Falcon Heavy Test Flight

What people said

NitpickLawyer · 2026-04 · Strong recommendation

> I think everyone forgot about early SpaceX product quality. This was 8 years ago and is one of the greatest stuff I've seen in space launches. The footage is so epic that it even got replicated in SciFi series! ... [VIDEO] This was 9 years ago, first droneship landing - [LINK] And this is 18 years ago, their first Falcon1 launch - [LINK] More live video from the ascent than we got on Artemis2 for sure...

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somenameforme · 2025-01 · Strong recommendation

Just to link that: [VIDEO] Such an unbelievable moment. And I also think an indicator of how much better society could be if we focused more on doing amazing things. The comments on YouTube are just filled with hope optimism and general awesomeness. FWIW that link goes straight to the moneyshot - it's always so much better if you watch it all the way through. It's an amazing broadcast.

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somenameforme · 2023-10 · Strong recommendation

Falcon Heavy has been launching commercial, government, and military payloads successfully for years now. [1] I'd strongly encourage checking out their first successful test launch of it, from 5 years ago. [2] Skip to about 29 minutes in for the money shot. Still gives me goose bumps! So let's compare the two! Falcon Heavy was developed with completely private funding, at a cost of ~$500 million. The prices of the launches are listed in Wiki. They start at $117 million, as NASA paid in 2023 to launch their Psyche craft. The SLS has been in development for more than a decade now, fully paid by the taxpayer, at a cost just about to break the $30 billion mark. The nominal cost per launch is still unknown but will almost certainly top a billion dollars. The last NASA administration gave an estimate of $800-$900 million per launch in 2019 dollars. And SLS cost estimates only go one way. And what do you get for $30 billion, and then another billion per launch? Ideally up to almost twice the capacity of a Falcon Heavy. The reason people are so cool on the SLS is that it's already a very poor value against existing technologies. And will be completely obsolete by the time Starship comes to pass which should not only be able to launch for a fraction of the cost of Falcon Heavy (which is already a fraction of the cost of SLS), but also launch well over the ideal launch capacity of SLS. [1] - [LINK] [2] - [VIDEO]

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