Main Engine Cut Off - T+72: SpaceX’s Motivation for Falcon Heavy

Episode Date: February 13, 2018

SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy last week and shook up the space launch world. I spend some time thinking through SpaceX’s motivations for building Falcon Heavy, and what its effects might be on the wo...rld around it. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 27 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Laszlo, and six anonymous—and 125 other supporters on Patreon. 05 - The Volume of Anti-Starmanism | Off-Nominal Falcon Heavy Demo from the Press Site - YouTube Falcon Heavy Test Flight - YouTube Military certification the next big test for Falcon Heavy - SpaceNews.com SES Rethinks GEO Model - Main Engine Cut Off SpaceX no longer planning crewed missions on Falcon Heavy - SpaceNews.com Email your thoughts and comments to anthony@mainenginecutoff.com Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, and it is a big week for space. Falcon Heavy has successfully launched. I'm sure you're aware of that if you're listening to this show at this point. That has been the big story the past week. So I want to spend a little time breaking it down and talking about some things that we should look for coming out of the launch. at the press site, Kennedy Space Center. Amazing time. If you want to hear a little bit about what it was like to be there for the launch and what the experience was the surrounding couple of days, head over to offnominal.space. That's the podcast I do with Jake from We Martians.
Starting point is 00:00:55 We were both down there together hanging out for the couple of days that we were in Florida. And the fifth episode of Off Nominal, which is coming out the same day as this podcast, we talk about our entire experience, our trip, and about Starman, and about all of the kind of softer side of Falcon Heavy. But this show I want to focus on some of the thoughts I've been kicking around in my head the past week or so about what Falcon Heavy means, what we might see from it in the future,
Starting point is 00:01:23 why SpaceX went through with it and built it anyway. So I don't really have an overarching thesis, you know, a singular thesis about Falcon Heavy, but I do have, you know, five to ten different things that I've been thinking about. So let's dive in there. And I think a good place to start is the day before the launch, Jake and I were having lunch in Florida, in Port Canaveral, right across from where the drone ships pull up to dock. And I asked him a question,
Starting point is 00:01:53 maybe had a little bit of a premonition that this would actually be answered during the week. But I asked him, how many times do you think SpaceX tried to cancel Falcon Heavy or thought about canceling Falcon Heavy or even discussed it? Because it's a really interesting thing when you look at the history. The original Falcon 9 only could do a couple of metric tons to Leo. Since then, the upgrades have
Starting point is 00:02:18 taken it to a spot where it can take 22 metric tons to Leo. So it is a massive increase, almost three times what the original Falcon 9 could do, now it can do to Leo. And at the same time, the original Falcon Heavy was designed to take 25 tons to Leo. Since then, it has grown to take 60-some tons through all of the upgrades of Falcon 9. And that upgrade path is maybe the
Starting point is 00:02:48 biggest reason that Falcon Heavy is as delayed as it is. Because SpaceX kept upgrading Falcon 9 and realizing that Falcon 9 could do all the things that it needed for a launch service. There weren't a lot of payloads, and there still aren't quite honestly, that need Falcon Heavy. So they were able to upgrade Falcon 9, upgrade it, upgrade it, upgrade it, and keep it in front of what they needed as far as launch services go. So because of that, the need for Falcon Heavy was kind of delayed and put off because there wasn't anything that required Falcon Heavy. So why redesign the rocket twice, or why redesign two rockets at the same time, you know, rolling out a Falcon Heavy with the original Falcon 9, and then upgrading Falcon 9 and redeveloping Falcon Heavy for that upgraded
Starting point is 00:03:36 version. Rather, they waited until they pushed Falcon 9 about as far as they could take it, and then built Falcon Heavy. And that's what led to this multi-year delay is a combination of not needing the payload capacity and also, you know, waiting to finish development on Falcon 9 before they rolled out Heavy. And in the press conference the day after the launch, Elon Musk answered that question and said that SpaceX tried to cancel Falcon Heavy three times. And, you know, he said that they tried to cancel Falcon Heavy three times. And, you know, he said that they tried to cancel it three times. That might have been three particular meetings in which they could have walked out the door and there would be no more Falcon Heavy. But I'm
Starting point is 00:04:14 sure it's many magnitudes more if you consider how many times an individual engineer said, this is such a large task and so little use case that we can see today. Why are we building this thing? Or, you know, the times that Elon Musk asked people around the factory, do you think we should still build Falcon Heavy? What do you think about this? I'm sure there was many magnitudes more times when it was discussed and considered and thought about on people's, you know, while they're showering and thinking about work and things like that. But nonetheless, there were three official times when SpaceX considered, very, very heavily considered canceling Falcon Heavy.
