From PayPal to Planetary Travel 97
A user writes "PayPal founder Elon Musk muses about his plans to send rockets to space and his eventual hopes for making life 'multi-planetary.' 'I said I wanted to take a large fortune and make it a small one, so I started a rocket business,' Musk said. SpaceX is not new, but in a speech at Virginia Tech, Musk talked about the company's troubles and its lawsuit against Boeing and Lockheed as he tries to get a slice of the valuable Air Force contracts."
Re:Price? (Score:5, Informative)
Small payload rockets are much more expensive per kilogram than large rockets - $15-30k/kg typically. Falcon 1 is $9k. Very, very cheap for this market.
For midsized and large rockets, costs typically range from $7k-15k/kg. Energia was $8.6k/kg. Falcon V is predicted to be $2.9k/kg. Falcon 9 is predicted to be $2.9k/kg. Falcon 9-S5 is predicted to be $3k/kg. Falcon 9-S9 is predicted to be $3.1k/kg. Again, very, very cheap. And the size of a Falcon 9-S9, if they make it that far, is monstrous. A regular Falcon 9 would compete with an Ariane 5, but a 9-S9 would be a shuttle competitor. Real heavy lift.
If Musk can really pull this off, he deserves a medal. And a fat roster of contracts
Quotes from Elon Musk (Score:5, Informative)
A number of people have been complaining about Musk and his three launch scrubs in the past few months, where the countdown was terminated for various reasons before the rocket left the ground. It should be noted though that these sorts of delays are pretty much the norm for the launch business. For example, there were eleven separate attempts to launch the ARGOS satellite on a Boeing Delta II rocket.
This set of notes by Michael Belfiore from their pre-launch press conference [collegiatetimes.com] for their launch attempt late last year is a pretty interesting read and gives great insight into what Musk wants to do with SpaceX. Some excerpts:
SpaceX's second Gen rocket engine will be the biggest rocket engine in the world, though not the biggest in history. The F1 engine that sent people to the moon is no longer in production, so Musk doesn't count that.
Q: What customers will you put on Falcon 9?
A: We haven't thought a lot about it because it's speculative, but big customers would be NASA, Bigelow Aerospace, which is launching its first subscale space station module next year, and potentially people who just want to go to orbit and just spend some time on orbit. Also we could do a loop around the moon, which actually wouldn't require a huge rocket. [Space Adventures recently cut a deal with the Russian Space Agency to do just that, so that may be what inspired Musk to say that.]
Q: When will you go to space?
A: I'm not doing this to go into space myself, per se. I want to help build a space faring civilization. It would have been very easy for me to pay to go to the International Space Station myself. I want to help other people get to space.
Musk: The expansion of life on earth to other places is arguably the most important thing to happen to life on earth, if it happens. Life has the duty to expand. And we're the representatives of life with the ability to do so.
Q: When will you fly cargo missions to the space station?
A: I hope in the next 3 to 4 years.
Another question from me: Are you developing a manned vehicle right now, or have you thought that far ahead yet?
A: I can't comment on that right now.
Q: What's next in the entreprenurial space field?
A: Lots of people doing things--Paul Allen [who funded SpaceShipOne], Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, John Carmack with Armadillo Aerospace...Musk thinks we're heading toward a Netscape moment, when someone turns a profit, and hopefully it'll be SpaceX, and then investment capital will start to flow in.
Boeing & Lockheed suit dismissed (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, it looks like the suit against the merger of Boeing & Lockheed's launch operations (effectively creating a launch monopoly) has been dismissed [nasaspaceflight.com]. Some comments from RLV News [hobbyspace.com] (a fantastic space news resource, btw):
A judge has dismissed the lawsuit by SpaceX against the Boeing / Lockheed plan to form the United Launch Alliance to provide most all of the large payload launches for the Air Force for the next several years: SpaceX vs. Boeing and Lockheed Lawsuit Dismissed - NasaSpaceFlight.com - Feb.17.06 [nasaspaceflight.com].
From the description of the decision, it sounds like a Catch-22 situation. The judge is saying that you can't sue to stop the formation of a monopoly until you have built your system and proved that it is capable of competing against the monopoly. However, in a monopoly situation, especially in such a capital intensive area as rockets, it can be extremely difficult to raise the money to build your system if potential investors see that you will be kept out of a primary market. Talk about a barrier to entry!
In this case, Elon Musk has said he will build the Falcon 9 regardless, but it's a shame he has to enter a playing field tilted against him from the start.
An additional comment from the Space Law Probe [blogspot.com]: The court did not address the merits of SpaceX claims. (Nor, by the way, did the judge make note of whether a successful Falcon launch might have made a difference in the analysis or ruling, as some will no doubt wonder.)