Launch Vehicle Infographic

youmagine

The infographic has three pieces of information: (1) total cost to the customer of one flight, in US dollars FOR CARGO. Humans are a whole 'nother story. The shuttle is included purely for fun(x axis: $3 million/mm) (2) amount of mass that can be carried into LEO, in kg (y axis: 500kg/mm) (3) physical height of the assembled launch stack, in meters (z axis: 1m/mm) The values used are in the 'rough-order-of-magnitude' range of accuracy. The lack of public information, coupled with the multiple ways that a rocket can be priced and the varying capabilities depending on the launch site place this project squarely into the 'interesting but useless' category of information. Seriously, if your using these values for anything important you're crazy. With that said, the following sites were used to find the information: Wikipedia (of course) Marspedia.org russianspaceweb.com spaceandtech.com spacelaunchreport.com If I'm feeling very, very motivated I may go and cross check the numbers against whatever is available on ILS',ESA's and ULA's websites, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. There is a good case to be made in splitting the rockets into low, medium and heavy lift categories to better accentuate the differences in cost/payload, but I didn't feel that there were enough rockets in each category to make it worth my while. Plus, it's kind of nice to have a unified scale to get an idea of the range of craft available. Who said the space age was dead? Currently the following rockets are available for printing: Name Mass/LEO Stack Height Cost Ariane 5 18,000 kg 52m $165 million Atlas 5 HLV 29,420 kg 58.3m $349.6 million Delta IV Heavy 22,560 kg 72m $275.6 million Falcon 9 10,450 kg 54.3m $56 million Proton Breeze M 20,700 kg 53m $89 million Zenit-2 (Sea Launch) 13,740 kg 59.6m $42.5 million Soyuz 8,400 kg 49.3m $44.8 million Space Shuttle 28,800 kg 56m $300 million lv_scale - The map key! All the rockets can be view in the 'lv_all' stl, but the intention is to print them separately. Each file as a version number at the end that should give an idea (along with the picture) at what stage the files are at. The latest version of each rocket is attached, along with a zip of the latest version of each rocket. As the versions are updated a zip of the older versions will be available as well. In addition there is a zip of the pro/e files for this project. Sorry OpenSCAD users - I know this project cries out for scalable goodness but I just don't have time to learn it right now. Another time, perhaps.