It’s a spaceship!
So I’m about to fly up to San Jose on some super secret business, but before I do I wanted to send you all a little greeting from the Los Angeles hangar of the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation.
We last covered SpaceX back in March when it launched the Falcon 1 from its launch facility in the Marshall Islands.
Behind me is the latest rocket being developed by SpaceX, the Falcon 9. It is scheduled to launch in Q2 2008 and the crew here are all hustling and bustling around in their efforts toward getting it all ready for go time.
The Falcon 9 in the picture is soon headed to Texas for furthering testing and whatever else it is they do to make rockets be rockets. Everybody wish it luck.
If you’re in the market to launch stuff into space (satellites, uranium, in-laws, etc.) you can reserve your very own Falcon 9 launch solution for just $35 million — which actually is a bargain for a space launch.
Looking at that picture, seems like somebody just told you Blake (pointing at the big stainless steel canister) that it’s a new soylent green factory component!
Jon
haha.
dork.
What happened to Falcon 2-8?
Those Bluth boys really do get everywhere!
I’m pretty sure that the “9″ in Falcon-9 refers to the number of engines.
Rick, You’re quite right ;Falcon 9 has 9 Merlin engines,and could put c 10 tons into LEO; the Falcon 9 “Heavy” has also two strap on boosters,and is aimed to launch 28 tons into LEO- beating Delta 4,and Ariane 5 .It is aiming for a demo flight in c 2010- just in time for Robert Bigelow’s larger successors to his inflatable Genesis 1 and 2 space modules. We could see a true private space industry- of mostly re-usable man rated launchers and space habitats within 8-10 years, at this rate
All very intersting; Iam saving up for my suborbital flight, and making modest preparations by learning tofly gliders. Did my first “loop the loop”- under instruction- 10days ago, pulling 3.3 G- a useful start??
What I’m wondering is: at the bargain basement price of $35M, who’s going to develop and send up an asteroid mining robot probe and bring back some loot? That’ll blow the doors wide open on this ‘outer space’ thing.
Thought this deserved revisiting today as SpaceX, just launched its first commercial satellite into orbit (event:http://bit.ly/13Oshw).