I’m glad they corrected that. There seem to be a lot of nit pickers reading technical articles.

“Update (Jan. 25, 2018): This story originally gave a number of rocket specifications that were incorrect. We apologize for these errors and thank the commenters who brought them to our attention.”

I guess someone commented there or they read this blog!

Mitch S asked: “Funny the writer didn’t catch that as he says FH weighs 3.1 million lbs – if it makes 1.7 mil lbs of thrust how would it get off the ground?!”

I read the article differently. The next paragraph says: “On the other hand, the two-stage Falcon Heavy has nine Merlin 1D main engines in its first stage and nine in each of its two boosters burning supercooled liquid oxygen and kerosene to produce 5,130,000 lb of thrust.” It is a single Falcon 9 that generates the 1.7 million pounds of thrust.

Besides, the Saturn V is no competition to the Falcon Heavy, if for no other reason that no more Saturns could be built. True, the complete microfilm plans for the giant rocket and its support systems are carefully stored by NASA, but the men and women who built Saturn are all dead or retired, the machine tools used to build it are all broken up, and most of the components are no longer manufactured.

Yes, it is a pointless exercise especially if anyone thinks it is about available options. Even if the the production facilities were sitting around someplace in working condition, the Saturn V still wouldn’t be built. There have been so many advances in technology, it would essentially be a new launcher. The problem has never been that a rocket the size of Saturn V couldn’t be built, that Saturn V production lines don’t exist, or that it couldn’t be built today with a better design. Congress never directed NASA to build one, unless you count the SLS.

FH would have to launch twice to get the spaceship to LEO, and the crew then in a Dragon on a F9, all docked together before going to the Moon. Preferably to land near preplaced FH cargo on the surface to enhance mission length and scope. That’s 3 times $90 plus $133 = $400 million for the launches and the Dragon, as I gather it.

Even a Saturn V class launcher, like the SLS, can’t launch directly to the Moon. It has to leave a return module in Lunar orbit. Apollo even had to turn around and re-dock with the landing module mid way, and the Soviet approach required the single Lunar cosmonaut to transfer between the modules in a space suite EVA. Docking uncrewed modules in LEO as a preparation is much safer. The crew only launches when it is confirmed that all of that worked out fine.

I doubt even the BFR launcher would be capable of direct launch from Earth to Lunar surface. Dockings seem necessary in any case, and then the size of the launcher doesn’t matter much.