Privately Funded Rocket Reaches Space Orbit

[pameladlloyd]

With the launch of the Falcon 1 on September 28, 2008, SpaceX, has become the first private venture to sucessfully put a rocket in orbit around the Earth. Wired Magazine offers video footage of the launch in their article, SpaceX Did It -- Falcon 1 Made it to Space, and the Associated Press also released an article, SpaceX finally reaches orbit after fourth try, about the launch. Or, you can go to the SpaceX website and read their press release.

SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk, one of the co-founders of PayPal, who had reportedly invested $100 million of his own money into the company by March 2006. He's also the creator of the computer game, Blaster, which he sold at the age of twelve. In the company overview on the SpaceX website, the company states that one of its goals is to "reduce the cost and increase the reliability of space access by a factor of ten."

Comments

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

Dang! That's something to watch!

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Isn't it cool? 8-)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Having private companies in space will certainly cut down on foolish government space-race mentality. It will make it normal. Also, the more ways to approach space, the better.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Yes. When space becomes truly profitable, we will become a space-faring race.

Many years ago, I applied for a position with a mining company. There was a painting of a strip mine on the moon hanging on the wall and when I commented on it, the man interviewing me (he was pretty far up the chain in the company) explained that he had commissioned the painting, because it was his dream to someday mine the moon. I've always had mixed feelings about that. It's the sort of activity that probably has to occur, but I hate to think of the moon being chewed up, that way. At the same time, moving that kind of activity away from Earth might help to improve (or at least prevent future damage to) our Earth environment.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exploitation is an ugly thing, wherever it happens.... there are a lot of ifs about a future moon mining operation that make it hard to say much about it... are there desirable minerals and things up there? I suppose if mining operations happened on the moon, they wouldn't be visible from Earth... and I guess (or hope?) that we'd be careful not to mine it out of existence...

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I'm going to answer you in my next post, as I discovered that my answer was becoming more and more complex. :)