Falcon Surprise, SpaceX Says Something Big is Coming Options

[Greg Hullender]

From SpaceX about two hours ago.

Something Big is Coming
ElonMusk Holding Press Conference on Tuesday, April 5th
Elon Musk,CEO and Chief Technical Officer of SpaceX, will hold a press conference on Tuesday, April 5th at 11:20am EST to discuss SpaceX's latest venture.
Get a sneakpeak of the discussion on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th6HQ9RtVCE.
The press conference will be webcast live at: http://www.visualwebcaster.com/spacex. The press conference will also be accessible via the home page ofSpaceX.com by clicking the main banner. If you are unable to watch live, the press conference will be archived at http://www.visualwebcaster.com/spacex for future viewing.

Judging from the video (and the fact that the Falcon 9 Heavy Maiden Launch showed up on their mainifest a month or two ago) I'm guessing this'll be the F9H announcement. But, given the fanfare, it could be anything.

--Greg

This post has been edited by Astro0: Apr 5 2011, 04:31 AM

Reason for edit: Edited to fix formatting problems

[algorimancer]

Launch costs of <$1000/lb. encourage the notion of an UMSF craft. I would think that we could come up with enough donations to launch a 100-500 lb spacecraft, building on the notion of the CubeSat program. Given a piggyback beyond LEO, adding an ion drive and perhaps a magsail (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Magnetic_sail), an asteroid (perhaps 16 Psyche or 15 Eunomia?) flyby or even rendevous/landing might be entirely feasible, given a bit of creativity. I would envision 5 years to launch, followed by a 5 year mission.

[djellison]

Launch costs of <$1000/lb. encourage the notion of an UMSF craft. I would think that we could come up with enough donations to launch a 100-500 lb spacecraft, building on the notion of the CubeSat program.

The most expensive part has never been the launch. Build a spacecraft, testing it, the ground systems required to use it - that's the expensive part with spacecraft, typically.

[Syrinx]

You know the old saying. In for $1000, in for a pound. Heh.

I would like to entertain the idea of a "UMSF" craft. I'd be in for a few pounds. Integration, testing, comms, all that business is definitely a concern.

[algorimancer]

...
I would like to entertain the idea of a "UMSF" craft. I'd be in for a few pounds.

I too would easily be in for a few pounds, especially over a 5+ year time frame.

It has been my experience that much of the expense of this sort of endeavor is personnel. In the case of an UMSF craft, I would expect that most of this would be volunteered time. Also, I note that rather a lot of the relevant professionals are members of this site. It would certainly be of interest to work-up a reference design and costs. Are ion drives prohibitively expensive? Would we need to buy time on the DSN, or could comms be more improvised (pulsed laser, for instance)? This could be an opportunity to test some new technology. Then there's also the possibility of commercial sponsors.