Future of Falcon Heavy

In article ,
says...

On 2018-02-09 17:33, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3423/1

I think it's relevant to your question.


OK, so Falcon Heavy is a niche market to serve DoD and a few others.

Would be interesting to ask Musk if, in hindsight, it turned out cheaper
to work on strapping 3 Falcon 9s together versus packaging Falcon9
components (engines, tanks etc) into a single core). Isn't it simpler to
strap the tanks together than to deal with booster sepatation?

No. SpaceX found that it is much harder to do parallel loading,
parallel ignition, parallel aerodynamics, and parallel staging than it
was to do a "single stick" vehicle. There are many Elon Musk quotes
which essentially says that Falcon Heavy was, in fact, much harder than
they thought it would be. So much so that they almost canceled it 3
different times according to Musk.

Look, Falcon Heavy reportedly cost $500 million to develop, has a $90
million per launch list price, and it's playing in a market where it
might get 2-3 launches per year. If everything goes according to Musk's
plans it will be replaced by BFR/BFS in maybe 5 years (possibly
optimistic). So, spread $500 million over 15 launches of Falcon Heavy
during that time and you get $33 million, which is over 1/3 of the list
price of Falcon Heavy (ouch). Add in interest over those years and it's
an even higher percentage of the list price.

How in the hell is it ever going to make back that R&D investment with
those numbers? My guess is that it simply won't. It's a technological
dead end, just like Falcon 9. BFR/BFS, a fully reusable TSTO, is
planned to eventually replace them both.

Musk had repeatedly stated that they had grossly underestimated how much
work was needed to strap the 3 stages together.

Well that answers your question above, doesn't it?

Someone mentioned that musk won't bother man-rating Falcon Heavy.
(despite mentions elswhere of "joy rides around the moon" in Dragon).

Since it shares some much commonality with Falcon 9, including common
stage 2, capsule escape system, common stage 1 engines and I assume
much commonality in software, how difficult would it be to man rate
Falcon Heavy once Falcon 9 gets its man rating certification ?

It's hard to say how much of this is hard fact and how much of this is
marketing (i.e. product differentiation). BFR/BFS needs funding and was
always intended to be "man rated" from the very beginning. It's hard to
get a few $billion from investors to finish BFR/BFS development when
Falcon Heavy is already flying and can handle the "high end" of the
existing markets. To some investors (hopefully none that actually have
money in SpaceX), now is the time to stop developing new hardware and
turn SpaceX into a cash cow ala ULA (e.g. Atlas V, Delta IV, and Delta
Heavy).

Jeff
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