Falcon 1 lifts off on its second test flight. Credit: SpaceX
Third Time’s the Charm?
Geoffrey Little
Air & Space Magazine
“For [Elon] Musk, it’s a critical moment in his second career. A co-founder of PayPal with a personal fortune estimated at more than $300 million, the South African native has sunk more than a third of that amount into his 470-person space company. This is not a hobby; SpaceX’s manifest lists 14 launches through 2011, all with customers who have contracted for low-cost launches on Falcon 1 and the much larger Falcon 9, which is being built and tested for launch early next year.
“Musk aims to use these rockets and their variants to smash the current price to reach orbit. A Falcon-1 launch costs under $8 million, about half the industry average; the Falcon 9 goes for less than $37 million to lift 7,700 pounds to low Earth orbit; a planned Falcon-9 Heavy will be able to lift 62,000 pounds for $94.5 million.”
Rob Coppinger of Flightglobal and Hyperbola has a couple of SpaceX updates. CEO Elon Musk recently visited London, where he spoke before the United Kingdom’s Royal Aeronautical Society.
Musk says that his company, SpaceX, should complete development work on its first Dragon test vehicle by the end of the year. Dragon, which is designed to carry cargo and crew to the International Space Station, will be flight tested next year. The work is being done under NASA’s COTS program.
Coppinger also reports that Musk has set a price tag on the cost of sending a Dragon spacecraft on a circumlunar flight: $80 million.
This strikes me as a fairly low figure. It’s a bold claim coming from a company that has yet to fly anything successfully in space. SpaceX’s small Falcon 1 rocket has failed in two launches; a third attempt is set for later this summer. The larger Falcon 9 booster, which would be required for a lunar mission, has not yet flown. There also would be significant modifications required for the Dragon spacecraft, which is designed for orbital use.
Coppinger recorded Musk’s 10-minute address to the Royal Aeronautical Society and the hour-long Q&A that followed. You can access audio recordings here.
SpaceX has delayed the scheduled third test flight of its Falcon 1 launch until at least the end of July amid conflicting reports amid conflicting reports from founder Elon Musk as to why…..
SpaceX pushes back target date for next Falcon 1 launch
Spaceflight Now
23 June 2008
“Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said the U.S. Army range at Kwajalein Atoll will be busy with other activities for the next month.
“‘Launch is no sooner than late July to early August,’ Musk said. ‘We will use the time to do additional checkouts.’
Minute Defect Delays SpaceX’s Falcon 1 Launch Again
Space.com
30 June 2008
A tiny weld defect discovered in one of the Falcon 1’s engine nozzles as the rocket was being readied for a late June launch contributed to Space Exploration Technologies’ (SpaceX) decision to postpone its third attempt to put the rocket into orbit by at least a month…
“One Kwajalein official told Space News the range would be open and available throughout July with no launch activity on the schedule ‘unless there’s a black program going on that I don’t know about.’
“[Army Missile Command spokesman John] Cummings confirmed that the range would remain open throughout July, but said he did not know whether it is available to SpaceX sooner than July 29. ‘We haven’t looked because they did not ask for it,’ he said.”
Gregg Easterbrook takes issue with NASA’s “Who, us?” attitude toward protecting the Earth against errant asteroids in a piece titled, “The Sky is Falling,” in The Atlantic. “The odds that a potentially devastating space rock will hit Earth this century may be as high as one in 10. So why isn’t NASA trying harder to prevent catastrophe?” Easterbook’s answer? NASA is obsessed with putting humans on the moon.
A Russian Progress vehicle was launched from Kazakhstan on Wednesday with fresh supplies for astronauts aboard the International Space Station. And what will the fastest men alive be receiving in additional to their regular shipment of clothes, oxygen and fuel? Snails. Ninety of them. (No, they’re not going to eat them; it’s all part of a biology experiment. Really.)
In other news, SpaceX’s Elon Musk is saying that he could launch astronauts to ISS aboard his Dragon spacecraft by 2011 if NASA gives the OK to develop a human-rated version of the vehicle this summer. This date is at least two years (or four or five) before NASA would be able to launch its Orion vehicle.
This is an ambitious goal given that SpaceX has yet to successfully launch anything into space. It failed in both attempts to launch its small Falcon I rocket; a third attempt is scheduled for next month. Dragon will be launched atop the company’s larger Falcon 9 rocket, which has yet to fly.
Officials in Hawthorne, California are hoping that SpaceX will help bring the city back its aerospace glory days, the Daily Breeze reports. Elon Musk’s company is now building Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft in the same building where Boeing once assembled 747 fuselages.
