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1. Add a post containing the topic of your Project and your investigatory question.
2. Begin collecting research FOR and AGAINST your question.
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1. Why is SpaceX more efficient than NASA?

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1. Why is SpaceX more efficient than NASA?

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Bill Nye on the Remarkable Efficiency of SpaceX

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Bill Nye on the Remarkable Efficiency of SpaceX

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Bill Nye is a lot of things. He's the world-famous Science Guy, for example. He's also Executive Director of the Planetary Society and one of the nation's most fervent bow tie aficionados.

And as you probably know, Bill Nye is a big fan of SpaceX.

There are plenty of reasons for this, not the least of which is how the private space transport company has significantly cut the cost of building and launching rockets. The key to doing so, as Bill explains, was in breaking from a NASA model that traded efficiency for resilience:

"When you build rocket engines in Alabama and you get the fuel from Utah and you test them in Mississippi and you then send them to Florida and control all that from Texas, with some drop testing done in Cleveland and all sorts of material science research done in California, some flight tests done in the desert in Arizona, when you do all that you just add cost."

SpaceX, on the other hand, handles most of the above at its massive headquarters in Hawthorne, California, before transporting the product to a launch site, thus consolidating effort and trimming overhead. For Bill, the hope is that this and similar processes from other private companies will lower the cost of launching things (and people) into low Earth orbit. NASA is certainly on board:

"SpaceX has taken at least $500 million from NASA because NASA wants to develop this capability... These are commercial rockets and NASA has gone to great lengths to develop that business."

What really excites Bill is this means relatively inexpensive space travel could soon be on the horizon. He compares the appeal of space to the exhilaration one feels when skydiving:

"Everybody's dream is to be able to fly... I can see how people get hooked on that. And I think space exploration would be the same deal."

For more on SpaceX, NASA, and the chance to hear Bill Nye the Science Guy say "Iz'all good," check out this clip from his Big Think interview:

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Bill Nye on the Remarkable Efficiency of SpaceX

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Bill Nye is a lot of things. He's the world-famous Science Guy, for example. He's also Executive Director of the Planetary Society and one of the nation's most fervent bow tie aficionados. And as you probably know, Bill Nye is a big fan of SpaceX. There are plenty of reasons for this, not the ...

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You just launched one of the most powerful rockets humans have ever built. So what do you do for an encore?

If you're Elon Musk, you up the ante. Big time.

The billionaire CEO of SpaceX hosted a press conference after the company's Falcon Heavy rocket aced its first launch Tuesday.

The new rocket is slated to fly a hefty telecommunications satellite for Arabsat, a Saudi Arabia-based firm, during the first half of 2018. It's also signed up to deliver a payload for the U.S. Air Force sometime this year.

But Musk was more interested in talking about what SpaceX will build next.

And he made it clear the company is still focused on its ultimate goal: Sending humans to live on Mars.

Falcon Heavy is big, he said, but SpaceX needs a rocket "way bigger than that."

SpaceX's idea of exactly how it will get humans to Mars has evolved over the years.

Musk revealed his most recent plan at a conference in Australia last year. It involves a truly enormous launch vehicle, called BFR or Big Falcon Rocket, that would give off more than 11 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. That's more than double the Falcon Heavy's thrust.

BFR needs enough power to vault a 160-foot long spacecraft (loaded with humans and all their cargo) into space before it can begin the months-long trek to Mars.

One of Musk's key takeaways from the Falcon Heavy's successful flight?

"It's giving me a lot of confidence we can make the BFR design work," he said.

Related: SpaceX launches Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket

In the near future, "most of our engineering resources will be dedicated to BFR, and I think that will make things go quite quickly," he said. A first test flight for BFR could happen in "three or four years."

SpaceX -- and the space community in general -- is notoriously loose with deadlines. When Falcon Heavy was first announced back in 2011, Musk said it could fly within the next couple of years. It ended up taking nearly seven.

And SpaceX does have one more thing to check off its to-do list before it can focuson BFR.

