Falcon Heavy

Finally, some good news on the heavy-lift front.

While Congress and NASA continue to wrangle over budgets and the need for extreme heavy-lift options to orbit, the moon and Mars, Elon Musk and Space X have announced that their heavy-lift platform, Falcon Heavy, will be ready to launch by 2013 or 2014.

With the exception of the Saturn V, Falcon Heavy will be the largest rocket ever built by anyone. Falcon Heavy has a payload capacity of 53 metric tons, roughly the equivalent of a fully loaded Boeing 737-200. All for about $100 million, about half the cost of a new Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Good on them.

Here's the press release from Space X:

http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20110405