It was 03:44 hours EST at Cape Canaveral on May 22 2012, I was watching live via the companys Livestream video feed and got to watch the launch go off with out a hitch, unlike the last launch in December 2010 in daylight all you got to look at this time was a very bright fire plume rocketing into the atmosphere ever faster until it left visual range, followed by a brightly cherry red engine bell on the 2nd stage. The video feed was excellent all the way to 2nd stage engine cutt off and then further to just a minute forty seconds later when the Solar cell array deployment that was met with a loud cheer from the gallery at Spacex's Hawthorne California facility. The hosts were visibly shaken as they realized, hey we really are in the space launch BUSINESS. My hearty and HEART FELT compliments to Spacex, every milestone you've set you've hit, maybe not the first time but, but you did hit them. With the Falcon 9 you so far havent missed, a far cry from the early days of NASA, Excellent work one and all.
Now on to the reason for the Blog, like it says IT Started in 2002 when Elon Musk decided to build space hardware to put things in orbit. I heard of it and said, well he's smart and after a few years he'll figure out its too hard and fold his tent and go on to other more profitable endeavors, after all the recent spat of rocket companies like roton and a list of others had only just failed very recently then. And elon and company weren't planning any special ultra high tech revolutionary system , hell they were building stuff just like the other space hardware vendors were building, multistage rockets, albeit from scratch. Oh well just one more reason to doubt right, after all the design and qualification of any space hardware was just too prohibitive in the real world.
But lets look at the logic behind these observations I was comparing Spacex to everyother neer do well that tried in the 90's to become the next phase in space access. Well for one everyother approach attempted was what is termed as bleeding edge technology that was questionable to begin with, an example roton or the rotary rocket had planned to use a rotating set of wings like a unpowered helicopter to allow the ship to reenter and then autogyro unpower except for the wind through the blades just like an amergency helicopter landing uses. The problem was they never got enough funding and were never able to resolve technology issues that dogged the design, eventually in the early 200's it foled and its assest sold at auction.
Spacex on the other hand looked at the system design based on one pragmatic principle, how do we make a profit with this? Then looked at the presently successful list of Space harware vendors and saw they were using multistage rockets, so Spacex mimic'd the concepts there in. But Spacex was also started with an agenda to enable a permanent off planet human presence, so as part of the plan the Dragon space capsule was always part of the plan, with the loss of Columbia and the Shuttle retirement the Drsgon was in a position to take over the manned spaceflight function.
In 2006 NASA planning for a gap in its manned and unmanned ability for space access then let what is known as the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract, so far only of the included competitors for the contract including Orbital Sciences, Spacex is the only COTS contractor to actually launch a space craft to orbit and to recover it safely on 9 December 2010, a feat until that point only done by the American and Russian and Chinese space programs.
I could belabor the point, but lets be blunt, the Falcon/Dragon program has done what no other space program has done in the last 40 years, lived up to its budget and to its stated goals. the Constellation could never get its design together in eight years and was cancelled in 2010, in 2011 the Obama administration redirected NASA to develop the Space Launch System a NASA alternative to the Aries, in both cases, the designs either never or are years if not decades away from spaceflight, the Aries did do a boileplate mission on October 28 2009, one month and 10 days prior to the Dragons first successful launch and rentry test mission, but that was only a suborbital design test.
The reason for this success was simple, Spacex was designing their hardware from scratch to make a profit, they knew they needed to be able to economically justify their existence, not just to the government but to other users as well, thats why you can go to Spacex's website and they'll quote you how much it will cost to launch to orbit on a falcon 9, $54,000,000.00. Why list the price when others wont, because this is their BUSINESS and they want you to use it.
Whats in store for Spacex includes a project to devlop a totally reusable version of the Falcon/Dragon system, with the stated goal of dropping the price per pound to orbit below $1000.00. Lets see if they are successful, their track record suggests they just might be.
