It took four years for Elon to turn his first start-up, Zip2, into a $307 million cash sale. It took four years for Musk to make PayPal the largest online payment provider in the world, only for eBay to make it the site’s primary payment engine to the tune of a $1.5 billion. It’s been four years since Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, came into being in El Segundo, California.
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SpaceX update: "We've made a tremendous amount of progress on Falcon 9"
Posted: Jul 06, 2006 06:18 pm EDT
Following a number of busted deadlines, Elon Musk's rocket finally took flight March 24. Falcon 1, priced at $6.7 million was to accelerate to 17,000 mph (twenty-five times the speed of sound) in less than ten minutes. The target orbit was 400 km X 500 km (just above the International Space Station) at an inclination of 39 degrees. Unfortunately the vehicle was lost in the first stage burn.
With that, all went quiet - until today! Here goes the latest from Elon Musk:
Falcon 1.1
"My apologies for the long delay in providing an update. Between the Falcon 1 return to flight, Falcon 9 development and the NASA COTS program, this has been an inordinately busy period for SpaceX."
"I will post the findings of the DARPA/SpaceX Return to Flight Board on the SpaceX website in about two weeks. The final meeting of the board was last week and the results will be posted after the DARPA senior leadership is briefed."
"No major surprises were uncovered in the course of the investigation, so perhaps more interesting is the broader set of design & process improvements that constitute 'Falcon 1.1'. I will post whatever I can, excluding only proprietary or ITAR restricted information."
Falcon 9
"At the end of July, I will post a detailed update on Falcon 9. We've made a tremendous amount of progress on that front. Except for the fairing (nosecone), we are 90% done with all the manufacturing tooling and should have serial number 1 of the first stage built within three to four months. We are targeting a stage hold down, multi-engine firing in about six months."
"On the business front, SpaceX now has ten launches on manifest and is on track to be cash flow positive in 2006, our fourth full year of operation."
---Elon
The 35-year-old South African Elon Musk earned multi-millions from the sale of Web-software maker Zip2 to Compaq in 1999 and of PayPal to eBay in 2003. Since then, Elon has been losing much of his money on building his own private rocket in a test facility in Texas.
The pioneer has dispatched through thick and thin - offering all the details of his battle for space. "I think I’ve come to realize what makes orbital rocket development so tough. It is not that any particular element is all that difficult, but rather that you are forced to develop a very complex product that can’t be fully tested in its real environment until launch and, when you do launch, there can be zero significant errors," he said earlier.
The inital launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base (near Santa Barbara, California) was abandoned last year for a tropical island - the Island of Dr. Yes. As a result of hundreds of millions of dollars of investment by the Defense Department over the past several decades, Kwajalein is home to some of the world’s most powerful radar tracking and space communications systems.
The customer for the failed March mission was DARPA and the Air Force. Falcon 1 was to provide the lowest cost per flight to orbit of any launch vehicle in the world, despite receiving a design reliability rating equivalent to that of the best launch vehicles currently flying in the United States.
But this is all only the beginning, according to Elon: His ultimate goal is to "make life multi-planetary." He wants human life spread out to the moon and Mars, using the next generation Falcon handling 100 tons of load.
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