Slashdot Mirror
Another Private Space Startup
An anonymous reader writes "Wired has a story about former PayPal owner Elon Musk who has his own rocket company, SpaceX, trying to lower the cost of getting into space. They just tested the rocket engine, and hope to fly a test by the end of the year. Not bad for less than a year's worth of work so far." We mentioned this guy last year.
by far, the greatest phenomenon in the world is that of the rich man with too much time on his hands....
Many people in space is dangerous. These "low cost" space aircraft all emite waste, and the people on board do too. This waste leads to spacecraft getting punctured, even destroyed, such as in the case of the Columbia, and eventually to numerous deaths. These craft also idealize visiting space, which is actually a dangerous proposition, considering recent deaths.
By his own admission, Musk is making some grandiose claims -- among them that he will cut the cost of launching up to 1,000 pounds of payload into near-Earth orbit by up to two-thirds, and that he can buck the dismal success rate of space-launch startups.
Wait a second. Grandiose or not, which market is he talking about? The European Space Agency can already lift more for less. So is he talking about taking two-thirds off the American price or the European price?
Heck, for all we know, he's going to take two-thirds off the price Afghanistan would charge you if they had launch capability.
Mirror to the article.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
As a bedroom, or you own secret cave?!
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
In a semi-related note, John Carmack (yes, that John Carmack) is competing to win the X-Prize, which gives $10 million to the first small team to put a man 62.5 miles above the surface of the earth. See http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/10/16/xprize.co ntest/
I found how many other types of people are actively starting their own "going to space" club. So far the only ones I've heard of on slashdot are IT-industry veterans. Are they the only ones, or is there somebody else out there with the money to pull it off?
Regardless, private space enterprise could be both a good and bad thing. As NASA seems to be flagging in some areas, private funding of exploration could be the big push needed to get us beyond the moon.
That... and whomever develops a working "warp drive" will probably have to be a Star Trek geek...
Or maybe it is to blast the 5 PayPal customer dis-service employees into space....
This guy doesn't look like Emperor Ming by any chance does he?
All the better to bomb the moon for water!
So, did he get the funding from this from all the disgruntled PayPal users?
http://www.paypalsucks.com
You might not like it, but that's my opinion.
The guy in the article should join the Space Entrepreneurship Network.
Maybe I should too...
Either way, I'll better off than that stupid NSync guy who thought Pepsi was going to sponsor his $20 million ride on a Soyuz. If he's really a space fanatic, as he claims, he should have put the money up himself. (I'm sure he's got enough, with all the teenage girls who listen to that crap.)
Suicide Booth: You are now dead! Thank you for using Stop and Drop, America's favorite since 2008.
Do they still have those little platic water rockets or have they gone the way of the lawn dart?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The more the merrier. NASA is busy launching (or lately, not launching) shuttles that cost roughly 30X the cost of launching a Soyuz, and has cancelled the latest of its "shuttle replacement" programs (the X-33/Venturestar). The sooner somebody else gets their foot in the door, the sooner we can get on with the exciting stuff in space. Cheaper. Some of these nuts will blow themselves up. Some will fail less catastrophically. A few will make it, and it will be a damn good thing to have somebody besides NASA pushing out for a change.
I heartily welcome and cheer for anybody willing to try. Build it and go, you crazy rich bastards!!
There's a big Nike swoosh in the night sky
An errant launch vehicle kills someone (the goverment just gets all somber and hands out taxpayer money, what would a private company do, buy Space Explorer insurance? Bet that's not gonna be cheap...)
Servers are running in space, immune from meddling DMCA-type laws, sending spam, etc. ("In tonight's news, a SpamHaus missile took out RalskySat I, also the RIAA plans to launch a series of jamming satellites as CD prices top $75 each.")
People start spamming me with Timeshares over Florida offers...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
With paypal being charged under the PATRIOT-ACT, it's obvious this guy is just a terrorist. He probably just wants to fly his rocket ship up and drop a bunch of crap on people from space.
Space is for the government. private space exploration is an invitation to disaster. Hopefully Total Information awareness will keep in eye on these dangerous types.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Chances are, you'd get half way there and they'd shut down your rocket for no reason.
About time! Now instead of posting dupes in ignorance, they check to see if it is a dupe and post it anyway with a note saying so right in the post!
[sig]you really dont want the answers, trust me[/sig]
If you're wondering what's up with all these private space ventures lately, the Space Access Society conference is going on right now. This particular contender is for freight, not human travel (at least at this point), and orbital, not suborbital as in the X Prize competition, which has also been heating up the last few months, since they got the full $10 million in the bank last October.
Energy: time to change the picture.
