Government is part of the market. Don't forget that.
You keep on saying this, but I don't think it's quite right. A market consists of voluntary trades between persons. The actions of a government are performed with the coercion of its monopoly on defense, and are pretty much by definition non-voluntary. Granted, the actions of government can be influenced by popular votes and elected officials, but in the end government actions are not mutually voluntary.
I'd like to see an SMS server where you can message a number "JohnPhotoShop.com" and have it return "50 positives, 300 negatives, 15 neutrals"
Having ratings servers like this are a start, but ultimately they're prone to abuse as scammers sign up for accounts and add in false reviews. A better solution is probably using something like TrustRank, where one specifies networks of people whose opinions you trust, and trust/reputation ratings propagate through the network.
Regarding fructose, here's a story I tried submitting to slashdot which didn't get through:
Fructose Tricks Body Into Being Hungrier
Researchers at the University of Florida have recently discovered that fructose may be a primary cause of America's growing obesity rate. According to their research, fructose tricks the body into being hungrier than it should be. High-fructose corn syrup is often used as a sweetener in US soft drinks and foods due to corn subsidies and sugar import tariffs.
Last week, in the wake of John Seigenthaler's anti-Wikipedia op-ed in USA Today, CNN had a televised discussion with both Seigenthaler and Jimbo Wales. There's a video and transcript available (the Wales/Seigenthaler interview starts).
I don't think the discussion went too well for Wales. The interviewer, Kyra Philips, was pretty peeved about the status of the Wikipedia article on herself, and I think Wales could have done a better job of addressing her concerns.
But if you were to plot journey cost vs safety, you'd find strong correlation, that is, flights are getting both cheaper AND safer. Of course, corrleation does not imply causation.
It's a matter of flight rate. As more and more flights took place and it became a part of everyday life, people got a better understanding of how to make airplanes fly more cheaply and safely. The hope is that the same thing will happen with spaceflight.
But why would NASA outsource the very skills they'll eventually need for future Moon, Mars, and beyond missions? They'd win the immediate budget battle but loose the war.
Sort of like how NASA lost the ability to take advantage of airflight when private companies took over air transportation of people and cargo?
SpaceX is one of the private launch firms mentioned in the article and considered by many alt.spacers as the foremost contender for the ISS commercial crew & cargo contracts. Businessweek just published a pretty informative article on them, The Final Frontier At Costco Prices. Here's some relevant quotes from the article:
If SpaceX succeeds in lofting its rocket and an Air Force Academy research satellite into orbit, Musk will vindicate his vision and his investment. Financed almost entirely out of his own pocket, the company is the South Africa native's attempt to carve out a lucrative niche in the wildly expensive launch business. Musk believes that he can blast military and commercial satellites into space at Costco prices -- $6.7 million for a small payload and $38 million to $78 million for a heavyweight launch. By comparison, the Air Force's total cost for a Boeing or Lockheed Martin launch of a big payload comes to about $230 million, up from an inflation-adjusted $95 million in 1998....
So far, satellite customers have rewarded Musk's optimism with $200 million in advance launch contracts. The company faces just two problems. While SpaceX, based in El Segundo, Calif., has fired off plenty of press releases, it has yet to get a rocket off the ground. Its first launch, already two years behind schedule, was scrubbed on Nov. 26 because of a balky computer and a liquid-oxygen leak from a valve inadvertently left open. The company expects to try again in mid-December....
Such rock-bottom fees -- and a belief in the reliability of SpaceX's gear -- have attracted a range of clients, from an unidentified U.S. intelligence agency to the Malaysian government to Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace. The startup is betting that companies will want to do research on the inflatable space stations it plans to put into orbit....
