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Ah. After the first three exploded, I really didn't follow them. They have put one sat into orbit, which is a huge accomplishment. However, keep in mind it's a max 165kg payload. The max payload of the shuttle is 24,000 kg, though the Falcon 9 is supposed to match that this year.

Falcon 1 sends up to 650 or so kg to LEO. Falcon 9 can do 10k kg. The Falcon 9 Heavy is the one comparable to the Shuttle. SpaceX claims they will be able to send almost 30k kg to LEO. I don't know when they expect to launch a Falcon 9 Heavy, but I gather it's not in the next few years.

Ah. Well, I was flat wrong on this point. Though it seems their rockets are based on the Minutemen and Peacekeeper rockets. In fact, you cannot use their Minotaur rockets for private purposes because they use military parts and thus are not available for resale.

That's a bogus legal requirement used by Congress to screw an earlier attempt by E-Prime Aerospace in the late 90's to use the Peacekeeper missiles. I don't know who was responsible for it other than it most likely wasn't Orbital, who came later to the scene and found a viable loophole. NASA probably didn't help kill E-Prime's efforts, but they didn't lift a finger to help them either. One of the reasons I want NASA out of the launch business.

I'd put money on OSC's avionics. And the Minotaur IV and V use the axial thrust vectoring of the Peacekeeper missile. Frankly, if true, that'd make the Minotaur the best rocket on the planet for placing things accurately since the Peacekeeper remains the most precise ICBM ever built. Turning Peacekeepers into space vehicles has been tried before. E'Prime attempted that in the early 90's. They got blocked by US Congress, probably at the behest of competitors.

While that is true, it is also true that SpaceX needs to put something in orbit if it wishes to stay in business.

We did a study of the tankage sizing changes required and a few other features and actually got some quotes back from some of the contractors. It would have been a relatively cheap mission, about the same as a geostationary satellite launch.

I don't recall whether Raytheon was one of the contractors we contacted for pricing.

The military went away from liquid fuel for logistical reasons and the Minuteman missle series, using solid boosters, were deployed. The Minuteman 3 evolved into the MX Missile aka Peacekeeper, which required only a small crew and was portable making it a "mobile missle" in some deployments.

This logistical advantage was the basis of was the basis of E'Prime Aerospace's proposed launch vehicle series in the late 1980s. Through an effort with the Reagan Administration they acquired rights to acquire the existing assembly lines, 2 of which were still packed up in crates, and managed to cut preliminary deals with the contractors for the parts. The design mods included stripping off the radiation hardening, saving substantial weight, and replacing the kevlar fiber with graphite fiber in the tankage windings, something the Air Force had already funded at about the time the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty put an end to their further development. The launch site preferred was Ascention Island due to its location near the equator, ease of access from Florida (where the production lines were to exist) and a landing strip there that could receive the stages of the rockets in separate shipping containers via DC-3 transport, and launch from a cliff to the east. There was also a problem with the upper stage of the MX containing nitroglycerine, and that stage was eliminated or modified in E'Prime's designs.

It was a good idea. Something not quite as radical was, later, picked up by Orbital Sciences Corporation in their Taurus launcher, which used some surplus MX segments. E'Prime didn't want to do that due to quality control problems on stages that had been stored -- and indeed I was told that when O.S. procured their first MX stage, it had already been rejected by E'Prime due to a huge occlusion in the X-Ray image. They obviously could never have flown stage in any mission and it is unclear why they procured it.

The company had management as well as funding problems, and when I came on board in late 1991 as VP for Public Affairs, it was a few weeks from closing its doors. I really thought the idea of putting the MX into commercial production for satellite launches was a good one and hated to see it die, especially since I had just testified before Congress regarding commercialization of space technology on the day SALT was put into action. I was already broke due to the grassroots lobbying efforts but decided to go on my credit cards and take an unpaid job at E'Prime to help save the company. While there we managed to get the first Ka band license put through the FCC for one of E'Primes potential customers (Norris Communications' NORSTAR satellite), and as a result the stock, by then it was a pink sheet penny stock, had a rebound, going from a low of fractional cents per share to 30 cents a share. I had to leave E'Prime when after a few months they still were unable to pay a salary and I was at the end of my rope. The IRS had a lot of fun with me during a subsequent audit, and they're after me again subsequent to another effort of mine, but that's another story to be written. still being written. Suffice to say I'm getting really sick of the way the US government acts toward inventors and technologists -- most of whom need to be tax lawyers these days in order to avoid prisoner gang rape these days due to the incomprehensible statutes written by tax lawyers for the rest of us to follow.