Related: You probably made more than Elon Musk last year

The company is developing a spacecraft that can fly humans -- a first for the company -- into orbit. It's called Crew Dragon, and NASA plans to use it to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

The United States hasn't had a spacecraft capable of sending humans to orbit since NASA's Space Shuttle program retired in 2011. Since then, the agency has relied on Russian spacecraft.

In 2014, NASA turned to the private sector for help. It awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing -- worth a combined $6.8 billion -- to develop systems that can transport astronauts. The goal was to end its reliance on Russia in 2017.

Obviously, that didn't happen. Both SpaceX and Boeing faced delays.

But Musk said Tuesday that he's planning to hit NASA's latest target of launching astronauts on Crew Dragon by December.

So, for now, "it's all hands on deck for Crew Dragon," Musk said. "That's our goal."

Crew Dragon will launch on a Falcon 9, the rocket SpaceX has flown since 2010.

Related: How Falcon Heavy stacks up with other massive rockets

But that doesn't mean Falcon Heavy will become a distant memory.

Musk said the rocket -- which is more than twice as powerful as any other rocket on the market -- is ready to launch whatever SpaceX clients can dream up.

"It can launch payloads straight to Pluto and beyond...it can launch giant satellites," Musk said Tuesday. It "opens up a new class of payload."

SpaceX does not, however, plan to certify the Falcon Heavy to fly humans. The company said in February last year that the rocket would send two people on a trip around the moon, but Musk said there's been a change of plans.

"I think the new architecture, the BFR architecture, is the way to go," he said.

-- Jethro Mullen contributed to this report.

CNNMoney (New York) First published February 7, 2018: 1:54 PM ET

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If you're Elon Musk, you up the ante. Big time. The billionaire CEO of SpaceX hosted a press conference after the company's Falcon Heavy rocket aced its first launch Tuesday. The new rocket is slated to fly a hefty telecommunications satellite for Arabsat, a Saudi Arabia-based firm, during the first half of 2018.

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Elon Musk on SpaceX's Reusable Rocket Plans

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Elon Musk on SpaceX's Reusable Rocket Plans

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Elon Musk, founder of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), has always said that he wants his rockets and spacecraft to be fully reusable. That's why it stoked our interest to see Musk tweet this recently: "Design completed for bringing rocket back to launchpad using only thrusters. Yay. Wings r just dead weight in space."

In a press release a few months ago, SpaceX had shown an animated simulation of a Falcon 9 that returned both its first and second stages all the way to land vertically at a recovery site. Recently we spoke to Musk so he could elaborate on the design in more than 140 characters.

Reusable Rocket Parts

As Musk's tweet implied, there are two primary ways to recover a rocket part: It can either fly back to a recovery location with wings (as the shuttle did) or return under rocket power. Wings add structural weight but are reasonably reliable, while the rocket approach is versatile but adds weight because of the extra propellant that must be carried to fly back. Plus, there's a risk of the rocket engines not restarting, or shutting down permanently.

Despite the dangers, Musk is clearly a fan of the rocket-powered approach. He told PM that SpaceX has come up with a solution to make both the lower and upper stages of the Falcon 9 reusable. (The Dragon capsule that will fly atop the rocket has already demonstrated that it can be recovered in the ocean after it splash-lands with a parachute, though SpaceX is building vertical-landing capability into that as well.)

The key, at least for the first stage, is the difference in speed. "It really comes down to what the staging Mach number would be," Musk says, referencing the speed the rocket would be traveling at separation. "For an expendable Falcon 9 rocket, that is around Mach 10. For a reusable Falcon 9, it is around Mach 6, depending on the mission." For the reusable version, the rocket must be traveling at a slower speed at separation because the burn must end early, preserving enough propellant to let the rocket fly back and land vertically. This also makes recovery easier because entry velocities are slower.

However, the slower speed also means that the upper stage of the Falcon rocket must supply more of the velocity needed to get to orbit, and that significantly reduces how much payload the rocket can lift into orbit. "The payload penalty for full and fast reusability versus an expendable version is roughly 40 percent," Musk says. "[But] propellant cost is less than 0.4 percent of the total flight cost. Even taking into account the payload reduction for reusability, the improvement is therefore theoretically over a hundred times."

