Launch Vehicle Infographic by jahg

Last crawled date: 2 years, 12 months ago

This is a 3D printable infographic showing a somewhat random selection of launch vehicles used to get to low Earth orbit. 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!