Entrepreneur Addresses Lawsuit, Launch
"If you see a rocket
ship on the way to Mars, honey, it'll be me." -- Jerry Lee
Lewis
Elon Musk of Space Exploration Technologies, as no one calls it,
SpaceX as it's called by everyone from him down, might be singing
that line from an old Sun Records rocker to himself. But if so,
he's singing it in the full knowledge that first he has to get to
orbit, and he has a great deal of opposition.
Musk has been in the news lately, if you know where to look; he
issued a statement on the 24th on the latest postponement of
SpaceX's Falcon 1 launch at Kwajalein, and a couple of days before
that he spoke to a college audience at Virginia Tech.
If you're tuning in late to this story, Musk is the
South-African-born entrepreneur that earned a fortune by building
up the PayPal online payments system into a trusted brand in four
years and selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He
previously founded another company, Zip2, which he sold to Compaq
for $307 million after four years.
Since the sale of PayPal, he's been trying to make another
success with SpaceX, and applying the same kind of imagination
that's served him well before. But what drives him, like what
drives other space entrepreneurs including Paul Allen and Burt
Rutan, is the sense that those of us living in this time inherit a
historic calling, and a historic opportunity, for exploration.
"I said I wanted to take a large fortune and make it a small
one, so I started a rocket business, but the ultimate goal is to
make life multi-planetary," Musk (below) said at the lecture,
according to Virginia Tech's independent Collegiate Times. "As
life's agents, it's on our shoulders," to carry life into space
where now -- all science so far indicates -- it is not.
As if the environment of space wasn't harsh enough, SpaceX's
model has it launching from launch pads operated by its principal
competitors for heavy space launch services -- competitors that
SpaceX says have conspired to cheat it of any opportunity to
compete for payloads.
The Lawsuit
Musk discussed the SpaceX Lawsuit against Boeing and
Lockheed-Martin. SpaceX filed the suit on October 18, 2005, saying
that the proposed merger of the two giants' space operations into
the one single operation that would be granted a monopoly on Air
Force, DARPA and NASA launches, was an unfair restraint of trade.
The Boeing/Lockheed-Martin operation is called the United Launch
Alliance, and it's pretty clear whom they're uniting and allying
against.
The terms of the
"agreement" by Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and the USAF divide coming
launches between Boeing's Delta 4 (right) and Lockheed-Martin's
Atlas 5 launch vehicles -- freezing out other competitors. One
irony in this is that the technology for Delta and Atlas was
developed entirely with government -- i.e. taxpayer -- money,
making this one of the largest corporate welfare bills in world
history.
Boeing spokesman Dan Beck reacted at the time the suit was
filed: ""SpaceX? They've yet to even launch one of these rockets,"
Beck sneered -- on the record.
In Virginia, Musk recognized what motivates the giants to try to
lock in the launch schedule now. "They can't compete with us on a
level playing field . . . If I were them, I would be trying to tilt
the playing field. The jury is out on whether that will happen,"
Musk said.
He indicated that it would be a bad thing indeed, "If you've got
a great rocket and the Air Force can't buy it from you." -- which
is indeed the deal that Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have been trying
to cut with the AIr Force. The defense giants have the ear of many
in Washington, including plenty of "friends" in Congress. But what
would you say about anybody who has to buy his friends?
Why This Matters
The Falcon 1 launch, when it occurs, is going to be a very
important event -- as important for commercial spaceflight, if
perhaps not as splashy, as the SpaceShipOne manned flights in
2004.
Every significant element of Falcon 1, except the satellite
which it launches for DARPA and the US Air Force Academy, was
conceived, designed and developed in-house by SpaceX.
It will be the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to
reach orbit -- its technical forebears all depended on government
technology or funding in some way.
It will be the first all-new boost vehicle in over a decade.
The next items needs a
direct quote from SpaceX to illustrate the degree to which the big
aerospace/defense prime contractors have been dogging it in space:
"The main engine of Falcon 1 (Merlin) will be the first all new
American hydrocarbon engine for an orbital booster to be flown in
forty years and only the second new American booster engine of any
kind in twenty-five years."
It will be the first vehicle to deploy low-cost,
low-power-budget 21st century avionics.
It will be one of only two orbital booster systems that is even
in part reusable. The other is the embattled Space Shuttle
Transportation System.
It will provide the lowest cost per flight to orbit in the
world, despite a reliability rating as good as any American
booster... $6.7 million. That's a fraction of the prices the
Boeing/Lockheed-Martin monopoly is hoping to charge its captive
customers.