Starting point is 00:04:57 And all of those times, they came out of that meeting or that discussion and said Falcon Heavy is still worth it. And that is the thing that I've been really thinking about the last week is what are those reasons that they didn't cancel Falcon Heavy? Because, you know, honestly, if you look at this whole scenario, you really have to spend some time thinking to realize why they went through with it. So let's go piece by piece and break down some of the reasons they may have wanted to continue with Falcon Heavy and see if we can determine if any of those are the reason. You know, we're obviously not going to be able to dive into Elon Musk's head or Gwen Shotwell's head and really know, but I think we can get close.
Starting point is 00:05:34 So the first most visible market is, especially considering what Falcon Heavy did on its demo flight, is the Department of Defense and defense missions for the U.S. Air Force or the rest of the Department of Defense here in the U.S. Falcon Heavy did a trajectory that involved a five and a half, almost six hour coast. And what that was, was a demonstration that they could fly a direct to geostationary mission. That is one of the missions that they have not yet been able to pull off. They don't have the capability to pull off and is one of the nine reference orbits that the U.S. Air Force uses in their launch services agreements that we've talked about many times on this show. Notably, ULA can cover all nine of those orbits. So, you know, if there's a particular satellite that needs to hit one of those orbits that SpaceX can't hit, ULA is the choice. And with this Long Coast demo, they've proven they can do a direct-to-geo mission and some heavier lift missions to even polar orbits and things like that.
Starting point is 00:06:38 So with Falcon Heavy, SpaceX has successfully covered all nine of those reference orbits for the U.S. Air Force, as far as we know. I don't think there's anything that's limiting them from any of those nine, but if somebody out there that is involved in some way does know whether or not there's some missing, I would love to hear that. But from what we can tell, they now cover the full range of Launch Services Agreements EELV-class missions. And that's an important note, But from what we can tell, they now cover the full range of launch services agreements, EELV class missions. And that's an important note because they are now truly competitive with ULA and they can truly compete at all levels rather than just some of the things that we've already
Starting point is 00:07:19 seen them win like GPS satellites and some NRO missions, the X-37B from the Air Force. Some of those things they've already begun to be competitive with, but there's these other things that they hadn't yet, and Falcon Heavy has now proven that they can cover those missions. Now, the interesting thing there is that that's not an all that big market. You know, we've heard that in the next few years, the amount of Department of Defense payloads is going to be shrinking. There's a ton of talk right now within Department of Defense about building smaller satellites and launching more of them rather than these giant dedicated single point of failure satellites. So we'll see how that market shifts. But honestly,
Starting point is 00:08:01 I don't think that that is the market that SpaceX was focused on with Falcon Heavy, because I don't think you would make back the $500 million that Elon said it cost to develop Falcon Heavy from that market alone. So it's definitely a part of it. And I think the motivation to fully compete with ULA is definitely part of it. I don't think it is the sole reason, and I don't think it can be the sole reason, that Falcon Heavy was still developed. So let's kind of shift our thinking to the commercial market. As a direct extension of that, do they want to offer direct-to-geo for geostationary satellites from SES or Intelsat or whoever is launching satellites up to geo? I don't know. I don't think that that would be a big market. We haven't seen a lot of that yet. It doesn't seem like a big use case yet,
Starting point is 00:08:49 but it is something they can offer now with a respectable payload capacity. So maybe they do want to extend that direct-to-GEO stuff over to the commercial market. We'll see if anyone jumps at that. They do have a few flights coming up. They've got two or three on the manifest. And there's been a lot of thought that maybe they want to promote these bigger geo-satellites that
Starting point is 00:09:11 require Falcon 9 to fly expendably. Maybe they want to promote flying those on a reusable Falcon Heavy. Now, to do that, you have to make reusable Falcon Heavy cheaper than an expendable Falcon 9. No customer is going to switch to a reusable Falcon Heavy out of the goodness of their heart and give you an extra $10 to $12 million or whatever the difference is now between expendable Falcon 9 and reusable Falcon Heavy. It seems likely that they would be able to make reusable Falcon Heavy cheaper than expendable Falcon 9. And we'll see if that's the case. You know, in the last year, SpaceX has launched a handful of satellites
Starting point is 00:09:49 to geostationary transfer orbit that are in the five and a half to six metric ton range, which is the upper end of the geosatellite scale. So, you know, while satellites across the board are getting smaller, I don't know that that's true on the upper ends of it. The upper end of the geostationary satellites tend to be growing a bit in size. And, you know, there's a lot of worries about the geomarket because there haven't been as many sales lately. And there's these new constellations that are being developed for low and medium Earth orbit. And that might impact the market that geostationary satellites serve. So geostationary market in general has a lot of questions about it. And by extension, launch services that are needed to serve that market are in question, and what they actually need is in question. But if we see this trend of geostationary satellites growing to the six metric ton, seven metric ton range,
Starting point is 00:10:46 Falcon Heavy may get a lot of use flying those things to GTO at least, and maybe, as I said, to direct geo. There is an aspect of this that is the if you build it, they will come mantra. Nobody's building payloads for the range that Falcon Heavy can serve in terms of mass because nobody can launch payloads in that range. So does the mere existence of a launch service that can take that much mass to orbit, does the mere existence of that promote the idea that someone like SES should begin thinking about what they could do with payloads in that range. Somebody like Orbital ATK can start considering what kind of satellite buses they would build
Starting point is 00:11:34 for a payload capacity in that range. But I'm not sure if that's really going to happen because today, Ariane 5 can launch 11 metric tons to GTO. And we really haven't seen anyone take advantage of that yet. Most Ariane 5 flights are dual launch, and they launch two of the, you know, four to six metric ton range satellites. Nobody's really bought a single dedicated Ariane 5 launch to launch an 11-ton satellite to GTO.
Starting point is 00:12:06 Now that Ariane 5 is kind of at that upper end, it takes a couple of years of lag maybe, yada yada, but that has not proven itself out yet. And as far as the listed capacity of Falcon Heavy, SpaceX has the $90 million reusable Falcon Heavy that can take eight metric tons to GTO. So it's quite a bit less than Ariane 5 can do for quite a bit less money, obviously, $90 million versus like $160 million. But again, you know, there is payload capacity above
Starting point is 00:12:39 the typical range of geostationary satellites, and nobody's really been taking advantage of it. So does an additional launcher being there promote that? I'm not sure. There's another thing, you know, as I said, Ariane 5 does dual launch to GTO. Falcon Heavy could, you know, they could presumably start offering dual launch of four metric ton satellites to GTO for $45 million apiece. But even that price is getting close to Falcon 9's reusable price. So you can see how there's a lot of open questions in the geo market about how Falcon Heavy fits in. Now there is one
Starting point is 00:13:21 geostationary satellite provider or operator that does bring up something interesting to consider with Falcon Heavy to GTO. And if I were to give you one guess at who I might be talking about, who might take advantage of a new SpaceX capability, one name should jump to mind. And that is SES, because they have continually been at the bleeding edge of SpaceX capabilities. They are a big, big believer in SpaceX. They are a big believer in reusability. They've flown many reusable boosters. They were the first one to fly on a reusable Falcon 9. They are a big supporter of SpaceX and a big customer of SpaceX. So when you consider who might take advantage of some new capability, SES should be at the forefront of your thoughts. Now, I want to read an excerpt from an article by Peter B. DeSelding of Space Intel Report from October 27th last year.
