I’m just watching the live feed of the SpaceX‘s Falcon 1 rocket launch.
I can’t even begin to describe what the impact of this whole move is if the launch succeeds as planned.
The Falcon 1 rocket is the first all American, built from scratch, rocket in the last 25+ years. It is built from new materials and its launch cost is $6.7 million which is about a quarter of what a launch will cost on a Delta II rocket or equivalent (even the Russian launch costs are higher than this the cost of launching Falcon 1).
In all of the times I tried to raise ideas and being to develop things related to satellites, the one thing that always hold me back was the fact that launching a satellite is VERY expensive and trying to piggy back on someone else’s launch is very cumbersome and risky (at least risky for the people that are launching the main payload in that rocket).
Maybe now the whole space exploration and satellite business will start taking off (hopefully, like the Falcon 1 rocket) and really revolutionize our lives.
The funny thing here is that there is a direct connection to the Hi-Tech software industry, SpaceX’s CEO and CTO is Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal which revolutionized the electronic payments over the internet.
I’ve been tracking SpaceX’s progress for the past 4 years (roughly about the time I had my first ideas about revolutionizing the satellite industry) and they have made an incredible progress.
I know what you are probably thinking “what does this crazy guy that have a .NET debugging blog and rants about various thing has to do with revolutionizing the satellite building industry”, well, in a short sentence a lot :-) but these are all things I’ll have to either implement or explain later when I’ll write my great book of unimplemented ideas ;-)
God Speed Falcon 1 and kudos to the whole SpaceX team!