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....
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...
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.
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
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar