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What It Took For SpaceX To Become a Serious Space Company
An anonymous reader writes: The Atlantic has a nice profile of SpaceX's rise to prominence — how a private startup managed to successfully compete with industry giants like Boeing in just a decade of existence. "Regardless of its inspirations, the company was forced to adopt a prosaic initial goal: Make a rocket at least 10 times cheaper than is possible today. Until it can do that, neither flowers nor people can go to Mars with any economy. With rocket technology, Musk has said, "you're really left with one key parameter against which technology improvements must be judged, and that's cost." SpaceX currently charges $61.2 million per launch. Its cost-per-kilogram of cargo to low-earth orbit, $4,653, is far less than the $14,000 to $39,000 offered by its chief American competitor, the United Launch Alliance. Other providers often charge $250 to $400 million per launch; NASA pays Russia $70 million per astronaut to hitch a ride on its three-person Soyuz spacecraft. SpaceX's costs are still nowhere near low enough to change the economics of space as Musk and his investors envision, but they have a plan to do so (of which more later)."
Eh, PayPal was among the first revolutionary online-payment services that enabled the rapid expansion of e-commerce. What you know now as the "evil PayPal" is what happened after Ebay bought it.
I still can't believe it is legal, in so many ways. I mean, I don't think anybody could argue ebay is not a monopoly in the online auction space, and yet they are allowed to only permit their own payment service (so they take a percentage on top of their commission).
Then, they hold your money like a bank account and even extend credit, and yet, unlike banks, they can freeze your money with no explanation.
The PayPal situation boggles the mind, but it is not related to Musk's X.com/PayPal.
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Make a rocket at least 10 times cheaper than is possible today.
Hardly "prosaic"; Sounds pretty damn ambitious to me.
OK, they had access to some of the body of knowledge so expensively won by the Germans, USA, Russians et al, but they're still privately funded, developed in-house a working product that's much, much cheaper than the competition and employ nearly 4000 people.
Like Musk or not, he made it work so far.
Yet another Musk fantasy with no hope of becoming reality. Wake me when he DOES something, rather than pie-in-the-sky fantasy.
What have you done that is so spectacular? Go ahead and dazzle us.
Elon Musk has founded several very influential companies, turning those industries upside down in the process. You actually think starting Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX is not impressive? If that doesn't impress you then you plainly don't understand what all that means. You don't have to like the guy but he's certainly earned a measure of respect for his accomplishments.