VERY INTERESTING: SPACEX

 Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about

SPACEX

1. Who is Elon Musk and why is he building rockets?

Musk (b. 1971) is a South African-born entrepreneur with degrees in business and physics from the University of Pennsylvania—and he’s launching rockets because he just kind of decided to. That’s the short answer, and it’s not much different from the long answer. Musk has no formal training in rocketry, but he does have an eye for new markets. He made his initial fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, and has since founded Tesla Motors and SolarCity—a solar energy company. 

In the early 2000s, he and others saw the opening NASA was creating by retreating from the business of launching spacecraft to low earth orbit. In 2002, he jumped into that gap, founding Space Exploration Technologies Corporation—or SpaceX—going into competition with other, generally more-established companies such as Boeing and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences.

2. What Has SpaceX Done That Other Companies Haven’t?

SpaceX scored its first big headline in 2010, when it became the first private company to launch a payload into orbit and return it to Earth intact—something only government agencies like NASA or Russia’s Roscosmos had done before.

Its upright landing and recovery of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on Dec. 21 2015, was another first. Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, sent a rocket to the edge of space and landed it upright earlier this year, but it was a demonstration flight and did not achieve orbit.

 3. Are SpaceX Rockets Special?

Progress in rocketry is incremental. The basic science of liquid-fueled rockets hasn’t changed much since the days of Robert Goddard. And solid fueled rockets—well, they go back millennia. The advances are made at the margins, and Musk is doing well there. His rockets are modular: the Falcon is a single engine model; the Falcon 9—no surprise—has nine; the Falcon Heavy, which has yet to fly, will have 27, in three clusters of nine engines. 

This streamlines production in the same way that building different car bodies atop similar chassis helps keep costs down for car manufacturers. Roughly 80% of the parts in any SpaceX rocket are made on the company’s own factory floor, reducing the cost of outsourcing. This keeps price per pound of payload down and quality control in house. One study, by NASA and the Air Force, estimated that the price tag for going from the initial design stages of the Falcon 9 rocket to its first flight was $440 million, about a third of what it would have cost NASA.

 4. How Close Is SpaceX To Flying A Crew?

Very close—maybe. The company has used its Dragon spacecraft to make uncrewed cargo runs to the ISS. The Dragon was designed with crew compatibility in mind, which means the ship has already proven its basic spaceworthiness, though it has a good way to go before its life support systems are similarly proven. SpaceX and Boeing are both scheduled to begin crewed runs to the ISS in 2017, and NASA has already designated the first astronauts who will fly in the new ships. 

The 2017 target could slip and the June explosion of one of SpaceX’s cargo rockets during launch was hardly good news for the company. The recent launch of the Falcon 9, even without the upright first-stage landing, was a confidence booster. But with astronaut lives on the line in future flights, the company will have to put a string of good launches together to make up for that very bad one.

 5. Where is SpaceX’s Mission Control?

You know the kitchen area in your office, where you microwave your coffee and reheat your lunch? Well, the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California has a better kitchen. And you know that area next to the kitchen where people gather to gossip and avoid going back to their desks? At SpaceX they use that place to launch rockets. Really. The SpaceX facility is a sprawling, one-floor industrial plant that was originally a factory for Boeing aircraft fuselage. 

SpaceX took it over and repurposed into an all-in-one spaceport. Thousands of square feet are given over to cubicles—almost no one at SpaceX, including Musk, has an office with doors. Adjacent to that is the factory floor and the kitchen. And adjacent to that, behind a high glass wall, is mission control. Workers gather to watch launches and recoveries, then go back to their lathes or computers or desks. It’s very Silicon Valley only way cooler.

and as always have a chilled day from the Viking