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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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You're correct about the volume limitations. They're currently working on an extended fairing option, but that's not to try to get the Falcon Heavy price/volume ratio lower than Falcon 9 - the bigger fairings won't even be reusable like their standard fairings are - it's to support a few bigger individual launches like conjoined Lunar Gateway modules as well as a few National-Security, Might-Be-Declassified-In-50-Years payloads.

But, I would say FH is designed for higher-mass launches; it was only originally that they thought that was necessary for high mass. FH design started before the Falcon 9 version 1.0 (with max payload to LEO of 10.4 tons or to GTO of 4.5 tons) even flew, and that wasn't enough for the DoD contracts they wanted, and they thought FH was the best way to get there ... but then improved Merlin engines and stretched tanks pushed the F9 payloads to 22.8t and 8.3t (fully expended, but for the prices DoD is willing to pay that's fine), and FH took them a lot longer than they'd hoped, and they ended up with a rocket they barely needed (9 launches so far, vs like 350 for F9, in part because a lot of "so heavy it needs Falcon Heavy" payloads ended up riding on upgraded F9s instead) but which they couldn't even cancel (IIRC Musk wanted to, and Gwynne Shotwell had to talk him out of it) because they already had those DoD contracts.

Despite agreeing to the extended fairing development, their internal strategy for fixing volume limitations is to forget about Falcons and finish Starship. 50% more mass capacity than FH with 550% more volume should be more than enough to ensure the latter limit isn't binding.