Musk says he has overcome many technical hurdles by simplifying launch hardware. For example, SpaceX uses the same engine on all its stages instead of different units. Its electronics are on chips instead of circuit boards, which reduces wiring glitches. To slice costs, most SpaceX rocket stages are reusable instead of expendable. And SpaceX intends to save money by recovering sections from the ocean instead of rebuilding an entire rocket. Musk also brought a Silicon Valley business model to Southern California, forming a small, innovative, 150-employee company, a sharp contrast to the bureaucratic legions who toil on launches for Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp. In an age of outsourcing, SpaceX makes its engines and boosters in-house to avoid high-priced suppliers such as Pratt & Whitney (UTX ), General Electric (GE ), and Rolls-Royce. If he used those manufacturers' components, Musk says, he would be trapped in "the high-cost culture of the space industry."...
For Musk, beating the big guys out of a share of the launch market is just the start. His ultimate goal is to turn everyone into a highflier by making launches so cheap, easy, and common that humans will become, in his words, "a space-faring, multiplanet species." Musk wants to colonize Mars as a backup planet because Earth is vulnerable to manmade and natural disasters. Beachfront property on the Red Planet? Maybe someday. But first, Musk has to get off the beach at Kwajalein and show the doubters that his rockets can soar as high as his rhetoric.
With NASA not even putting people in space, instead paying others to, it will be yet another step in furthering NASA away from... well anything involving space.
NASA's mission is "to understand and protect our home planet; to explore the Universe and search for life; and to inspire the next generation of explorers."
As far as I can tell, transporting cargo and people to a space depot isn't part of NASA's mission. If they can pay a private company to take care of logistics so that they can focus on research and exploration, more power to them.
Really, how much cheaper can we expect a private company to do this?
Much, much more cheaply. The private space startup SpaceX is targeting the ISS contracts with their Falcon 9, which has a price of $35-$78 million. In contrast, a launch on an equivalent Boeing or Lockheed rocket costs up to $230 million, and a space shuttle launch costs somewhere between $500 million and a billion.
The key thing to remember is that a truly private company has a direct incentive to make things cost-effectively. For a government agency the incentive is quite indirect, and in the case of a typical cost-plus contractor (i.e. Boeing or Lockheed), they actually make more money if a project costs more.
And, seeing as how all "NASA" hardware is built by private contactors, how much of a difference are we really going to see?
Again, the big difference here is that they'll be using fixed-price contracts for deliveries, rather than using cost-plus contracts.
Just as a quick FYI, when I tried to go to the main page in Firefox/Linux, I just got a blank screen, presumably because of Flash/Shockwave. You folks might want to add a normal link at the bottom of the splash screen to a page like this.
Many college students take ritalin to allow them to focus with low side-effects but they still cannot get it without a prescription.
You mean they can't legally get it without a prescription. I assure you that many of them still get it, prescription or not.
Estes Oracle Digital Video Rocket
on
Throwable WiFi Camera
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This reminds me a bit of something I came across while online holiday-shopping the other day. Basically, it looks like Estes came out with a $80 rocket kit which has a built-in digital video camera. The idea is that you launch it up into the air, recover the rocket, plug a USB cable into it to download the video, and then watch a rocket's-eye-view of the flight. The camera is in the rocket's nose, so you presumably only see the ground on descent. The camera is just 320x240 with 9fps, but it still seems pretty neat.
The article didn't have too much info on Zero-G's service, so I thought I'd chime in. Basically, Zero-G sells flights on their modified Boeing 727 at $3,750 each. Each flight has a total of 15 parabolas, which alternate between 1.8 g's and either zero g's, lunar g's, or martian g's; each of the low/zero gravity periods lasts 30 seconds.
John Carmack, of id Software fame, flew with Zero-G last year and wrote down some of his thoughts. He was pretty pleased with it, and got some ideas for his spaceflight company. He also recorded a video of messing around in zero-gravity. Here's an excerpt from his write-up:
The time went by so quickly that you completely forgot half the things you planned on trying. A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well). Most of us that were doing fairly aggressive bouncing around landed on our heads at least once, so I have some concern that they will eventually have someone test the liability waiver. The bottom line is that I highly recommend the experience, and I am almost certainly going to do it again at some point.
