I’ve Seen The Future

Alex Mitchell

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Published in

Frontiers

4 min readFeb 11, 2018

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(Courtesy of Elon Musk and SpaceX)

When’s the last time you saw the future?

I mean, truly, without-a-doubt, glimpsed into what human life will be like years, decades, generations from now.

I thought I’d had the feeling of seeing the future before, but in retrospect, it was nothing.

We live in an age of autonomous cars, household robots, voice commands for everything, and AI, but what I saw on Tuesday, February 6th, 2018 blew them all away.

I traveled Monday, on an Upside Travel booked trip of course, to the Space Coast to see the historic launch in person.

I didn’t know quite what I’d see. I’d never been to a rocket launch before, but I knew I was going to see history one way or another:

“It’s either going to be an exciting success or an exciting failure — one big boom.” Elon Musk

What Makes Falcon Heavy So Special

SpaceX’s launch of Falcon Heavy is significant in it’s own right.

It’s a major technological achievement that included numerous firsts: first double booster recovery, first SpaceX payload sent out of the earth’s orbit, and of course, the first Tesla into space (it still feels weird typing that).

What’s even more amazing is that the Falcon Heavy cost $90MM to build vs. >$1B for the Saturn V.

If you fully load the development costs of each rocket, the difference is still staggering:

~$500MM for the Heavy vs. $6B for Saturn V

But all of these achievements aren’t why the Falcon Heavy launch was so special. What made this launch so important is momentum.

Momentum is Everything

SpaceX started launching rockets in 2006 with Falcon I. By 2008, they had achieved their first successful launch.

But, momentum really didn’t start building until 2013, when SpaceX had 3 successful launches.

Since then, it’s been up and to the right, with a major spike in 2017, when SpaceX had 18 successful launches.

Full launch manifest: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/launches/manifest)

Yes, you read that right, there is a private company launching (major) rockets 1.5 times each month!

I Want to Keep Seeing the Future

Another thing that’s special (and maybe the most important outcome) about the Falcon Heavy launch is that it dramatically opens the possibilities for SpaceX.

In addition to lowering the costs and increasing the payload weight for its bread and butter (satellites), Falcon Heavy unlocks SpaceX manned flight and accelerates the development of the BFR.