Starting point is 00:14:16 And this is about SES rethinking their geostationary satellite model for the next era of space. As I said, constellations that are happening in LEO and MEO are shifting thoughts about what the geomarket can offer or should offer or how it has to operate. Because it's been pretty stagnant where you launch a satellite that lasts for 15 years, you serve the market you can. If there is life left, you either shift it to a new area, you sell off that asset to somebody else who needs to operate a satellite in that area. It's been a pretty stagnant model for the last decade or two. And now we're starting to see things shift a bit. So they are rethinking what they're going to do in geo. And I'm going to read a little excerpt here from this Peter B. DeSelding article.
Starting point is 00:15:08 Here's the profile of tomorrow's geostationary orbit satellite for SES. It weighs around 2,000 kilograms, is delivered on orbit 18 months after contract signature, which means a 14-month procurement if it takes an all-electric design four months from launch to reach its operating station. It is launched in stacked formation with two or three other satellites aboard the same rocket and is designed to operate for just seven or eight years. Hollywell said he could envision a per-satellite capital investment around $55 million, assuming a $50 or $60 million launch cost, divided by three, and a sub-$50 million cost for the manufacture of the spacecraft. the spacecraft. So you can see how they're kind of changing their thinking where they're cutting, basically cutting the mass in half, the lifespan in half, and doing a grouped launch. And it's the grouped launch part where I think Falcon Heavy could come in, given this architecture. He says two or three stacked, and they're 2000 kilograms a piece, you can't stack three of these on a Falcon 9 and make
Starting point is 00:16:06 it with a reusable price because the capability listed by SpaceX right now, which apparently is the Block 5 aspects that we're looking at there, is 5.5 metric tons to GTO. Three 2,000 kilogram satellites would be six metric tons. They'd have to fly expendably, and that would push the launch cost up quite a bit. But you could fly four of these on a Falcon Heavy, assuming that all of that volume fits in the tiny payload fairing, relatively tiny payload fairing of Falcon Heavy. You could fly four of these in a Falcon Heavy, reusably, these in a Falcon Heavy, reusably, eight metric tons to GTO. This would be eight metric tons, assuming the adapters aren't that heavy. $90 million, that would bring your launch price down to, what is that, $22-ish million per satellite. So that's in the realm of possibility that SES might want to look for these new smaller geostationary satellites. They might want to look to Falcon Heavy to launch four at a time, get a great price on shared launch, and, you know, really just start pumping out these new geosatellites.
Starting point is 00:17:23 or not even change their business model, but if anyone is going to take advantage of what Falcon Heavy can do and incorporate that into their business model, SES with something like this from this article back in October, that seems like a good fit for what Falcon Heavy can do. But other than that, we're going to have to wait a couple of months to see how the next few flights go. And if the existence of this shakes any other customers out, maybe there were people that given the history of Falcon shakes any other customers out. Maybe there were people that, given the history of Falcon Heavy, were really waiting to see it fly first before they proceed with signing a contract to launch. So I wouldn't be surprised if in the next few months we hear of four or five customers who have signed on to Falcon Heavy now that it has actually flown
Starting point is 00:18:00 and it will be flying in the next few months. We'll see if any of that shakes people out of the trees a bit. But there are other aspects to Falcon Heavy that I think are even more important than serving the defense and commercial markets. And that's what I want to get into. But before I do that, I want to say a huge, huge thank you to all the supporters of Main Engine Cutoff over at Patreon.com slash Miko. There are 152 of you over there supporting this show week in and week out, making trips like down to Falcon Heavy possible, making hardware upgrades possible, helping me push this show forward. And this particular episode of the show was produced by 27 executive producers. This number is getting crazy. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadeem,
Starting point is 00:18:46 Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Laszlo, and six anonymous executive producers. They made this episode of the show possible. They are the executive producers of this show, and I could not do it without their support and everyone else over at patreon.com slash Miko. As always, there's a couple of great perks over there if you join up at Patreon to support the show. If you just want to help out, head over to Patreon and help out the show with whatever