A friend of mine has had something similar for a while now for the Seattle area, called the Seattle Bus Monster. It also uses the Google Maps API, so it's interesting to compare the capabilities/interface of the two systems. Unfortunately, I don't think Bus Monster does actual route planning.
But that tiny move may cost 5x in safety expenditures. From a purely-economics standpoint it doesn't make sense to spend 5x the money on safety if the difference is statistically insignificant, but from a moral standpoint it does.
That's where I disagree, I guess. For example, one could drastically cut highway deaths by cutting the speed limit nation-wide to 40mph, but it wouldn't be worth the economic cost.
Customers didn't have a choice. The zero crashes a year thing only started happening since after 2001. Until then, while flying was safer than driving, you had no idea which plane was poorly maintained.
I'm not sure I follow. Customers could choose to fly on a plane which was safer than the vehicle they use to get the airport. That's safe enough for me.
In any case, I suspect we're operating off different definitions of "safe." I personally think that a consumer should be able to make a decision for themselves as to whether or not something is safe enough, whether it be driving, skydiving, or riding a rocket.
Besides, right now the Space Shuttle has a 2% death rate per astronaut per flight. It shouldn't be too hard to beat that.
Such safe quality of service is expensive, and this is one of the reasons airlines are going out of business now.
I suspect the rising cost of jet fuel is a far greater cost factor than keeping your plane in one piece.
Go do a google on GM - their CEOs actually found it was cheaper to eat a bunch of lawsuits over defective and dangerous cars than to recall them, or make them safer. You can betcha the same rule will apply to private space transport.
Uh, right. Having highly-publicized explosions and driving up launch insurance costs are -great- for business.
And big business would love to get rid of the FAA.
I'd love to get rid of it too, but that's a different topic.
Failing that they'll look for ways around it. Like flying cargo out of another country...
You can expect a lot more accidents in the private sector.
This, of course, is why we see so many accidents from commercial airlines and air cargo companies like FedEx. Their craft are so much more dangerous than government-operated vehicles.
What are you talking about, NASA has been outsourcing projects and components to private industry since its inception.
There's a significant between non-competitive cost-plus contracts and the new competitive commercial contracts which have just been proposed. With cost-plus contracts, it was actually in a company's interest to go over-budget, since it would result in greater budgets. Contract solicitations were also worded so that pretty much only a particular company could fit the requirements, so there wouldn't be any competition.
The plans is for these newer contracts to be fixed-cost, with payments contingent on meeting pre-established milestones. I'm curious to see whether or not this new system will survive, as its success would cut back drastically on congressional pork.
NASA is running contests to help make those more feasible. Unfortunately, Congress currently has a cap on the amount they're allowed to offer for competitive prizes -- it's very hard to turn a competitive prize into pork barrel for one's congressional district.
SpaceX is one of the private launch firms mentioned in the article and considered by many alt.spacers as the foremost contender for the ISS commercial crew & cargo contracts. Businessweek just published a pretty informative article on them, The Final Frontier At Costco Prices. Here's some relevant quotes from the article:
If SpaceX succeeds in lofting its rocket and an Air Force Academy research satellite into orbit, Musk will vindicate his vision and his investment. Financed almost entirely out of his own pocket, the company is the South Africa native's attempt to carve out a lucrative niche in the wildly expensive launch business. Musk believes that he can blast military and commercial satellites into space at Costco prices -- $6.7 million for a small payload and $38 million to $78 million for a heavyweight launch. By comparison, the Air Force's total cost for a Boeing or Lockheed Martin launch of a big payload comes to about $230 million, up from an inflation-adjusted $95 million in 1998....
So far, satellite customers have rewarded Musk's optimism with $200 million in advance launch contracts. The company faces just two problems. While SpaceX, based in El Segundo, Calif., has fired off plenty of press releases, it has yet to get a rocket off the ground. Its first launch, already two years behind schedule, was scrubbed on Nov. 26 because of a balky computer and a liquid-oxygen leak from a valve inadvertently left open. The company expects to try again in mid-December....
