The International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) got started formally this morning in Las Cruces, NM, with its first four speakers. The conference runs through Thursday evening.
Although I couldn’t be there, several people are Tweeting the event live. Below is a compilation of Tweets from Jeff Fust and others on the talk by SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell on Wednesday morning.
I will try to keep up with the conference from Mojave and provide summaries of speakers as I can.
Jeff Foust @Jeff Foust
- Gwynne Shotwell says that SpaceX is now up to about 3,800 employees, counting contractors working for the company.
- Shotwell: 600 more people to hire in next couple months. Finding good software people the hardest skills to fill.
- Shotwell: we called the upgraded Falcon 9 the v1.1 so not to scare anybody, but it’s really a v1000.1, a brand new launch vehicle.
- Shotwell said after the talk SpaceX is wrapping up their investigation of the 2nd stage relight issue, should be done by week’s end.
- Shotwell didn’t go into details about investigation, but indicated the issue wasn’t major, or a surprise, and next launch on track.
- Shotwell: SpaceX now into what we consider regular operations. Two comm’l satellite launches this year, up to 4 CRS missions in ’14.
- Shotwell: still interested in launching secondary payloads; plan to have P-PODs on every flight going forward.
- Shotwell: Grasshopper vehicle is “an absolute rock star,” in the news more than Elon.
- Shotwell: interested in expanding our Florida footprint; but also interested in sites in Tex., Ga., Puerto Rico.
- Shotwell: we hope to fly people on crewed Dragon in 2016. Leaning towards having NASA astronauts on that 1st flight.
- Shotwell: not a business case for going to Mars, but can’t think of another thing as important as moving humanity off Earth.
Additional Tweets
Justin Kugler @phalanx
- Gwynne Shotwell of spacex tells ispcs they matched NASA’s $396M for COTS with $450M. Got Falcon 9 out of it.
Launch Florida’s Future @Launch FL’s Future
- “Shiloh maybe,” says Gwynne Shotwell, President & COO of SpaceX, on future launch sites in Florida and elsewhere.
Joel Achenbach @Joel Achenbach
- SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell says human landing on Mars plausible in 13-15 years.