Starting point is 00:19:13 you think is reasonable per month. But if you are a $3 a month or more supporter on Patreon, you get access to the headline show. I do a show every Friday. You'll get me just running through the news of the week, the small stories, the big stories, giving some thoughts on each of them. It's a great way to stay up on Space Nudes each and every week. And $5 a month or more gets you access to the Discord. It's the joint Discord with We Martians Jake and myself, the off-nominal Discord, we call
Starting point is 00:19:42 it. It is an amazing place. We've been having a great time in there. It's a great community of a lot of knowledgeable people. And it's just a great place to hang out and talk some space with fellow space nerds. Really, really awesome place. I cannot say enough good things about it. And I think you would really enjoy it. So if you want either of those things,
Starting point is 00:20:00 head over to patreon.com slash Miko and do it there. And again, thank you so much for your support. It makes so many amazing things possible and it helps this thing keep going and stay independent. And that is what I love about it. So thank you so much for your support. All right. So the other thing I want to get into about Falcon Heavy is kind of the elephant in the room, if you will. Space policy. I think that is the big thing that we've been talking about with Falcon Heavy for years now. And now that it has flown, there's a little more realism to it. And I think this is where it starts to get really interesting with why SpaceX developed Falcon
Starting point is 00:20:35 Heavy. For years now, there's been debates raging about SLS and whether NASA should be building their own rocket or just acquiring launch services competitively. And everyone brings up Falcon Heavy as a reason to not develop SLS. And lately, people have been bringing up New Glenn, things like that. So there's a lot going on in this area. But the long and the short of it is that Falcon Heavy flying successfully, being an active launch vehicle, does invalidate the number one argument against going with the commercial market instead of SLS. And for a long time when you would bring up, you know, NASA should acquire launch services from the market and not build SLS. They should use
Starting point is 00:21:18 that money to develop payloads, to do interesting things in space rather than building their own rocket. The number one argument against that was nobody is building launch vehicles in that class. Nobody is close to launching that. They're all paper rockets. They're not off the launch pad. There's no guarantee that that company will succeed with that design. And that is the overarching argument against that model. And now that argument is invalidated to an extent. To an extent. Falcon Heavy is not an SLS killer. The mere existence of Falcon Heavy, now that it's an active launch vehicle, does not kill SLS tomorrow. But in the long view of this, it is the first step towards the market killing SLS. It's going to take a while.
Starting point is 00:22:10 And there's going to be other entrants that need to happen for SLS to really go down via this argument and not some other argument. SpaceX built this rocket. They put $500 million into this. They built this rocket, They put $500 million into this. They built this rocket and nobody asked them to. And that is a big, big meaningful thing that should not be overstated about Falcon Heavy flying. Maybe it's not a good commercial decision as we've just discussed.
Starting point is 00:22:36 Maybe they're not gonna get their investment back via the defense market or the commercial market. Maybe they're not gonna get that half a billion dollars back. But it is important that they built this rocket and that nobody asked them to. That says a lot, especially regarding policy conversations in the future. Because it does provide some insight into a new model, a new way of thinking, a new way of operating. And there are others doing it, Blue Origin most notably. Now, I said it's not an SLS killer yet, but it could be in a few years,
Starting point is 00:23:11 because the truth is you need an entire market to take down SLS with that argument. You need to show that there is a viable market that can rival SLS, and that can at least get close enough to the payload capacity to make these questions legitimate. It's not a healthy decision for NASA to say, you know what, Falcon Heavy exists, so let's cancel SLS and sole source everything to SpaceX. Because any one of those conversations that we talked about, SpaceX considering canceling Falcon Heavy, any one of those could have happened in a different way and SpaceX would have canceled Falcon Heavy.
