Pictures and video of Reusable Falcon 9 Spacex Vehicles

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Spacex has a page about the Elon Musk National Press Club talk

Hobby Space has highlights and discussion of the Elon Musk talk

– Pivotal break-through is a fully reusable, rapid turnaround rocket
– 2-3% of expendable initial total mass gets to orbit
– Adding reusability cuts into that 2-3%
– Very tough engineering problem. Wasn’t sure for awhile that it could be solved. In past year decided that it could be.
– SpaceX will try to do it. No guarantee of success.
– Calculations and simulations say it should work.
– See simulation (video below).
– Falcon 9 is the lowest cost rocket in world at ~$50M
– Fuel is only about $200,000
– So if could reuse it would lead to 100 times reduction in cost.
– Fully reusable rapid turnaround is absolutely required for practical spaceflight and making humanity multiplanetary.
– A little base is not interesting.
– Definitely going to be an adventure to make this happen.
– Doesn’t think mining anything on Mars to bring back to earth is viable.
– If you could make moving to Mars cost around $500k, that would be a viable business model.
– If only 1 in a million decided to do that, that’s 8000 people. Probably number would be far higher.

Q&A:
/– Near term – use for sat launches, ISS resupply, etc. Have $3B in orders. Moderately profitable.
Have to stay profitable to make all this happen. Most orders of any launch provider in the world.

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