"This is a rocket of truly huge scale," Musk said at a press conference unveiling the rocket. "With Falcon Heavy, we'll be able to put well over 100,000 pounds into orbit," he said, and possibly as much as 120,000 pounds.
"That's more than a fully loaded Boeing 737 -- with passengers and fuel" and even luggage, Musk said.
The Falcon Heavy consists of a standard Falcon 9 rocket with two additional Falcon 9 first-stage rockets acting as liquid strap-on boosters. The upgraded Merlin engines that power the rocket will generate 3.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff -- the equivalent of 15 Boeing 747s, he said.
(The "table" functions don't seem to work, or at least I don't know how to work them.)Table of the world’s heavy lift vehicles, based on historical launch data. Only the Saturn V moon rocket, last flown in 1973, delivered more payload to orbit than Falcon Heavy.
VEHICLE INCLINATION ORBIT PAYLOAD TO LEO
Falcon Heavy 28.5 degrees 200 km 53,000 kg
Space Shuttle 28.5 degrees 200 km 24,400 kg
Delta IV Heavy 28.5 degrees 407 km 22,980 kg
Titan IV-B 28.5 degrees 150 km x175 km 21,680 kg
Proton M 51.6 degrees 200 km 21,000 kg
Ariane 5 ES 51.6 degrees 407 km 20,000 kg
Atlas V 551 28.5 degrees 200 km 18,810 kg
Japan H2B 30.4 degrees 300 km 16,500 kg
China LM3B 28.5 degrees 200 km 11,200 kg
Like I've said before, the Space Age is just starting to get interesting. ;D
In the fall of 1961 Bull visited Murphy and Trudeau at Aberdeen and was able to interest them in the idea using guns to loft missile components for re-entry research, a task that was otherwise very expensive and time-consuming aboard rockets. They arranged funding for the work under Project HARP (for High Altitude Research Program, not to be confused with HAARP). The US Navy supplied a surplus 16-inch battleship gun, and a contract from the Office of Naval Research paid for the gun to be re-bored into a 16.4-inch smooth bore. The entire contract, excluding shipping, was only $2,000.he performance of the gun was so great that the Highwater site was too small to support it.Space X will be such a leap forward with such tremendous weight capacity couldn't they put the parts up and assemble them in space? And the return fuel from Mars, couldn't they drift a drone tanker on the return flight path for in flight refueling?
.The Martlets evolved through this period, growing in size and sophistication. As Bull later put it:QuoteMartlett 2A was the first high-altitude projectile. It weighted [sic] 225 pounds. The forebody carried electronics, the aftbody carried chemical payloads. It was five inches (127 mm) in diameter, and had a very heavy pusher plate. The actual all-up weight was around 400 to 450 pounds. Then what happened was the Martlet 2C. [It] was the big workhorse, still a five inch (127 mm). Then, towards the end, we came up with the 350 pound vehicle, the same thing, only seven inches in diameter....
The idea was to find out what happens in the atmosphere from sunset to sunrise. Remember, nobody gave us grants. We had to produce tropical atmospheric meteorological [data] for the army research office, that's how we got our money. We were trying to measure everything to the top of the atmosphere, which we labeled as a nominal two hundred kilometers.
The cost of a launch was about $5,000. We did up to eight a night. We used to do three nights in a row to try to get the data.
”
— Gerald Bull,
The Martlet-2 was only a stepping-stone on the way to Bull's real interest, a gun-launched rocket that could reach outer space. The gun had been thoroughly tested and was well past intercontinental ranges, but needed modifying. In the spring of 1963 HARP started experimenting with the Martlet-3, a 7-inch-diameter (177.8 mm) "full bore" projectile designed to test the basic problems of launching a solid-fuel artillery shell from guns.
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a third double-length gun was built at the Yuma Proving Grounds to continue the high-altitude measurements. On November 18, 1966 this gun launched a Martlet-2 to 180 km, a world record that still stands today.[18]
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Need something better than rockets, though. Rockets are good for travel once in orbit. Need a cheaper way to get out of Earth's gravity well. I'm thinking rail gun. Run it up the side of a mountain and hook it up to a nuke. A big nuke.