Starting point is 00:23:51 And then what is NASA to do? So it is not a healthy or smart or reasonable decision for NASA to cancel SLS because one single rocket from one single company exists. But push your mind out three, four years, and we see New Glenn on the launchpad, and Vulcan is probably on the launchpad, and it's on its upgrade path to a very, very heavy lift vehicle that can rival the Delta IV Heavy capability. Once you get to that point, when you have two or three viable options in this large payload class that are very cheap and very reasonably priced, then that question starts to become something that really needs some consideration.
Starting point is 00:24:38 And I think this is best seen in what we would call today the EELV market, Atlas V, Delta IV, Falcon 9. NASA isn't building a rocket in that class. They're not building a rocket to launch Curiosity to Mars, to launch Juno to Jupiter, to launch New Horizons to Pluto. They're not building rockets to launch those vehicles because an entire market exists in that class. A reliable market with multiple players, multiple competitors, multiple ways to get to space in that payload capacity. That market exists. So NASA does not need to enter it. But the upper end, you know, that market, even today with Falcon Heavy, the market doesn't exist. An option exists, but an option is not a market. So yes, Falcon Heavy is the first step towards that. But there is so much more needed before that is the number one reason to cancel SLS. I can think of many reasons to go with an alternate, with another route, with another policy. But the mere existence of Falcon Heavy is not the reason to cancel SLS or to change the way
Starting point is 00:25:37 NASA works, to change what they're doing. But that said, the way that SpaceX went about Falcon Heavy with zero outside investment from the government, with zero input from the government, with zero input even from customers that we know of, the way that they went about it is important and will come into play and will be a thing that people can talk about when they're making policy decisions, when they're discussing policy in front of Congress, behind closed doors at NASA. The motivation there, the way they went about it, the way they pulled it off, will matter in the long run. So if this is the first step towards that, then I think even if SpaceX doesn't make back that half a billion dollars from the commercial market and from the defense market, setting themselves up politically for the future, for a big contract for either Falcon Heavy services or looking down the line for BFR, for support for BFR and their new model, this could be a big moment that sets them up for political success in the future. It shows that they can develop a new launch vehicle on their own. It shows that they can successfully model that launch vehicle and launch it the first
Starting point is 00:26:52 time and nail it. It provides confidence towards SpaceX doing the things they say they want to do and that they're going to do and that they have done just in the way that they've done with landings and reuse, all of the things that they've done with landings and reuse, all of the things that they've hit that people have moved the goalposts after. Because now the goalposts is moving from you can't launch Falcon Heavy to nobody's going to buy Falcon Heavy. But it provides confidence that they can do these things. It provides confidence that BFR might just work out
Starting point is 00:27:22 and that they might just be serious about that. So there are a lot of other effects here that I think will come into play politically in the next 5, 10, 15 years that are big things for SpaceX and that are important things for SpaceX. And that alone, that alone might make that half a billion dollars meaningful. That alone, you know, even if they don't make that half a billion dollars meaningful. That alone, even if they don't make that half a billion back, putting in that groundwork now to set themselves up for hundreds of millions and billions of dollars of funding for their future projects, that is a big meaningful thing. And that might just be the most important thing about Falcon Heavy. It's not the shockwave that's going to run through with policy now, but it's setting up
Starting point is 00:28:06 a ground game for the next five or 10 years of policy changes, of policy decisions, of discussions with politicians, because they are going to need support for their projects in the future. And it doesn't hurt to have a little bit of confidence to show that you can do crazy things, that you can do things that would have taken NASA or some other agency like that 10 years and $30 billion or whatever they've realized that it would take in the past. But in the words of one of my favorite people of all time, there is just one more thing.
