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 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.
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...
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...