“I think SpaceX will basically bring Hawthorne back to the aerospace heydays,” Hawthorne councilman Gary Parsons tells the newspaper. “You have a major anchor like SpaceX, and then you’ll have other smaller companies coming to Hawthorne to serve SpaceX. It’s sort of returning to the aerospace renaissance of the good old days when Hawthorne was a central hub of aerospace activity.”
Bloomberg.com has an interesting profile of SpacX founder Elon Musk, the California-based entrepreneur who is trying to make access to space cheap and routine with his Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets.
“I personally wonder if Musk doesn’t want to be Time Man of the Year,” says Strategic Space Development CEO James Cantrell. “He wants recognition for changing the destiny of man.”
The main thing standing in his way is a couple of successful launches. Both Falcon 1 flights failed; a third is scheduled for June from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Falcon 9 has yet to fly.
In addition to trying to conquer space, Musk is making his mark in the automotive industry through his investment in Tesla Motors, which is making a $98,000 electric car that runs on laptop batteries. The main obstacle there has been the inability to find a decent transmission. Tesla is now producing one vehicle per week at a plant in England using an interim gearbox.
Taylor Dinerman examines the current state of the reusable launch vehicle industry over at The Space Review. He is particularly intrigued by a test of a sub-scale space plane that Lockheed Martin conducted in New Mexico last December.
Rob Coppinger of Flight Global takes a look at the success of SpaceX, the El Segundo, Calif. rocket company that has secured a NASA launch services contract that could be worth up to $1 billion without ever having launched anything into orbit. The contract involves the company’s Falcon 1 vehicle, which has failed in its only two launch attempts, and the larger Falcon 9, which has yet to fly.
Coppinger also examines new rocket and spacecraft concepts under consideration by Japan and Europe on his Hyperbola blog. JAXA is considering a VTOL concept that looks a lot like the vehicle that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is working on. Meanwhile, ESA and Russia are jointly examining various designs for a crew transport.
A major initiative has been launched to improve quality control for the Proton launcher, which has suffered two failures in eight months, Coppinger reports. Russia’s Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center and its partner, International Launch Services, will be working closely with subcontractors to prevent future problems.
In American space news, the Rocketsandsuch blog has a new post claiming that costs on NASA’s Orion program have risen again by about $3 billion.
NASA PRESS RELEASE
WASHINGTON — NASA has awarded Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, a NASA Launch Services contract for the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launch vehicles.
The NASA Launch Services contracts are multiple awards to multiple launch service providers. Twice per year, there is an opportunity for existing and emerging domestic launch service providers to submit proposals if their vehicles meet the minimum contract requirements.
The contract is an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract where NASA may order launch services through June 30, 2010, for launches to occur through December 2012. Under the NASA Launch Services IDIQ contracts, the potential total contract value is between $20,000 and $1 billion, depending on the number of missions awarded.
Continue reading ‘SpaceX Wins NASA Contract for Falcon Launches’
Investor’s Business Daily has an interview with SpaceX’s Elon Musk. The PayPal founder reports that his space company is profitable despite having failed to place anything into orbit thus far.
“We have been cash flow positive for the last six quarters,” Musk boasts. “We were profitable last year. Revenue was over $100 million. I won’t say how profitable we were, but it was a pretty healthy number.”
SpaceX failed in its two previous attempts to launch its Falcon 1 rocket. The first exploded shortly after takeoff; the second reached space but failed to obtain orbit. Musk and his team will try again in June. SpaceX hopes to significantly undercut its competitors.
“Our nearest competitor there is the Pegasus by Orbital Sciences, although the Falcon 1 has greater capability to orbit than Pegasus. The Pegasus has a NASA list price of $35 million, though I hear you can get it for $30 million commercially. Ours is $8 million,” Musk said.
SpaceX is also developing the larger Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft under NASA’s COTS program. Dragon is being designed to carry cargo and crew to the International Space Station after the space shuttle retires in 2010.
SpaceX has slipped the first launch of its Falcon 9 vehicle by nine months to June, 2009, according to Florida Today.
The El Segundo, Calif.-based company headed by Internet billionaire Elon Musk is receiving $278 million from NASA to launch three vehicles under its COTS program. COTS is designed to help develop commercial alternatives for cargo and crew delivery to the International Space Station.
Flight Global also has a story that includes comments from Musk blaming the delays on a shift in launch sites from a small Pacific atoll to Cape Canaveral and the “enormous amount of work” required to build a new rocket.
Meanwhile, SpaceX says it has completed qualification testing of its Merlin regeneratively cooled engine for its smaller Falcon 1 rocket, which is scheduled for Spring 2008. Two previous launch attempts of the missile failed.