A hundred times is an incredible gain. It would drop cost for Musk's Falcon Heavy rocket-a scaled-up version of the Falcon 9 that's currently rated at $1000 per pound to orbit-to just $10. "That, however, requires a very high flight rate, just like aircraft," Musk says. "At a low flight rate, the improvement is still probably around 50 percent. For Falcon Heavy, that would mean a price per pound to orbit of less than $500." Falcon Heavy is particularly amenable to reuse of the first stage-the two outer cores in particular, because they separate at a much lower velocity than the center one, being dropped off early in the flight.

Turnaround Time

Bringing down the cost of rocket launches isn't just about reusability; as Musk's quote suggests, it's also about turnaround time. The original premise of the space shuttle program was that the vehicle would be turned around within days; it ended up being months, which is one of the reasons that it never met its cost goals.

What about a reusable Falcon? Musk says he expects "single-digit hours" between landing and next flight, at least for the lower stages. "For the upper stage, there is the additional constraint of the orbit ground track needing to overfly the landing pad, since cross-range [the distance to a landing site that it can fly to either side of its original entry flight path] is limited. At most this adds 24 hours to the upper-stage turnaround."

Translation: One of the other reasons that the shuttle was so expensive was that it had very large wings to give the vehicle a thousand miles of cross-range. The Air Force demanded this feature, which would have allowed the shuttle to return to its launch site after a single orbit, though it was never used. But SpaceX doesn't mandate that cross-range feature. Therefore its craft would have to wait a little bit for the Earth to rotate and bring the landing site around again, but this would make SpaceX missions cheaper because the rockets don't have to carry so much propellant in this stage.

What does it imply for flight rate? "Multiple flights per day for first stage and side boosters," Musk says. "At least one flight per day for the upper stage" (which costs much less, anyway).

Last fall, the company announced an experimental test vehicle called Grasshopper to prove and refine the reusability concept. "There is no question in my mind that it will work," Musk says with trademark confidence. "It's just a question of how quickly the testing progresses. We expect to do several vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing (VTVL) flights this year and hopefully go supersonic in the fourth quarter."

SpaceX is trying to improve the reusability of the Dragon capsule, too. Last week, the company announced the successful test of its new SuperDraco rocket engines, which will power the launch-abort system for the Dragon, making it safer for human occupation, and also act as the landing engines. The idea is that Dragon will land vertically on the pad, like the Falcon rocket components, as opposed to landing in the water with parachutes.

So what does that mean for ticket prices in the future? Musk tells us that with daily flights, the cost will run about $100 per pound. For the average male, that means about 20,000 bucks. Start saving your money.

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Elon Musk on SpaceX's Reusable Rocket Plans

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Elon Musk, founder of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), has always said that he wants his rockets and spacecraft to be fully reusable. That's why it stoked our interest to see Musk tweet this recently: "Design completed for bringing rocket back to launchpad using only thrusters. Yay. Wings r just dead weight in space."

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Elon Musk has published a new study about his ambitious plans to colonize Mars with SpaceX

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Elon Musk has published a new study about his ambitious plans to colonize Mars with SpaceX

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SpaceX founder Elon Musk has authored a second academic study, published this month in the journal New Space.

The paper describes SpaceX's current plans for starting a Mars colony with a fully reusable Big Falcon Rocket system.

The study closely follows an October 2017 talk Musk gave in Australia.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has spun his latest talk about Mars colonization into a second academic study.

Musk's full paper, titled "Making Life Multi-Planetary," was published online this month by the journal New Space. It's currently available to read for free.

"You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great - and that's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about," reads the beginning of the study. "It's about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars."

If that line sounds familiar, that's because it comes from Musk's October 2017 presentation to the International Astronautical Congress.

In fact, the entire study closely follows that talk, though some new details and images have been added. Musk followed the same process after he debuted his preliminary Mars colonization plans at the IAC in September 2016 - he later published a 2017 paper outlining those plans in New Space.

Here are the highlights from Musk's latest academic study.

How Musk hopes to make life multi-planetary with SpaceX

During his 42-minute talk, Musk elaborated on SpaceX's plans to build a fully reusable system known as the BFR, Big Falcon Rocket, or - as Musk often calls it - the Big F---ing Rocket" (a name that's conspicuously absent from his New Space paper).