While I am all for free enterprise, I am not yet convinced that the technology exists to make space travel inexpensive enough for any organization that does not have the capability to spend hundreds of millions without seeing a return (like, say government agencies).
Sure a suborbital flight may be (relatively) cheap, but I am not sure that keeping humans in space for prolonged periods can ever be made safe and cheap.
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Hey, guys - if your rocket starts to malfunction - can you point it at - say - the Moon? We're looking for water.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
What's the deal with this anyways?
I mean the purse is 10 million. It seems to me you'd have spent that many times over to develop a rocket ship. So I doubt the winner recoups his investment, let alone makes any profit.
So I assume it's more about bragging rights? And if so, why not donate the 10 million to charity, and just give out a fancy trophy?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You won't be needing your identity here any longer. There are no scheduled return flights.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
What this fellow seems to be promoting is nothing more than a "Big Dumb Booster"-based launch system. He's not worried about building a reusable launch vehicle a-la X-Prize, or an orbiter/re-entry vehicle, or a hypersonic jet engine. Kerosene, LOX, and a good pumping system...not necessarily elegant, but could be pretty effective.
Big thrust, low weight, "cheap" to manufacture, limited exposure to the "risky" science of re-entry (leave that to the folks worrying about the payload)...
These guys may be on to something.
You don't want the government shutting you down for violating the Homeland Security Act
We really need to axe AC posting, it's making these boards a haven for 13 year olds with too much time, and no way to filter the good AC posts from the bad.
If only Bill Gates would get a bee in hif bonnet about putting a man on mars in 10 years, I would start purchasing the software put out by his company just to support the endeavor. Maybe I am a sell out...
Former PayPal owner Elon Musk is dead
I think his server just went into orbit.
"What payload are you talking about? We have no record of this."
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Perhaps he should have spent some of that money on a server that can serve pages faster than my local McDonalds takes to get my meal ready...
I just want to see him improve the response of servers running ridiculously slow flash menu systems by a factor of three.. now that would be amazing!
---
The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time. -- Merrick Furst
Organ transplants are best left to the professionals
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
IIRC, none of these private ventures that are trying to go into space are also trying to go into orbit. They are trying to do "sub-orbital" flights like the first couple of Mercury flights.
So, none of the "waste" that they may leave behind is going to remain up there: It will all come falling back down into the atmosphere where it will not pose any danger to any other spacecraft.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
well.. I hope their rocket engine works better than their webpage..
Obama = Socialism.
Just a matter of time before IP Lawyers are in space...
"Jeff Bezos announces Amazon awarded patent for 1-click launch."
"Pan-IP files suit against PayPal for infringement of their patent on doing business from space."
"Now we've got all this room, we've even got the moon and I hear the U.S.S.R will be open soon, as vacation land for lawyers in love."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Specically, the private sector race to the moon. An excellent read.
I was suprised that a couple of these private companies are launching later this year.
Ruddygore then announced his partner in the space business, Larry Fineburg, owner and operator of the Fineburg Rubber Company in Hope, Arkansas.
Both Ruddygore and Fineburg were evasive on the precise nature of the launch technology behind their astro-endeavor until a an exasperated reported asked, "What are you going to do? Build a giant rubber band?" At which point Ruddygore tromped off the stage, dragging Fineburg with him, and was quoted as saying, "That goddamned Sally Spinfeld gots a blabbermouth on her like the Devil hisself! I hired her as a secretary as a favor to ol' Skeetch, but I warned him she'd be a sek-ruity risk!"
BTSETFOWM public relations officer Jeb "Hound" Pulver then took the podium to answer questions about their goals in space.
"Let me put it this way," said Pulver, "Think chickens, barbed wire and country music. That should make it obvious." After he stared at the baffled reporters for several minutes, Pulver said, "Chickens. You know... *chick*-*ens*... Barbed *wye*-*err*? What part of this are you not understanding?"
--- Ban humanity.
eBay listing (Large Image!)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I am anxious to see more of these private space startups. After all, it's how the Fantastic Four got their super powers. It's just a matter of time...
The specifications of such a device are as follows:
* It has to travel 62 miles - straight up.
* It has to travel 62 miles down and land in a controlled fashion so it can be re-used.
* It must not kill any passengers (of which it should be capable of carrying 3).
A $1000 motor scooter is a self-powered device that can easily go 62 miles there and back with a passenger - provided it's along the ground. For ten thousand times as much you ought to be able to come up with something nifty that'll go straight up. On the face of it, it is a simple problem.
One of the goals of the X-Prize is to reduce the cost of space travel. Private ventures may very well have to invent entirely new ways of solving technical spaceship problems.
90% of space projects so far are sponsored by governments, and as such they rarely innovate - they're too busy trying to satisfy a design commitee than to solve the problem with an elegant engineering solution.