Starting point is 00:28:40 I haven't heard a lot of people talking about this yet, but SpaceX might have built Falcon Heavy for their own purposes alone. Maybe it's going to be part of their launch campaign for their satellite internet constellation. We don't know yet. Not sure you can fit enough things volume-wise in the fairing to make that viable, but maybe that will be the case. They're not going to fly crew on Falcon Heavy apparently now, and I think that shows that the announcement of that lunar trip was purely political. It
Starting point is 00:29:10 happened the same week that EM-1 was either going to get crew or say that they can't get crew, and it seemed like purely a political move to say Falcon Heavy can do that if you give us a little extra money. But one thing I haven't seen mentioned at all is that maybe SpaceX pushed through with Falcon Heavy to begin sending their own hardware to Mars, not even to provide planetary launch, which is something we didn't even talk about. That is a viable market that they could do as well for NASA, but it's not a big market. It's one launch every five, ten years, maybe. But just maybe SpaceX built this to begin sending hardware towards Mars. Maybe they want to take what they're working on with their satellite
Starting point is 00:29:53 internet constellation, these communication satellites they're building, and send a few to Mars orbit. Set up a communications network at Mars. Maybe assist with the infrastructure issues that NASA's having at Mars with these orbiters that are dying. Maybe they want to replenish that. Get some new uplinks there. They're going to need to learn how to launch and navigate their way to Mars. And I would rather do that with some cheap pieces of metal than a $10 billion BFS the first time you've ever launched it off Earth. And I think this is the X factor here. Not to, no pun intended, SpaceX factor, but I think this is the X factor.
Starting point is 00:30:34 I think in the next five or ten years, they're going to send hardware to Mars, be it orbiters alone, I doubt it would be a lander, but it could be a lander and a little bit of a scout of some sort. But I think this is an important factor to Falcon Heavy. They have spent half a billion dollars to open up some new markets, but to give themselves a way to get to Mars reasonably in the next five years while they focus on BFR and BFS development. But while they're doing that, the operations team can use their current launch infrastructure to begin working on Mars operations, navigation there, what they're going to do,
Starting point is 00:31:13 you know, what they need to set up communications-wise to carry out their missions in the future. And I think this is a big part of it that nobody's really discussing yet. But I would not be surprised if in the next even two or three years, SpaceX starts sending something to Mars, even if it's a flyby or if it's a elliptical orbiter of some sort. I would not be surprised at all. And in fact, if I was a betting man, I would be putting money on that because I think it's such a reasonable thing. You're going to be making some money off launch services and you can quickly pay internally for your own launch to send something
Starting point is 00:31:51 towards Mars and it would be, you know, a hundred million dollars, a hundred and some million dollars all in. So that's an important, important thing that we should keep our eye on. And that may just be the reason that SpaceX did not cancel Falcon Heavy. Now, I'm sure there's going to be a lot more that we're talking about Falcon Heavy this year. But quite honestly, looking ahead for SpaceX in 2018, we're going to see some Falcon Heavy flights. We're going to find out if new customers are signing on. We're going to probably see some maneuvering politically with Falcon Heavy. But the rest of 2018 for SpaceX is all about Falcon 9 Block 5 and Dragon 2. Those are the things that we're going to be watching from SpaceX for the rest of the year. We need to see Block 5 get off the ground, get running,
Starting point is 00:32:37 see how quick they can get turnaround down to on Block 5. And once they've got a couple of flights under their belt, they're going to try to launch Dragon 2 on top of that. Those two things are hugely, hugely important. And if 2018 is the year that they knock down Falcon Heavy and crew flights, that is a big, big year, probably the biggest ever for SpaceX, because it gets a lot of things that people have been telling them for years, you can't do this, You can't do this. It gets those people off their back, shows that they can do it, shows they can do it successfully, reliably, and it gives them so much firepower moving into the future when they're starting to do these crazy things like developing and building BFR and BFS. So this could be a very, very giant year. And honestly, in the long view of history, this could be the year that SpaceX makes everything real. And that is so exciting to me, to you, I'm sure, as well, to anyone that's been watching this story for as long as we have.
Starting point is 00:33:41 And I am so excited for it. And I'm just very, very happy that all of this is happening, that this is in motion. Could not be more excited for the future. But for now, that's about all I got on Falcon Heavy. Would love to hear your thoughts. As always, email me, anthony at managingcutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. Thank you so much for listening
Starting point is 00:34:00 and I will talk to you next week.

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