PS: For more information you may be able to get the article I wrote for "Space Technology International" annual edition in 1992, from interlibrary loan.

The MX-Missile's steam cannon launch already works economically and reliably. Scaling it up should be relatively straight-forward, as long as you avoid the fate of Gerald Bull.

So, while in Washington, D.C., I shared with Rep. Rohrabacher, Truax's vision of a rapid-turn-around reusable system and how additional legislation we were proposing, such as giving tax incentives for capitalization of commercial space transport systems, would help guys like Truax get people to plop down their own cash to help him get started.

I was pretty exhausted both physically and financially from all the political activism, so I took a position as VP of Public Affairs with E'Prime Aerospace Corporation, initially to acquire the first Ka-band orbital slot from the FCC. It was for Norris Communications' geostationary "Norstar" satellite -- one of E'Prime's potential customers. This was all keeping an eye to attract capital for both E'Prime and Norris Communications. As part of that work, I ended up in Los Angeles. There, cable companies were interested in the high-frequency of Ka-band (and consequently smaller dishes for direct-broadcast media services). We had some potential investors interested. In the middle of the day of meetings with our potential investors, they disappeared. When we investigated, it turned out that McDonnell-Douglas had just (and I mean that day) held a press conference announcing they were going into a "public private partnership" to develop what would come to be known as the DC-X for "Delta Clipper-Experimental". In addition to satellite launching, one of the early applications touted for this vehicle was to be commercial transportation services shuttling cargo between ports on earth.

McDonnell-Douglas's headquarters were located in Long Beach, CA just a few miles from our meeting place. Long Beach, CA was Rep. Rohrabacher's district.

But all of this is moot. As long as pioneer stock Americans see governments as their ticket to the new frontier, the long-term prospects for all of terrestrial life, human and nonhuman, are going to continue rapidly deteriorating.

Then in 1991, following on my legislative successes in space commercialization I went to work with E'Prime Aerospace as Vice President of Public Affairs. I took on that job because they had a potential customer (Norris Satellite Communications -- run by a Dutch Amish expatriate from my ancestral county of Lancaster Pennsylvania) who wanted to launch a geostationary Ka Band satellite called "Norstar", but he couldn't get the license thorugh the FCC. There had never been a Ka Band satellite licensed and there was a lot of conflict over letting this Amish character have the first crack at commercializing the Milstar technology (NASA likes people to think ACTS was the pioneer in Ka band, but even thought ACTS was launched first, the Harris ECL satellite switching guys Norris used did their pioneering work with Milstar, not ACTS). Anyway, to make a long story short, we managed to get the FCC licensing dislodged and the first Ka band satellite license was awarded to Norris, the Amish dude. The satellite specifications called for multiple geostationary Ka band satellites with onboard switching of time division multiplexed spot beams that would allow you to adaptively switch the power (both informational and energetic) to various geographic hotspots as needed. This was getting close to what I had predicted as a geostationary computer network, because the ECL switches were systems that Seymour Cray himself would have respected, and the spot beams made it feasible to load-level much more effectively to stationary ground dishes only inches in diameter. If Cray's gallium arsenide switches, developed for the Cray-4, had made it into production, I think the systems could have been a lot high capacity at lower power while retaining their radiation hard characteristics.

Unfortunately, Norris's satellite system was to go the way of another Norris's (William) Plato system -- to the "before its time" scrap heap of history. The Calling Communications Corporation guys who were cursing me at the 1993 Small Satellite Conference in Logan, UT for grabbing their coveted Ka band first eventually, along with Iridium, got it reallocated. Calling Communications Corporation eventually went away from voice communications to computer networking and changed their name to Teledesic. Everyone seemed to forget about geostationary Ka band computer networking.

Even so, I still think there is enormous opportunity for a geostationary orbital computation satellite network based on phased-array spot beam switching and intersatellite optical links.