Recently
another great space race has started, except this time it's as a
private industry. One of the top contenders is SpaceX, which has
hugely benefited from the recent shift in American around privatizing
routine mission. SpaceX will be used to transport supplies and later
on people to the ISS kn a rocket which has reusable first and second
stage rockets. Their goal is to drastically reduce the cost of space
travel with these reusable crafts. In the past few years SpaceX had
estimated a quick relaunch turn around with a price tag of between 5
to 7 million, which is much, much less the current shuttle launches
cost. NASA will also benefit as it will reduce there rountine costs
which will let them more so focus their resources on other mission.
As it currently sits each launch of the falcon 9 has cost NASA 166
million, this is still much cheaper then the max of $1.5 billion the
development and building of shuttles used to cost. As it sits SpaceX
is also much cheaper than any other private company, even the banned
long march rockets from China are more expensive. Although the
payload is small there is room for improvement with the upcoming
heavy falcon9 although the current 140,000-pound-thrust Merlin 1D,
designated the production model for Falcon 9, has the highest
thrust-to-weight ratio of any rocket engine ever made so far.
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