 97.7%, higher than the Russian Soyuz series (97.4%), Russian proton series (88.6%), European Ariane 5 (95.2%), and Chinese Long March 3B (94%).
What Future Lies Ahead :
SpaceX has always been in competition for Government contracts with the ULA (Union Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin). It’s estimated that ULA would charge USD 422 million for every launch but SpaceX is doing the same kind of Job is around USD 83 million. This is because most of the parts of rockets are built by SpaceX itself.
For now, the baseline price of a Falcon 9 is estimated at about USD 62 million, of which the first stage accounts for USD 30 million to USD 40 million. Elon Musk said that one Falcon 9 can be used for a dozen of times. Approximately, the launch cost of a reused Falcon 9 is USD 50 million and the future technology will allow SpaceX for a cheaper cost.
So when Elon Musk says that SpaceX will likely be able to get a rocket to Mars with half a million dollars, it wouldn’t be too crazy to believe him.
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