The 348-foot-tall system will have two main parts: a 191-foot-tall reusable rocket booster and a 157-foot-tall reusable spaceship. The spaceship is being designed to carry 100 people or 140,000 lbs into low-Earth orbit.

As Musk explained in his new study and presentation, the spaceship can be refilled with fuel while in orbit, then fired off to the moon, Mars, or somewhere else in the solar system.

SpaceX's first missions to Mars would come in 2022 and 2024, according to Muks's plan - though he has emphasized that the timeline is "aspirational."

"People have told me that my timelines, historically, have been optimistic," Musk said at SXSW.

The first trip in 2022 would drop off equipment made to harvest water and carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into methane using solar energy. That fuel would be stored in depots to refill Earth-bound BFRs. The second trip in 2024 which would be crewed with astronauts.

Musk has yet to explain the details of how he'd keep anyone alive on the moon or red planet, though he addressed that process in very general terms during a conversation earlier this month at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

"It will start off building just the most elementary infrastructure, just a base to create some propellant, a power station, blast domes in which to grow crops - all of the sort of fundamentals without which you cannot survive," Musk said. "And then really there's gonna be an explosion of entrepreneurial opportunity, because Mars will need everything from iron foundries to pizza joints. I think Mars should really have great bars: the Mars Bar."

Musk is not joking

After a successful test-launch of Spacex's Falcon Heavy- the world's most powerful operational rocket system - Musk called for a new space race. Joining SpaceX in its space-exploration efforts is a growing list of competing companies and government agencies scrambling to develop their own reusable, lower-cost launch systems.

But SpaceX is for now ahead of the pack. The company recently applied to take over an 18-acre site in the Port of Los Angeles, which is 14 miles south of its Hawthorne, California headquarters. The goal appears to be the construction of a factory that will build the first BFR spaceships.

Musk has said SpaceX plans to test-launch the first spaceship on short "up-and-down flights" before the summer of 2019. This will likely occur at SpaceX's remote facility in McGregor, Texas.

Around the same time SpaceX begins to reach for Mars, Musk may start using BFRs to establish a high-speed transportation system for Earth. In theory, a BFR flight could take a person from Los Angeles to New York in 25 minutes.

The rocket rides may be costly and uncomfortable for passengers, but Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut, previously told Business Insider that he doesn't doubt Musk's resolve.

"This would not be for the faint of heart, and it is difficult to see how this would be inexpensive," he added. "But the one thing I've learned from observing Elon is not to count him out."

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Elon Musk has published a new study about his ambitious plans to colonize Mars with SpaceX

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SpaceX founder Elon Musk has authored a second academic study, published this month in the journal New Space. The paper describes SpaceX's current plans for starting a Mars colony with a fully reusable Big Falcon Rocket system. The study closely follows an October 2017 talk Musk gave in Australia.

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What is SpaceX and is it the future of space exploration?

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What is SpaceX and is it the future of space exploration?

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SpaceX is a company that aims to reduce the cost of space transportation with the long-term goal of creating a colony on Mars.

US billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk formed the business in California in 2002 out of a project called Mars Oasis that explored ways to send a mini greenhouse to the Red Planet to grow interplanetary plants.

After failing to elicit cheap rockets for the project from Nasa and returning empty-handed from a low-cost purchasing mission in Russia, Musk decided he would need to create his own rockets. Thus,...

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What is SpaceX and is it the future of space exploration?

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SpaceX is a company that aims to reduce the cost of space transportation with the long-term goal of creating a colony on Mars. US billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk formed the business in California in 2002 out of a project called Mars Oasis that explored ways to send a mini greenhouse to the Red Planet to grow interplanetary plants.

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SpaceX Spends 320 Times Less on Building the Dragon Than NASA Does on the Orion

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SpaceX Spends 320 Times Less on Building the Dragon Than NASA Does on the Orion

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SpaceX's Dragon capsule was once again when NASA announced that it passed a design review for a manned launch. NASA is expecting Dragon - and at least one other of the three capsules it selected for its commercial crew development program (CCDev2) - to be ready for its first mission in 2017. In the meantime, the U.S. is depending on Russian spacecraft to get our astronauts into orbit. At $60 million-a-seat, the aging Russian Soyuz program will hopefully soon be eclipsed by the $20 million-a-seat Dragon.

