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From PayPal to Planetary Travel
furnk 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."
I can't wait to start getting helpful unsolicited emails informing me that someone's attempted to use my SpaceX account that I don't even have to purchase tickets to Mars.
Damn phishers.
What is it with them ? Like the Amazon owner who wants to get into rockets, now this guy and don't forget Richard British guy who tries to break every meaningless record.
News. We have rockets already.
Try and beat Pegasus for cost/lb.
Huh? Lets start from the beginning.
;)
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
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
He'd get in trouble if he tried to send his rockets someplace on Earth.
Trust not a man who's rich in flax / His morals may be sadly lax
Charles Hill, professor of aerospace and ocean engineering, said the university had a $1 million spacecraft that was mothballed after the Columbia explosion.
Whatever happened to the good ol' days where astronauts had balls and the administrators let them prove it? Spaceflight is a little dangerous, sure; but I'd volunteer if I was given a 50/50 chance of returning alive. I'm sure many other people would too.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
The former CEO of paypal just dropped a $100k matching challenge to the singularity challenge. Transcend humanity first, then the stars are nothing in comparison. Why terraform for oxygen when you can run on antimatter?
Don't get me wrong -- I kind of like the Singularity Institute. However, could you point me towards some of the technological advancements they've been responsible for recently, or some of their research publications? As far as I can tell, there's zero.
I can't help thinking about all the explorers who set out from a tired conservative European world to find the 'new world'; multi-year trips, many lost ships, false starts, disasters and discoveries. In some ways we now live in a very conservative risk averse world that likes to try and keep the status quo rather than push the boundaries and explore new hosizons.
How long will it be and how many 'lost ships' will we see before we get another Christopher Columus, Marco Polo or James Cook?
I'm a big fan of Elon Musk, who started SpaceX with the money he got from selling PayPal to eBay. He's a pretty good example of someone who grew up with dreams about space who's trying to make those dreams a reality. I think his efforts with towards dramatically decreasing the cost of space launch are quite important, and crucial for his (and my) long-term goal of making humanity a multi-planet species.
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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 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.
Not *nearly* that easy.
First off, boosters typically get jettisoned at unstable altitudes. If you wanted to take the space shuttle main tanks up to LEO, for example, you'd have to fly without payload. You'd need to bring up everything that goes in and on the tank in subsequent flughts.
Secondly, space stations are far more than an airtight container. They're hundreds of thousands to millions of parts, each needing to be attached. Often this involves breaches of your structure, which you would need to make re-airtight at many points.
The shapes are often odd. They often have complicating factors, such as residual chemicals or clouds of insulation or outgassing around them. They may not weld well. And in-space assembly itself is already incredibly difficult (not to mention that an astronaut in orbit is the highest labour cost you'll ever find).
It's much easier just to build it on the ground and launch it. Even Skylab, which was just a modified upper stage, was modified on the ground (even then it had problems). It just makes more economic and structural sense to do your work here on Earth, even if it means more (or bigger) launches. And yes, this has been considered before - what would later become ISS had the possibility of being made of shuttle ETs considered several times.
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
Almost everything comes down to launch costs. Is shielding a problem? Cut your launch costs in half, and you can double your craft's mass. Double the craft's mass, and you'll get several times thicker radiation shielding.
:)
Launch cost reduction should be our number one space research project. Sending people to the moon and mars when launch costs to LEO alone are 7-15k$/kg is just silly. It's unsustainable. It's asking to get yourself a new albatross around your neck as ISS has started to become.
With the money put into these projects, we should fund a huge amount of launch cost reduction research. Fund development at big companies. At small companies like SpaceX. Fund materials and component research. Fund scramjets. Fund nuclear thermal. Fund ballistic launch. Fund it all. Find what works, toss the rest. It will take money. A lot of it. But once we have reduced launch costs, we get to keep them that way
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
Elon Musk is an idiot. Read below to find out why.
PayPal was founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel. Elon Musk's competitor, X.com, merged with PayPal in 2000. Elon Musk became PayPal's CEO and Peter Thiel stepped down. Elon then ordered the PayPal system to be rewritten for Windows (it previously ran on Linux). This rewrite was strongly disliked by engineering, but Elon Musk persisted. The Windows rewrite was completed after six months of hard work, but was deemed too unstable to use. Elon Musk was fired by the board of directors of PayPal in late 2000 through a vote of no confidence. He would have destroyed PayPal.
Peter Thiel stepped up to become CEO, again, and made PayPal into a gigantic success.
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."
Unfortunately, it looks like the suit against the merger of Boeing & Lockheed's launch operations (effectively creating a launch monopoly) has been dismissed. Some comments from RLV News (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.
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: 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.)
Why would anyone become "multi-planetary" when there's no reason to do so? Other planets are harsh, inhospitable places. What's the incentive to spend the billions upon billions of dollars it'd take to develop the technology for a colony? "Coolness?" Not to mention the unknown health costs of living in a lower gravity for years.
It's all about economics, and if the economics aren't their the lowest launch costs imaginable aren't going to matter. The closest economic benefit we've got is mining Helium-3 from the moon, and even that's a pipe dream. I'm sure there will be a manned mission to Mars someday, but that's not anything like being "multi-planetary"
AccountKiller
...if he can't even manage to tell a joke. Here's how it goes:
Q: How do you make a small fortune?
A: Start with a large fortune, and join the rocket business.
I'm a big fan of Musk, too, and of private space enterprise in general.
My biggest problem with Musk is the lack of information at his website. If you want to generate a political movement (and that's what he's trying to do -- vying for Air Force contracts is the very definition of politics) you need to have much better publicity.
And his website sucks. While it's kind of pretty, there's almost no content. The news, in particular, is weak --three sentences and movie that won't play on Linux about the most recent static firing.
He has no excuse. He built PayPal! He knows the 'net! He has seen the kind of virtuous circle that can be built up through good communication. I cannot for the life of me understand why SpaceX fails so spectacularly in the communication mission.
And don't say that they are trying to keep their proprietary details secret -- if he's really interested in promoting inexpensive space travel, he'd *want* those secrets out there!
I contrast this with Carmack's spectacular Armadillo Aerospace site. All of his successes, failures, dead ends, oopses -- all presented in more detail than any sane person could ever want. With Carmack, you really feel like you can understand the process as much as you can without picking up a welding torch.
Anyway, I really can't complain. I'm sitting around making movies instead of spaceships -- please treat this rant as constructive criticism.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
...in order to be able to take some payload, but your basic point remains sound. Shuttles are effing expensive beasts to run. Far better to use something much simpler, more robust and reliable which more importantly was designed to do exact what you want to achieve.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing