SpaceX Powerhouse SpaceX, the company run by Elon Musk has been flexing its muscles lately and sometimes people don’t like it. Some of the weirdest opposition has come from the Flat Earth Society. In case you never heard of it there are actually people who don’t believe the earth is round and they have joined a group. They have been making claims which seem to indicate the only reason SpaceX is showing live launches is to deceive all of us. They believe the launches are some sort of hoax. They may have got the idea from those who do not believe the moon landing was real. Then there was the guy who said Musk might have murdered someone and used the idea to launch his Tesla car into space with a dummy in a space suit behind the wheel. He claimed the dummy might really be a body. I guess when you are famous you become a target for all the crazies. SpaceX was founded in 2002, a mere 16 years ago and already it has accomplished some wonderful things. When President Kennedy announced a decision to land on the moon it was on May 25, 1961 and before congress. With all the resources of the entire U.S. government behind it NASA accomplished this on July 20, 1969. This means we did it in a little over 8 years. SpaceX was the first private company to launch a liquid fueled rocket into orbit. From the founding of that company to orbit was only 6 years. This is an incredible feat when you think about it. Sure, NASA has paved the way and solved some of the problems, but if it was easy to do why weren’t any other companies up there already? Elon Musk is a man with a mission. He seems to want to remake the world into a better place while making a profit on the attempt and who can blame him for that. Look what happened with computers and other electronics, they have become affordable for most of us over the years and prices are still descending in some cases. Musk has already shown that using reusable rockets can save tons of money. One of the problems with this was having to go out into the ocean to try and find the boosters after they were jettisoned. With Musk’s system the boosters land like the spaceships in science fiction movies and they land where they are programmed to, so there is no hunting for them and no damage when done correctly. With all of the funds received by NASA one has to wonder why it took a company like SpaceX to discover how to do this. The full title of the SpaceX company is Space Exploration Technologies Corporation doing business as SpaceX. Musk decided when he founded the company it cost too much to launch objects into space. He certainly was correct about that. If we average out the cost of space shuttle launches by NASA, the average cost as of 2011 was 450 million per mission. A recent estimate of the cost of launching rocket payloads into space stated a single rocket launch will be 422 million dollars and one year later 424 million dollars. SpaceX is selling commercial launches of its Falcon 9 rocket for only 65 million dollars, which is quite a big difference. Some people say SpaceX is taking a loss, but I doubt that. It seems they are trying to justify the enormous waste of money that seems to follow our military everywhere. SpaceX has said the cost to launch its Falcon 9 Heavy Rocket is 90 million dollars and this is for a launch of the world’s most powerful rocket. If the military launches don’t switch to SpaceX for their launches they better have a damn good reason, since they are costing the taxpayers over 400 million dollars in wasted money. Musk has a dream, a dream of putting people on the planet Mars. He is developing a new spacecraft to do this called Crew Dragon. The idea is to use it to get to the space station, moon and maybe Mars. SpaceX was the first commercial company to deliver cargo to the space station. Prior to that delivery only rockets from governments had accomplished this task. The rocket that delivered the supplies had originally been designed to carry people. On the SpaceX site they refer to the supply rocket called Dragon and the people carrying design Dragon 2. “SpaceX is finalizing the necessary refinements to make that a reality.” The Dragon has an emergency escape system which the space shuttle could have used when things went wrong on launch. Even the temperature inside the Dragon can be set anywhere between 65 and 80 degrees. There are other space companies watching SpaceX and trying to catch up to its accomplishments. This is great news for space travel. When Musk was asked about competition he said he welcomed it and it was good. Maybe he thought it might push his scientists and engineers to even higher feats. I can’t answer that question, but I do know this, it is certainly good for us. Beside space travel who knows what else might be discovered which could help mankind. Space advancements have been responsible for new advances on earth and this competition may cause technology to advance even faster. |