Such rock-bottom fees -- and a belief in the reliability of SpaceX's gear -- have attracted a range of clients, from an unidentified U.S. intelligence agency to the Malaysian government to Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace. The startup is betting that companies will want to do research on the inflatable space stations it plans to put into orbit....
Musk says he has overcome many technical hurdles by simplifying launch hardware. For example, SpaceX uses the same engine on all its stages instead of different units. Its electronics are on chips instead of circuit boards, which reduces wiring glitches. To slice costs, most SpaceX rocket stages are reusable instead of expendable. And SpaceX intends to save money by recovering sections from the ocean instead of rebuilding an entire rocket. Musk also brought a Silicon Valley business model to Southern California, forming a small, innovative, 150-employee company, a sharp contrast to the bureaucratic legions who toil on launches for Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp. In an age of outsourcing, SpaceX makes its engines and boosters in-house to avoid high-priced suppliers such as Pratt & Whitney (UTX ), General Electric (GE ), and Rolls-Royce. If he used those manufacturers' components, Musk says, he would be trapped in "the high-cost culture of the space industry."...
For Musk, beating the big guys out of a share of the launch market is just the start. His ultimate goal is to turn everyone into a highflier by making launches so cheap, easy, and common that humans will become, in his words, "a space-faring, multiplanet species." Musk wants to colonize Mars as a backup planet because Earth is vulnerable to manmade and natural disasters. Beachfront property on the Red Planet? Maybe someday. But first, Musk has to get off the beach at Kwajalein and show the doubters that his rockets can soar as high as his rhetoric.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have an estimate for how much NASA's suborbital rockets cost, and what sorts of payloads they typically have?
Government is part of the market. Don't forget that.
You keep on saying this, but I don't think it's quite right. A market consists of voluntary trades between persons. The actions of a government are performed with the coercion of its monopoly on defense, and are pretty much by definition non-voluntary. Granted, the actions of government can be influenced by popular votes and elected officials, but in the end government actions are not mutually voluntary.
I'd like to see an SMS server where you can message a number "JohnPhotoShop.com" and have it return "50 positives, 300 negatives, 15 neutrals"
Having ratings servers like this are a start, but ultimately they're prone to abuse as scammers sign up for accounts and add in false reviews. A better solution is probably using something like TrustRank, where one specifies networks of people whose opinions you trust, and trust/reputation ratings propagate through the network.
Regarding fructose, here's a story I tried submitting to slashdot which didn't get through:
Fructose Tricks Body Into Being Hungrier
Researchers at the University of Florida have recently discovered that fructose may be a primary cause of America's growing obesity rate. According to their research, fructose tricks the body into being hungrier than it should be. High-fructose corn syrup is often used as a sweetener in US soft drinks and foods due to corn subsidies and sugar import tariffs.
Now how accusing someone of being a murderer counts as "subtle political jab"? It's slander and auhtor should be held responsible for it.
FleaPlus says: "adaml75 killed JFK"
Uh oh.
Last week, in the wake of John Seigenthaler's anti-Wikipedia op-ed in USA Today, CNN had a televised discussion with both Seigenthaler and Jimbo Wales. There's a video and transcript available (the Wales/Seigenthaler interview starts).
I don't think the discussion went too well for Wales. The interviewer, Kyra Philips, was pretty peeved about the status of the Wikipedia article on herself, and I think Wales could have done a better job of addressing her concerns.
I seriously doubt that Scaled Composites or other 'up and commers' will have any serious shot at any dollars from this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T/Space
But if you were to plot journey cost vs safety, you'd find strong correlation, that is, flights are getting both cheaper AND safer. Of course, corrleation does not imply causation.
It's a matter of flight rate. As more and more flights took place and it became a part of everyday life, people got a better understanding of how to make airplanes fly more cheaply and safely. The hope is that the same thing will happen with spaceflight.
But why would NASA outsource the very skills they'll eventually need for future Moon, Mars, and beyond missions? They'd win the immediate budget battle but loose the war.
Sort of like how NASA lost the ability to take advantage of airflight when private companies took over air transportation of people and cargo?
(Here's a copy of a comment I made the last time this story was posted.)
...
...
...
...
SpaceX is one of the private launch firms mentioned in the article and considered by many alt.spacers as the foremost contender for the ISS commercial crew & cargo contracts. Businessweek just published a pretty informative article on them, The Final Frontier At Costco Prices. Here's some relevant quotes from the article:
If SpaceX succeeds in lofting its rocket and an Air Force Academy research satellite into orbit, Musk will vindicate his vision and his investment. Financed almost entirely out of his own pocket, the company is the South Africa native's attempt to carve out a lucrative niche in the wildly expensive launch business. Musk believes that he can blast military and commercial satellites into space at Costco prices -- $6.7 million for a small payload and $38 million to $78 million for a heavyweight launch. By comparison, the Air Force's total cost for a Boeing or Lockheed Martin launch of a big payload comes to about $230 million, up from an inflation-adjusted $95 million in 1998.
So far, satellite customers have rewarded Musk's optimism with $200 million in advance launch contracts. The company faces just two problems. While SpaceX, based in El Segundo, Calif., has fired off plenty of press releases, it has yet to get a rocket off the ground. Its first launch, already two years behind schedule, was scrubbed on Nov. 26 because of a balky computer and a liquid-oxygen leak from a valve inadvertently left open. The company expects to try again in mid-December.
Such rock-bottom fees -- and a belief in the reliability of SpaceX's gear -- have attracted a range of clients, from an unidentified U.S. intelligence agency to the Malaysian government to Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace. The startup is betting that companies will want to do research on the inflatable space stations it plans to put into orbit.
Musk says he has overcome many technical hurdles by simplifying launch hardware. For example, SpaceX uses the same engine on all its stages instead of different units. Its electronics are on chips instead of circuit boards, which reduces wiring glitches. To slice costs, most SpaceX rocket stages are reusable instead of expendable. And SpaceX intends to save money by recovering sections from the ocean instead of rebuilding an entire rocket. Musk also brought a Silicon Valley business model to Southern California, forming a small, innovative, 150-employee company, a sharp contrast to the bureaucratic legions who toil on launches for Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp. In an age of outsourcing, SpaceX makes its engines and boosters in-house to avoid high-priced suppliers such as Pratt & Whitney (UTX ), General Electric (GE ), and Rolls-Royce. If he used those manufacturers' components, Musk says, he would be trapped in "the high-cost culture of the space industry."
For Musk, beating the big guys out of a share of the launch market is just the start. His ultimate goal is to turn everyone into a highflier by making launches so cheap, easy, and common that humans will become, in his words, "a space-faring, multiplanet species." Musk wants to colonize Mars as a backup planet because Earth is vulnerable to manmade and natural disasters. Beachfront property on the Red Planet? Maybe someday. But first, Musk has to get off the beach at Kwajalein and show the doubters that his rockets can soar as high as his rhetoric.
With NASA not even putting people in space, instead paying others to, it will be yet another step in furthering NASA away from... well anything involving space.
NASA's mission is "to understand and protect our home planet; to explore the Universe and search for life; and to inspire the next generation of explorers."
As far as I can tell, transporting cargo and people to a space depot isn't part of NASA's mission. If they can pay a private company to take care of logistics so that they can focus on research and exploration, more power to them.
Really, how much cheaper can we expect a private company to do this?
Much, much more cheaply. The private space startup SpaceX is targeting the ISS contracts with their Falcon 9, which has a price of $35-$78 million. In contrast, a launch on an equivalent Boeing or Lockheed rocket costs up to $230 million, and a space shuttle launch costs somewhere between $500 million and a billion.
The key thing to remember is that a truly private company has a direct incentive to make things cost-effectively. For a government agency the incentive is quite indirect, and in the case of a typical cost-plus contractor (i.e. Boeing or Lockheed), they actually make more money if a project costs more.
And, seeing as how all "NASA" hardware is built by private contactors, how much of a difference are we really going to see?
