| 送交者: 朱砂[☆品衔R3☆] 于 2018-02-09 0:52 已读 2429 次 | 朱砂的个人频道 |
The Falcon Heavy: A Good Show, but Not Necessarily Great Business
WASHINGTON—The launch this week of SpaceX’s mammoth Falcon Heavy rocket was a feat, but many in the space industry doubt it will bring the company big commercial business.
The heavy-lift vehicle appears to be too small for ferrying crews or delivering major cargo packages into deep space, said executives attending a commercial space conference here Wednesday. At the same time, it seems too big to serve today’s generation of smaller satellites, they added.
“I don’t understand what their plan is” to overcome those challenges, said John Mulholland, head of Boeing Co.’s program to carry U.S. astronauts to the international space station, on the sidelines of the conference.
When Space Exploration Technologies Corp. founder Elon Musk kicked off development of what would become the world’s most powerful operational rocket at the start of the decade, the goal was to lift as many as 70 tons into orbits relatively close to Earth.
The vehicle was conceived to carry megasatellites for either businesses or the government, and transport U.S. astronauts. It was also intended to serve as a bridge to even more powerful systems designed to ultimately create human outposts deeper in space.
The successful launch proved the validity of the engineering, but assumptions about market demand have changed considerably in the intervening years. The size as well as the type of payloads has shifted, and not to the Falcon Heavy’s advantage.
请点这里投票，“赞”助支持！