I mean, come on. Look at what some of the X-Prize competitors have been up to:
Armadillo Aerospace - Powered manned lander working prototype that can hover and land safely. Look me in the eye and tell me that cost $10 million. In theory (assuming infinite onboard fuel and life-support) this thing could jet anywhere in the solar system - today. When they scale up the design it'll be capable of going to space with all the fuel it needs onboard.
Scaled Composites - The cockpit of their spaceship has a battery-powered digital kitchen timer clock glued to the control panel - a logical and practical cost-cutting measure that would never be seen in a US government program. It wouldn't suprise me if this spacecraft cost around $5 million to fabricate (especially since Scaled are an aircraft design and manufacturing company and could do it for cost). But it definitely did not cost $300 million.
Overpriced government projects have managed to convince you (and most of the public) that space travel needs to be expensive. The X-Prize will (with a bit of luck) end that myth.
Sure, now we see were al the money stolen by PayPal went to. To his litle space program.
I think a lot of people who got duped by PayPal,
because for now good reason PayPal told his users that they were abused it, and kept al the money belonging to those users!
This is a ******** crime if you ask me.
May Ye Rot In Hell!
russia is good for launching, they can do heavy loads and have the lowest failure rate.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
"If only Bill Gates would get a bee in hif bonnet about putting a man on mars in 10 years"
Though, I am sure he day dreams about blasting a certain Finnish programmer off the face of Earth.
"I would start purchasing the software put out by his company just to support the endeavor."
Yes, let's all fund a SOFTWARE company to build rockets. That would be A LOT more efficient than funding, say, NASA.
The rockets can run on IIS and be manipulated with Internet Explorer and scheduled events via Outlook. Instead of a count down, we'll wait for the file system to defrag.
I can see it now . . . "lowest TCO to space" and "we will get to the moon before those commy penguinestas".
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
All this from a guy who couldn't keep his last million dollar investment on the road
But I'm sure he has things figured out this time.
I read the Wired piece while I was waiting for the SpaceX site to load.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I could do that..... if I wanted to.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
...cancelled the latest of its "shuttle replacement" programs (the X-33/Venturestar).
NASA has cancelled about seven of these shuttle replacement programs over the last 20 years. The cancelled programs were naturally over budget and over schedule by the time they were cancelled. The money wasted would have probably been enough for at least one complete system.
If any of the proposed replacements had delivered even 10% of what it promised it would still be a major improvement over the shuttle - the first (and so far the last) semi-reusable orbital lifter ever built.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The first stage is actually reusable and pump-fed. The second stage is a pressure-fed expendable.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
"Flying is easy... it's the landing that's hard."
As long as they're only claiming that they can get stuff into space, I'm inclined to believe them. All you need for that is a powerful rocket and some good mathematicians. But when some random rich guy claims that he can bring stuff back safely when even NASA is having problems with that... that's when I stop buying it.
This was part of the plot of the Red Dwarf novels.
A spacecraft, called the Nova 5, was sent up into space to trigger certain stars to go supernova at precisely the right times so that when the light from each of them reached the earth, it would spell out "COKE ADDS LIFE!" across the night sky - an ad campaign that would supposedly "buy pepsi for good".
The crew were in stasis on their way to add the final dot on the excalmation mark when the ship's android decided to clean the computer - with hot soapy water. The ship, with no computer (the android, Kryten, cleaned the backup computer as well), crashed into a moon, to be found three million years later by Red Dwarf and its crew - with Kryten still tending to the needs of the three female crash survivors, feeding them, bathing them etc, although they've been skelotons for a fairly large proportion of those three million years.
... because once you have built up that enormous weapons industry, what are you going to tell all those engineers to do? Keep churning out more weapons? From the days of Krupp weapons have spread everywhere the producing country doesn't want them to. ... governments want to keep arms/aerospace companies ready to produce lots of arms without the bad effects of excess productions.
Nah, take some of that enourmous defense budget and tell them to go to mars instead. It's why we have a space industry in the first place
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Can I eat your babies? I bet they taste really good. I'd like to boil one and have the other baked. If thats possible please email me lronhubbard@scientologistrule.org thanks.
Also if you could stop sending me pictures of you and BigTool4u@aol.com that would be appreciated.
HAVE A GREAT DAY
Do they have the bubble wrap handy?
I'm afraid that wouldn't work. Ya see, they're loking for spectrograph traces - and the presence of (70% water) splatted humans would foul the readings.
Sorry.
Unless it's a dupe
I don't want to wait for my machine to download files to see his fancy animations, I just want to see a few simple pics or drawings, and read what he has to say. Instead I see this flashy overhyped waste of time and money, (his web page), that can only be there to cover a lack of abilities elsewhere.
