6.02.2007

WIRED MAGAZINE SPACE ADVOCATES

WIRED MAAGAZINE IS A BIG INFLUENCE ON OUR ORGANIZATION. THIS MONTHS MAIN ARTICLE FOCUSES ON THE PRIVATE SPACE INDUSTRY, BUT FOCUSES ON THE PIONEERING MAVERICK OF THE CURRENT PRIVATE SPACE HAULING ENTERPRISE, SPACE-X. ELON MUSK HAS WAGERED MILLIONS ON THE SPACE INDUSTRY (his huge investment in the new electric car phenom company, Tesla Motorcars, is another achievement to be discussed later!).


THE COVER OF THE MAGAZINE IS A BRILLIANT RENDITION OF COMPETITION WORKING TOGETHER TO MEET GLOBAL GOALS. CLICK THE TITLE LINK ABOVE TO GO DIRECTLY TO THE ARTICLE.
HERE ARE A FEW PARAPHRASES TO GET YOU INTERESTED...
--- The ultimate objective is to make humanity a multiplanet species. Thirty years from now, there'll be a base on the moon and on Mars, and people will be going back and forth on SpaceX rockets."
---We've developed it ourselves, and no other private company has ever done that. Ever. By next year, we'll be building 30 to 40 rocket engines a year, more than any other company in the US, getting economies of scale that have never been achieved before."
---In 30 minutes if everything goes according to plan, the Falcon will be in orbit above Earth — something so difficult that it has always been the province of nations, not entrepreneurs like Musk.
---"Look," Buzza says, "as launch director I'm extremely uncomfortable putting the vehicle, fully fueled, into a safe state." Buzza orders the fuel drained. "Wait a second, Tim," Musk says, pacing. He's a gazillionaire, a master of the universe, the guy who started PayPal and flipped it to eBay for $1.5 billion, the guy who built the first viable electric sports car. He gets stuff done. "Tim? Tim! If we can launch today, why are we scrubbing?" But he's powerless, stuck half a world away from the action. Buzza cancels the launch. Musk plops back into his chair, shakes his head, and begins frantically sending messages on his BlackBerry.
---The space industry was built by huge aerospace companies on government contracts — thousands of people working with hundreds of millions of dollars. Market forces didn't apply. Rockets were launched once and thrown away, high-performance miracles of engineering — race cars. Musk's basic idea was to use his own prodigious fortune to build not touchy Formula One cars but reliable Camrys. Run a company less like Boeing and more like Google — nimble, aggressive, and cheap.
---He had always been interested in space, convinced that humans were destined to be a multiplanet species. But where were the Columbuses and da Gamas of the 21st century?
Still on Earth — because going to space is hard. An object in low Earth orbit stays there, 250 miles up, only when the force that put it up there equals the gravity trying to pull it back down. And that force comes from one thing: massive amounts of kinetic energy, also known as speed. "Look," Musk says, scribbling equations on a notepad, "the energy increases with the square of the velocity. To go 60 miles into suborbital space, like Rutan and the X-Prize, you need to travel at Mach 3. The square of that is 9. But to get to orbit, you need to go Mach 25, and the square of that is 625. So you're looking at something that takes 60 to 70 times more energy. And then, to come back, you need to unwind that energy in a meteoric fireball, and if there's one violation of integrity, you're toast."

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ENJOY THE RACE BOYS!

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