Again, the big difference here is that they'll be using fixed-price contracts for deliveries, rather than using cost-plus contracts.
Soon, just keep checking the ZeroG website.
Just as a quick FYI, when I tried to go to the main page in Firefox/Linux, I just got a blank screen, presumably because of Flash/Shockwave. You folks might want to add a normal link at the bottom of the splash screen to a page like this.
Many college students take ritalin to allow them to focus with low side-effects but they still cannot get it without a prescription.
You mean they can't legally get it without a prescription. I assure you that many of them still get it, prescription or not.
This reminds me a bit of something I came across while online holiday-shopping the other day. Basically, it looks like Estes came out with a $80 rocket kit which has a built-in digital video camera. The idea is that you launch it up into the air, recover the rocket, plug a USB cable into it to download the video, and then watch a rocket's-eye-view of the flight. The camera is in the rocket's nose, so you presumably only see the ground on descent. The camera is just 320x240 with 9fps, but it still seems pretty neat.
The article didn't have too much info on Zero-G's service, so I thought I'd chime in. Basically, Zero-G sells flights on their modified Boeing 727 at $3,750 each. Each flight has a total of 15 parabolas, which alternate between 1.8 g's and either zero g's, lunar g's, or martian g's; each of the low/zero gravity periods lasts 30 seconds.
John Carmack, of id Software fame, flew with Zero-G last year and wrote down some of his thoughts. He was pretty pleased with it, and got some ideas for his spaceflight company. He also recorded a video of messing around in zero-gravity. Here's an excerpt from his write-up:
The time went by so quickly that you completely forgot half the things you planned on trying. A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well). Most of us that were doing fairly aggressive bouncing around landed on our heads at least once, so I have some concern that they will eventually have someone test the liability waiver. The bottom line is that I highly recommend the experience, and I am almost certainly going to do it again at some point.
Google is about tagging too. Witness Gmail. Labels = tags.
Not only that, but last month Google also quietly added tagging capabilities to search histories.
A friend of mine has had something similar for a while now for the Seattle area, called the Seattle Bus Monster. It also uses the Google Maps API, so it's interesting to compare the capabilities/interface of the two systems. Unfortunately, I don't think Bus Monster does actual route planning.
But that tiny move may cost 5x in safety expenditures. From a purely-economics standpoint it doesn't make sense to spend 5x the money on safety if the difference is statistically insignificant, but from a moral standpoint it does.
That's where I disagree, I guess. For example, one could drastically cut highway deaths by cutting the speed limit nation-wide to 40mph, but it wouldn't be worth the economic cost.
Customers didn't have a choice. The zero crashes a year thing only started happening since after 2001. Until then, while flying was safer than driving, you had no idea which plane was poorly maintained.
I'm not sure I follow. Customers could choose to fly on a plane which was safer than the vehicle they use to get the airport. That's safe enough for me.
In any case, I suspect we're operating off different definitions of "safe." I personally think that a consumer should be able to make a decision for themselves as to whether or not something is safe enough, whether it be driving, skydiving, or riding a rocket.
Besides, right now the Space Shuttle has a 2% death rate per astronaut per flight. It shouldn't be too hard to beat that.
Such safe quality of service is expensive, and this is one of the reasons airlines are going out of business now.
I suspect the rising cost of jet fuel is a far greater cost factor than keeping your plane in one piece.
Go do a google on GM - their CEOs actually found it was cheaper to eat a bunch of lawsuits over defective and dangerous cars than to recall them, or make them safer. You can betcha the same rule will apply to private space transport.
Uh, right. Having highly-publicized explosions and driving up launch insurance costs are -great- for business.
And big business would love to get rid of the FAA.
I'd love to get rid of it too, but that's a different topic.
Failing that they'll look for ways around it. Like flying cargo out of another country...
Could you elaborate on how this is a bad thing?
Private airlines aren't safe because they're private. They're safe because of a slew of regulations.