The news about Dragon came only a couple weeks after NASA had news of its own with the unveiling of the Orion capsule in its early stages. Built primarily by Lockheed Martin (but to NASA specifications, in contrast to the Dragon capsule which is fully developed by the private sector), the olive drab hull was shown off at the Kennedy Center surrounded by NASA employees and congressmen. The capsule is scheduled to make its first unmanned flight in 2014, with the Space Launch System (the rocket for taking Orion to the moon or beyond) scheduled to test launch in 2017.

It is good to see NASA on track for some big spaceflight milestones once again. But despite the progress, something stands out as a problem: The total NASA funding for the CCDev2 program was around $270 million. That's $270 million for the development of four different vehicles to bring people into orbit. NASA will then have to pay per flight once the vehicles are functional, but it's still not bad.

Especially when compared to the Orion capsule.

Compared to the SpaceX CCDev2 program, the Space Launch System that Orion is a part of is expected to cost . Between $17 to $22 billion is needed just for development. That is 80 times the cost of the development of four manned crew vehicles by the private sector, i.e. 320 times more per vehicle.

Now, I understand that creating a system to go to the moon is much more complicated and expensive than going to orbit. But 320 times more? I think not.

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has said he could do it for a grand total of $3 billion, not all of which would have to be footed by the government. That would be less than one quarter of the $13 billion NASA spent on the defunct Constellation moon program that never even produced a flyable rocket. I think it might be wise for NASA to consider refocusing its budget (side note: a showed that most Americans thought NASA got 25% of the federal budget while it actually gets less than half of 1%).

Looking at the state of the aerospace industry, it is hard to be surprised by the inefficiency. The aerospace industry is one of the most concentrated in the country, fed by consistent government contracts. Programs are always going over time and over budget, which is unsurprising when "cost plus" contracts pay the contractors more the longer they take, and there are only a couple of companies to choose from.

It may seem bizarre that I am bashing one system of contracting in favor or another, but CCDev-style programs are fundamentally different than the normal system. CCDev contracts for the service of transporting people and goods to space, as opposed to the current system of contracting for the construction of a NASA product. Private companies are then free to accomplish the task as they see fit, instead of merely building a capsule to NASA specs.

Commercial space companies are very new and have yet to prove themselves entirely capable of human spaceflight. While I do think NASA has serious spending problems, I would not advocate immediately overthrowing the current system in favor of an industry that only took its first baby step a couple months ago. Hopefully by the end of this decade, or maybe even within five years, we will have seen multiple private launches of astronauts to orbit. Until then, NASA should continue its work, but focus more on enhancing the development of the private sector.

NASA's vital role in this country has and always will be to spur technological progress beyond what the general private sector will accomplish on its own. It has been wildly successful in doing so thus far, but the advent of cost efficient private space companies will allow NASA's dollar to go much further towards technological advancement. It would be better for everyone if they pursued that path.

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SpaceX Spends 320 Times Less on Building the Dragon Than NASA Does on the Orion

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SpaceX's Dragon capsule was once again when NASA announced that it passed a design review for a manned launch. NASA is expecting Dragon - and at least one other of the three capsules it selected for its commercial crew development program (CCDev2) - to be ready for its first mission in 2017.

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SpaceX's new ultra-reusable rocket could shape the future of humanity

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SpaceX's new ultra-reusable rocket could shape the future of humanity

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When Elon Musk's SpaceX first launched its Falcon 9 rocket back in 2010 it was thought of as a novelty venture by a tech entrepreneur that would be little more than a tech demonstration. No one thought it would become the de facto rocket for getting satellites, and even people, into orbit.

Exactly 54 launches later, SpaceX has become famous the world over for its reusable rockets, with their discarded boosters landing dramatically back on their launch pad, or on drone-ships offshore. So far about 20 first-stage boosters, complete with engines and fuel tanks, have been recovered.

SpaceX is aiming to both dominate the commercial rocket launch industry, and make space flight more efficient and affordable to further Musk's interplanetary ambitions. However, one obstacle to these ambitions is that a standard Falcon 9 rocket's boosters can still only be reused twice.

Cue the new SpaceX Block 5 boosters, which can be reused no less than 10 times - and possibly as much as 100 times. They have the potential to change everything.

What is a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket?

The new Falcon 9 Block 5 is likely the final version of a product that's gradually been improved and developed with the same Silicon Valley mindset that drives advances in consumer electronics. SpaceX strives to constantly improve its rockets, making them more reusable and more powerful, and the Block 5 features a whole host of improvements.

Technically known as a 'two-stage-to-orbit medium-lift launch vehicle', this fifth and final version of the Falcon 9 enables each first-stage booster to be used 10 times, and just as importantly they can be cleaned up and ready to go again within weeks rather than months - in the rocket business, that's revolutionary. However, Musk has said publicly that he thinks that a Block 5 first stage could be able to launch 100 times.

That kind of reusability could, in the long term, make space flight much cheaper. However, perhaps the most important upgrade the Block 5 brings is new COPVs (composite overwrapped pressure vessels) developed with NASA to replace the old versions that partly caused a catastrophic failure of a Falcon 9 in 2016.

Why is Falcon 9 Block 5 so important?

In terms of performance and reliability the Falcon 9 Block 5 - a decade in the making - is all about impressing NASA. The new, final Falcon 9 with Block 5 upgrades will likely be used to launch humans into space from US Soil, something that hasn't happened since NASA's Space Shuttle launched for the final time in July 2011.

In theory that could happen in early 2019. "Falcon 9, along with the Dragon spacecraft, was designed from the outset to deliver humans into space, and under an agreement with NASA, SpaceX is actively working toward this goal," says the SpaceX website.

As well as manned spaceflight missions, the Block 5 improvements will also allow SpaceX to bid for more contracts from the Pentagon, such as the US$290 million deal it just struck to launch three next-gen Air-Force Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, dubbed GPS-III.

Has the Falcon 9 Block 5 flown yet?

It was thought that SpaceX had used its new rocket for the first time on May 11 2018, when SpaceX delivered Bangladeshi telecoms satellite Bangabandhu-1 into orbit from Kennedy Space Center, then landed the booster on SpaceX's drone-ship in the Atlantic Ocean; however it seems that wasn't quite the finished article.

"Apparently SpaceX hasn't flown its final Block 5 rocket - it decided after that launch that it's going to add a final component that the Falcon 9 needs to meet the very stringent requirements for NASA for what's needed to safely fly NASA astronauts," says Laura Forczyk at Astralytical, a space research, analysis and consulting firm in the US.

NASA wants SpaceX to install the new COPVs, and see the rocket flown seven times without a failure. Their first use will be as part of the SpaceX DM-1 mission, the uncrewed Crew Dragon demo mission planned for later this year. "So technically that first flight of the Block 5 rocket doesn't count because it wasn't the very final configuration," says Forczyk. "But it's still a very impressive upgrade."

Will a Falcon 9 Block 5 takes astronauts to space?

Probably, but it's still not clear when. SpaceX is scheduled to send a crewed test flight into orbit in December 2018 in a Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 Block 5. Its rival for the NASA contract is Boeing, which will perform a similar test flight in January 2019 using its CST-100 Starliner space capsule and an Atlas V rocket from ULA. However, both companies - and NASA - appear to be dragging their feet.

"SpaceX and Boeing are neck and neck in the delays they announce," says Forczyk. "It should have happened already." An independent assessment recently predicted that crewed spaceflights would take place towards the end of 2019. "My best guess is 2020," says Forczyk. SpaceX has also delayed plans to send space tourists around the moon.

The delays are due to NASA's stringent requirements, but the first Crew Dragon spacecraft, to be used on DM-1, is now at NASA's Plum Brook facility for testing.

What about Falcon Heavy and the Big Falcon Rocket?

For all their awesomeness, Falcon 9 rockets generally don't leave Earth's orbit, except when they're strapped together to make a Falcon Heavy rocket. The most powerful operational rocket in the world, SpaceX's flagship Falcon Heavy was successfully tested in February 2018. However, what Musk really wants his engineers to concentrate on is developing the massive - and entirely reusable - Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) for testing in 2020.

"The Falcon Heavy is an intermediary rocket - SpaceX is not intending to put humans on that one," says Forczyk. Not so the BFR, which is nothing less than an interplanetary spaceship, with a planned liftoff thrust about twice that of the Saturn V rockets that took Apollo astronauts to the Moon. "The BFR is what they're planning to use to go to the moon and to Mars, which has been the SpaceX plan from the start," says Forczyk.

The Falcon 9's new and improved reusability should mean bigger profits for SpaceX, and therefore more cash that can be spent on developing the BFR.

When was the most recent SpaceX launch?

That would be June 29 2018, when a Falcon 9 sent a Dragon capsule to the International Space Station (ISS) from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. Called CRS-15 because it's the fifteenth such mission in SpaceX's contract with NASA as part of its Commercial Resupply Services contract, the capsule contained supplies and science experiments. SpaceX has been sending Dragon capsules to the ISS since 2012.

However, CRS-15 will use an 'old' Block 4 booster, which SpaceX won't be landing and reusing. It's the third launch in a row that's using - and losing - Falcon 9 Block 4 rockets.

It may have perfected reusable rockets, but when you've got a new toy to house, you need to clear some, er, space. If Falcon 9 was the prototype, the Block 5 improvements make it the real thing: a very reusable rocket that will eventually make spaceflight cheaper and more frequent. Almost everything is now in place for cheaper, more frequent spaceflight.

The missing piece in the puzzle? That would be a fierce competitor to SpaceX that's willing to slash prices and grow the market for satellites and space tourism, which would ultimately trigger a price-drop in rocket retail. Can you think of anyone who might be qualified? Just a couple of miles from Kennedy Space Center and the SpaceX launch facility, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has just moved in to a massive new reusable rocket manufacturing plant.

The reusable rocket price war is coming.
TechRadar's Next Up series is brought to you in association with Honor

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SpaceX's new ultra-reusable rocket could shape the future of humanity

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When Elon Musk's SpaceX first launched its Falcon 9 rocket back in 2010 it was thought of as a novelty venture by a tech entrepreneur that would be little more than a tech demonstration. No one thought it would become the de facto rocket for getting satellites, and even people, into orbit.

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Elon Musk's SpaceX becomes first private company to launch a reused rocket on a NASA mission

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Elon Musk's SpaceX becomes first private company to launch a reused rocket on a NASA mission

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The mission brings about 2½ tons of crew supplies and scientific payloads to the space station. Dragon will travel for two days before it attaches to the orbiting station, returning about one month later to Earth.

NASA officials announced the CRS-13 would be on a previously flown booster, saying in a press conference before the launch that the administration is "very comfortable that the risk posture on this vehicle is not significantly greater than a new booster."

This was the only launch where NASA has approved the use of a previously launched rocket. SpaceX demonstrated thorough readiness for the rocket after NASA participated "in a broad range" of date assessments and inspections of the Falcon 9.

The launch had been delayed multiple times from its original Dec. 8 target, with today marking the last backup opportunity until Dec. 25.

The 45th Space Wing of the U.S. Air Force said in a tweet before the launch that this was the 19th launch from Cape Canaveral's Eastern Range in 2017. This was SpaceX's 17th launch this year, with one more expected on Dec. 22 to launch more Iridium satellites.

Musk's company is at the forefront of a global shift in rocket launches, with this year the first in history that commercial launches will outpace government-sponsored ones.

While SpaceX is the first private company to achieve this milestone, the U.S. government formerly launched astronauts and supplies aboard its space shuttles. The shuttle was a composite of an orbiter, two recoverable solid rocket boosters and an iconic orange external fuel tank. The shuttle program flew 135 missions and ran for nearly 40 years until 2011, when it was retired.

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Elon Musk's SpaceX becomes first private company to launch a reused rocket on a NASA mission

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The mission brings about 2½ tons of crew supplies and scientific payloads to the space station. Dragon will travel for two days before it attaches to the orbiting station, returning about one month later to Earth.