I found this comment regarding Falcon Heavy future use on reddit quite
interesting. I'm completely unaware of the validity of the assertion but I
thought it interesting both from a NASA use perspective as well as from a
"Is SLS now doomed?" perspective.
*The government will pay good money to build a cislunar station (called
Deep Space Gateway), plus provide all the necessary crew flights and cargo.
It is currently proposed such a station could be complete by 2030, using a
fleet of disposable SLS. However, with a single reusable Falcon Heavy, such
a station could be deployed by 2020 (assuming availability of modules),
using just the SLS reserve funds!*
A listing of possible Falcon Heavy missions (and the thread where the above
quote came from) can be found here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/7vqje4/falcon_heavy_future/
On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 10:16 AM, John Stoffel <john@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So lets look a what use cases Falcon Heavy starts to make sense. If
you can launch two comm-sats at once ala Ariane 5, that might be
good. Heck, you could launch three big ones without problem.
Now what about people starting to make *big* commsats, where the
system has so much capacity and speed you can just park it over
Europe, US or Asia to feed lots and lots and lots of spot beams down.
You have the room for really big antennas now, lots of station keeping
fuel and lots of solar panels to power it.
Because there are slot constraints in GSO aren't there?
And I'd figure that NASA or some else is going to want to be able to
launch a big probe to the outer system, or even just stuff to Mars on
the cheap. Think about having two or three FHs launch probes at each
martian conjunction, becuase you can launch, refurbish, launch and
still not lose too much of the window.
Or even using FH to get a nice big lander and rover onto the moon.
It's got the throw to send a pretty decent system, ala curiosity, or
better yet, multiple ones at once.
Radio controlled explorers might be quite doable with only 4-5 second
delay and HD signals coming back. Surviving the night is tough I
admit...
Heck, launch two or three keplers at once, which you didn't have to
sweat over the pounds, but just built three chunky copies. Wouldn't
that be an idea?