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Sunday: 11 AM EDT on Daily Kos. I have an interview coming up with a space industry entrepreneur right out of a Robert Heinlein sci-fi novel (If everything goes right, my interview subject will be available in comments to answer a few questions). This particular person was instrumental to creating SpaceX; a commercial rocket company which has landed the NASA contract to resupply the International Space Station beginning next year when the Shuttle is phased out. SpaceX currently has two rocket designs in production, Falcons 1 and 9, and a busy launch manifest in the next couple of years for both birds.
Falcon 1 is a seven story, two stage, liquid fuel rocket. The first stage is powered with a single Merlin engine (Shown above). This sleek bird will compete with the Ariane series for commercial satellite delivery to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The video below shows the first successful test flight of a Falcon 1 on 28 Sep 2008, set to eerie music by Crystal Method. On 14 July 2009, a Falcon 1 successfully delivered a commercial satellite (RazaSAT) to orbit.
The Falcon 9 is a much more powerful rocket, 53 meters or over 150 feet tall, which is intended to ferry large payloads and, hopefully, crew to Low Earth Orbit (Left, Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 heavy). The Falcon 9 heavy is a souped up version with two extra boosters which can hurl almost 30,000 Kg (About 65,000 pounds) to LEO or about 10,000 Kg to Geostationary transfer orbit at a distance of over 22,500 miles from earth's surface. This is the most powerful booster since the mighty Saturn V that graced Kennedy Space Center and blasted Apollo 11 to its historic rendezvous with the moon in 1969.
In addition to the rockets, SpaceX is also developing a crew capsule called Dragon (Right. click on image for more detail) which can carry up to seven astronauts. Space X hopes to launch a Dragon test flight this year. I'm told they have other destinations in mind besides LEO!
All this brings to mind what private astronaut Richard Garriot told me in his interview a few weeks ago when speculating on the future of space exploration:
When the navigation and ship building technology had been worked out private venture took over, enormous fortunes were made, and some of the spinoffs were completely unpredictable. Who would have foreseen that by gaining experience with the trade winds and ocean currents around South America and in the tropical Pacific, the HMS Beagle would carry a young Charles Darwin to places that fired his imagination and ultimately changed forever our understanding of our place in the natural world? So basically about a century or so of investment from the major European powers, at great cost and loss of life, to get all that going. But slowly, private venture took over, settlements were founded, new resources and foodstuffs and farmland was developed, enormous fortunes were lost and made and lost again. Now the whole world is richer for it ...
Perhaps SpaceX is the first step in that development; the great ships of the new space age, hopefully with less loss of life than developing the new world extracted centuries ago. But in the end, space travel is dangerous. Or at least it will be, until the equivalent of the modern day ocean liner and jumbo jet are plying the great oceans of space and time between the planets, and maybe one, day, the stars.
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