Drop the hype and show us the goods.
I agree completely. They are truly split-personality about their design choices. They flog outdated stuff that costs more to use than anyone expected (witness the $5million per flight the shuttle costs), while simultaneously targetting only pie-in-the-sky replacement designs like scramjets and all-composite SSTO lifters that invariably end up aborted in the design stage vastly overbudget.
If I could personally beat one thing into NASA, it would be TAKE SMALLER STEPS. Build something that's 30% better than the shuttle. Don't try for 1000% better right out of the gate-- they've proven time and time again that they can't hit their targets on massively complicated designs.
Here's just one small-step suggestion: take the successfully built and tested Linear Aerospike engine from the cancelled Venturestar program, and weld it to the ass-end of the shuttle. That right there is a 30% efficiency gain, if I remember the numbers right. That should result in your choice of: smaller SRBs, smaller main fuel tank, or larger payload. Or any moderate combination of all three.
Orrrr.... stick with Big Dumb Boosters until you can FINISH a new design. Russia lobs Soyuz capsules up for somewhere between 1/15 and 1/30 the cost of a shuttle launch. Send heavy stuff with Proton, and people with a Soyuz. Now that we have the half-finished ISS, we don't really need to fly our whole space laboratory back and forth just for some zero-G experiments do we?
I want to see as much in space as we can possibly afford. If old-style rockets are cheaper, use them. The Shuttle is a hideous investment at $500mil a pop. It's reusable, but not in any practical sense. Mir's yearly operating budget was ~$250mil, and the WHOLE MIR PROGRAM (construction and support missions included) cost less than $5bil, less than 10 shuttle missions. There is very little science being done with the shuttle that can't be done on a station, with crew and experiments launched on comparatively cheap russion lifters. Using the shuttle to launch comsats is like using a school bus to pick up some milk at the store.
Anyway, here's to hoping that a couple of successful private launches spur NASA into a more practical (but advancing, rather than stagnating) program.
It seems like quite a few groups have gotten to the "engine test in the desert" phase. Not too many have actually flown something around. Don't think I'll get my hopes up until I see some of that from these guys.
Independence Day (Score:1)
by Klerck (213193) Neutral on 10:38 PM -- Tuesday April 15 2003 (#5741846)
( http://www.klerck.org/ | Last Journal: 12:20 AM -- Wednesday April 16 2003 )
In less than an hour, crapflooders from here will join others from all over the world, and we will be launching the largest troll battle in the history of trollkind. Trollkind, that word should have a new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by out petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interest. Perhaps, it's fate that today is the 4th of July, and I will once again be fighting for my freedom. Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution, or downmodding, but from banning. I am fighting for my right to post, to goatse.cx. And should I win the day, the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day all trolls and crapflooders declared in one voice, "We will not go quietly into the night, we will not be banned without a fight, we are going to post on, we are going to have sex with goats, we will not post at -1. Today we celebrate our Independence Day!"
[ Reply to This ]
Re:Independence Day (Score:1)
by Anonymous Coward on 01:16 AM -- Friday April 18 2003 (#5757787)
stick to racist comments and page widening. you really aren't funny or clever at all and trying to be makes you look bad.
-trollaxor and everyone from trollaxor.com that hates goatse.info assholes, in the name of factionalism
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Re:Independence Day (Score:1)
by Klerck (213193) Neutral on 03:27 AM -- Friday April 18 2003 (#5758145)
( http://www.klerck.org/ | Last Journal: 12:20 AM -- Wednesday April 16 2003 )
oic
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
But it MAY pose risk to inhabitants on earth? Or would it all burn in the atmosphere?
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
From the flash file:
"Ethernet Local Area Network connects computers and the vehicle to the ground."
From this we can ascertain:
- They're only gonna be able to put stuff into orbit at 2000m altitude, since they are using Ethernet media.
- They would have to simulaneously provide an amphibious vehicle with an attached Ethernet transciever to circle the globe below.
- The satellites they put into orbit will require propulsion to compensate for the severe friction that would occur at 2000 m altitude.
- They have found a way to encircle the globe without crossing public right-of-way (since it is a LAN, not a WAN).
Impressive.
They must have invented a way to put an airplane into orbit at ~ 9000 ft orbit using a 6 million dollar rocket, with a tether for air-to-ground communications!
except the "good" (things that appeal to slashbotting mediocritomatons) ac posts get modded up fuckhead. your hitler totalitarian bullshit might wash in your basement where you imprison little kids to molest them, but anonymous communications are the fundamantal mechanism by which we, the victims of child molestoers like yourself, have recourse against monsters like you.