space x
More cool news at hobbyspace (and some other sites, but he's the only one who links to them all).
IT entrepreneur Elon Musk's company Space X is finally flying their small satellite launcher on November 25th.
For those unfamiliar with Space X (and the media's mostly ignoring it), the cool thing here is that they only cost about a third of what the big guys (Boeing and Lockheed) do. Musk is also developing an intermediate-size booster called Falcon 5, and a really, really big SOB called Falcon 9. For me, the coolest thing Musk said at the press conference was this, liveblogged by Michael Belfiore:
'Boeing and Lockheed can't win on a level playing field. The only way we can fail is if we're stupid. If we build a good rocket and we launch it and it's reliable, then we have a very bright future and there's very little a competitor can do to stop us.'
If the rocket doesn't blow up, as new rockets often do, and establishes a track record, this could be huge. As I posted earlier, the biggest obstacle to making the human race a spacefaring civilisation is cost. Anything that brings it down is very good news. Though I don't entirely agree with Musk that Boeing and Lockheed are finished if Space X succeeds -- hopefully they'll stay in the race, invest their own money in new technologies that make things cheaper, and then we'll have competition. A Space X monopoly wouldn't help anyone.
Falcon 9 will evidently be able to carry people. It's only a few years from launch. Pretty soon he'll be able to send those people to orbital facilities provided by Robert Bigelow. Bigelow has said he's not much interested in operating tourist hotels himself, he'll just sell the hardware to anyone else who is. Imagine maybe a hotel chain, say Hilton, wanted to do so. Virgin is already poised for hundreds of millions in free advertising from the Virgin Galactic venture, even before considering the prospect of actual operating profits. How much is it worth to Virgin, advertising wise, to have their name emblazoned on the sides of actual manned spacecraft soaring into sub-orbit? How much would it be worth to a Hilton or Shangri La to have their name on an orbital hotel? You can just see the ads, can't you?
Possibilities, possibilities...
IT entrepreneur Elon Musk's company Space X is finally flying their small satellite launcher on November 25th.
For those unfamiliar with Space X (and the media's mostly ignoring it), the cool thing here is that they only cost about a third of what the big guys (Boeing and Lockheed) do. Musk is also developing an intermediate-size booster called Falcon 5, and a really, really big SOB called Falcon 9. For me, the coolest thing Musk said at the press conference was this, liveblogged by Michael Belfiore:
'Boeing and Lockheed can't win on a level playing field. The only way we can fail is if we're stupid. If we build a good rocket and we launch it and it's reliable, then we have a very bright future and there's very little a competitor can do to stop us.'
If the rocket doesn't blow up, as new rockets often do, and establishes a track record, this could be huge. As I posted earlier, the biggest obstacle to making the human race a spacefaring civilisation is cost. Anything that brings it down is very good news. Though I don't entirely agree with Musk that Boeing and Lockheed are finished if Space X succeeds -- hopefully they'll stay in the race, invest their own money in new technologies that make things cheaper, and then we'll have competition. A Space X monopoly wouldn't help anyone.
Falcon 9 will evidently be able to carry people. It's only a few years from launch. Pretty soon he'll be able to send those people to orbital facilities provided by Robert Bigelow. Bigelow has said he's not much interested in operating tourist hotels himself, he'll just sell the hardware to anyone else who is. Imagine maybe a hotel chain, say Hilton, wanted to do so. Virgin is already poised for hundreds of millions in free advertising from the Virgin Galactic venture, even before considering the prospect of actual operating profits. How much is it worth to Virgin, advertising wise, to have their name emblazoned on the sides of actual manned spacecraft soaring into sub-orbit? How much would it be worth to a Hilton or Shangri La to have their name on an orbital hotel? You can just see the ads, can't you?
Possibilities, possibilities...
2 Comments:
Keep asking myself what activities will be economically viable in space. Then I keep reminding myself, it's not possible to predict what unforseen things will emerge in a free economy, that's the whole beauty of it, with a million monkey brains trying to figure out an angle.
Rich-guy tourism seems obvious, but I have heard some fair nonsense in the past about, say, semiconductor manufacturing. I'm hung up on what benefits could make marginal revenue exceed the marginal cost of boosting into orbit or further, so to speak.
Maybe my viewpoint is too contrained. One thing's for sure, NASA won't give us the answer.
I suspect that, once entrepreneurship reaches space, some killer app out there will emerge that none of us has figured out yet.
One way of looking at it is this -- transport is the most integral piece of infrastructure to any space faring civilisation (duh! If you can't get to space, it doesn't exist). So what would happen to Earth-based economies today if all our transport cost a few hundred times what it does right now? How many of today's industries could survive that massive hike in costs? Or, reversing the question, how many industries today, and how much of our present economy, has been enabled by LOW transport costs? Most of it, I think. So no surprise that so long as space transport remains stiflingly expensive, nothing else can grow.
I think most of the emerging space economy will begin with tourism, then move into B-to-B, business to business, with stations, lunar bases, mining colonies etc trading with each other, rather than with Earth. It'll remain a strange bubble economy, all prices inflated, but paid for by the trickle-down from tourists. It'll be a long, long time before they start producing things cheaply enough to sell back on Earth... but who know, maybe there will be some unique applications with zero-G manufacturing and the like. The most important thing is that costs keep coming down, that's what makes new developments inevitable.
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