Remember this picture, its the first launch vehicle of the 21st Century.Just under a week ago, amidst financial meltdown, high-stakes piracy on the high seas, and a looming political battle of the sexes, an upstart and his start-up made history by putting a privately funded rocket in orbit for the first time ever.
SpaceX, founded in 2003 by PayPal billionaire and technology tycoon Elon Musk, successfully launched (on its 4th try) their Falcon 1 orbital launch vehicle. This trip carried a dummy payload, but the Falcon 1 can put small satellites in just about any orbit.
This is the dawn of a bright new era for spaceflight. SpaceX's rockets are a fraction the cost of their competitors, and are mostly reusable, which could eventually bring their costs down to 1/10th of their competitors. The door to affordable spaceflight has now been cracked open, and the greatest dreamers in science and industry are eagerly peering in.
And they have no lack of ambition. SpaceX is already competing with the veteran Orbital Sciences to be the space shuttle's replacement for getting supplies to the space station through the COTS competition (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services). Elon Musk has offered a variant of his Falcon 1 to ferry small missions for Google Lunar X-Prize at a discount, and this past week it came out that SpaceX is offering NASA $80M cargo rides to the moon, which is almost laughably cheap.
The proof-of-concept success of the Falcon 1 brings great promise to the rest of SpaceX's exploits. Their Falcon 9 and Falcon 9-Heavy launch vehicles, which essentially are respectively 9 and 27 Falcon 1s strapped together, have now had their hardware flight tested. This subsequently brings great promise to others who have been waiting for SpaceX launch vehicles, such as Bigelow Aerospace and their line of inflatable space stations.
Say what you will about the state of the world, but with the flight of the Falcon 1 orbital launch vehicle, private space is at least one industry with something to cheer about. In an age of relative technological stagnation in the United States, where America sees its competitive edge getting duller by the day, SpaceX has acheived a game changing triumph that could keep the red white and blue in first place when it comes to business in the great beyond.