Right. It's only because of the regulations. Consumers aren't smart enough to not buy tickets on an airline which crashes regularly.
That said, what gives you the impression that the FAA isn't going to have any regulations on private spaceflight?
You can expect a lot more accidents in the private sector.
This, of course, is why we see so many accidents from commercial airlines and air cargo companies like FedEx. Their craft are so much more dangerous than government-operated vehicles.
What are you talking about, NASA has been outsourcing projects and components to private industry since its inception.
There's a significant between non-competitive cost-plus contracts and the new competitive commercial contracts which have just been proposed. With cost-plus contracts, it was actually in a company's interest to go over-budget, since it would result in greater budgets. Contract solicitations were also worded so that pretty much only a particular company could fit the requirements, so there wouldn't be any competition.
The plans is for these newer contracts to be fixed-cost, with payments contingent on meeting pre-established milestones. I'm curious to see whether or not this new system will survive, as its success would cut back drastically on congressional pork.
Freaking Space Elevators!!!
NASA is running contests to help make those more feasible. Unfortunately, Congress currently has a cap on the amount they're allowed to offer for competitive prizes -- it's very hard to turn a competitive prize into pork barrel for one's congressional district.
SpaceX is one of the private launch firms mentioned in the article and considered by many alt.spacers as the foremost contender for the ISS commercial crew & cargo contracts. Businessweek just published a pretty informative article on them, The Final Frontier At Costco Prices. Here's some relevant quotes from the article:
...
...
...
...
If SpaceX succeeds in lofting its rocket and an Air Force Academy research satellite into orbit, Musk will vindicate his vision and his investment. Financed almost entirely out of his own pocket, the company is the South Africa native's attempt to carve out a lucrative niche in the wildly expensive launch business. Musk believes that he can blast military and commercial satellites into space at Costco prices -- $6.7 million for a small payload and $38 million to $78 million for a heavyweight launch. By comparison, the Air Force's total cost for a Boeing or Lockheed Martin launch of a big payload comes to about $230 million, up from an inflation-adjusted $95 million in 1998.
So far, satellite customers have rewarded Musk's optimism with $200 million in advance launch contracts. The company faces just two problems. While SpaceX, based in El Segundo, Calif., has fired off plenty of press releases, it has yet to get a rocket off the ground. Its first launch, already two years behind schedule, was scrubbed on Nov. 26 because of a balky computer and a liquid-oxygen leak from a valve inadvertently left open. The company expects to try again in mid-December.
Such rock-bottom fees -- and a belief in the reliability of SpaceX's gear -- have attracted a range of clients, from an unidentified U.S. intelligence agency to the Malaysian government to Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace. The startup is betting that companies will want to do research on the inflatable space stations it plans to put into orbit.
Musk says he has overcome many technical hurdles by simplifying launch hardware. For example, SpaceX uses the same engine on all its stages instead of different units. Its electronics are on chips instead of circuit boards, which reduces wiring glitches. To slice costs, most SpaceX rocket stages are reusable instead of expendable. And SpaceX intends to save money by recovering sections from the ocean instead of rebuilding an entire rocket. Musk also brought a Silicon Valley business model to Southern California, forming a small, innovative, 150-employee company, a sharp contrast to the bureaucratic legions who toil on launches for Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp. In an age of outsourcing, SpaceX makes its engines and boosters in-house to avoid high-priced suppliers such as Pratt & Whitney (UTX ), General Electric (GE ), and Rolls-Royce. If he used those manufacturers' components, Musk says, he would be trapped in "the high-cost culture of the space industry."
For Musk, beating the big guys out of a share of the launch market is just the start. His ultimate goal is to turn everyone into a highflier by making launches so cheap, easy, and common that humans will become, in his words, "a space-faring, multiplanet species." Musk wants to colonize Mars as a backup planet because Earth is vulnerable to manmade and natural disasters. Beachfront property on the Red Planet? Maybe someday. But first, Musk has to get off the beach at Kwajalein and show the doubters that his rockets can soar as high as his rhetoric.