Like the vast majority of people, you probably don't know that today was a turning point in human history - a turning point for the better, and for the hell of a lot more interesting. No lives were saved by this event; no empty stomachs fed; no great peace treaties concluded; no unjustly imprisoned people freed; no criminals brought to justice; no radical scientific breakthroughs made; no legislation or policy changes have (yet) been passed as a result of it; no economic, racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation inequalities mitigated. What merely happened is that a commercial rocket was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, and the cost of reaching outer space is now about 1/4 of what it was yesterday - and may be cut in half yet again over the next handful of years.
The rocket above is the Falcon 9 - the nine-engine orbital launcher of Hawthorne, CA-based SpaceX (short for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation). The firm's founder, successful serial entrepreneur Elon Musk - whom you may recognize as also being co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors - created SpaceX with the deliberate intention of radically reducing the cost of reaching orbit so that humanity could finally realize the long-delayed dreams of the Apollo era: General expansion into space.
Elon Musk is one of my personal heroes, and today was a major reaffirmation of why: While simultaneously spearheading the EV revolution with the Tesla Roadster - without which it's questionable if the major auto manufacturers would now be pursuing EVs - Musk built a rocket company from the ground up, creating an entirely new class of rocket with (until recently) no outside investment or government contracts. Using the principles of Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism - which Musk had earlier demonstrated by co-founding PayPal - SpaceX sought to create an entirely new system of launch operations to eliminate antiquated technologies and procedures left over from the ICBM roots of current rocketry.
Utilizing new software, process automation, and advanced manufacturing techniques, the initial result of these efforts was the Falcon 1 - a single-engine orbital rocket whose purpose from the beginning was to test and verify components that would ultimately go into the Falcon 9: Particularly the Merlin engine. It took four launch attempts over three years - three rockets failing to reach orbit, each with intense effort and emotion behind them - before a completely successful mission was achieved in 2008. One additional flight of the Falcon 1 successfully launched a Malaysian satellite into orbit last year.
Although the Falcon 1 remains on the market, and may or may not prove a commercial success in itself, the main show has always been the Falcon 9: The logical scaling-up of the Falcon class to a nine-engine configuration, and designed from the beginning for human space transportation. In 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX a $278 million contract to use the Falcon 9 for commercial cargo resupply of the International Space Station as part of its COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) initiative.
This is vastly cheaper than what it would cost NASA to resupply the ISS itself or pay for Russian Soyuz flights. Furthermore, because it is a fixed-price award, any cost-overruns on the part of SpaceX will have to be swallowed by SpaceX - all of the impetus is on them to deliver, and NASA thinks they can do it. Today, SpaceX all but proved it.
Atop the Falcon 9 rocket was a structural qualification version of the Dragon spacecraft - the capsule that will be used to deliver cargo to the ISS, and that has been designed from the very beginning for ultimate use as a crew transportation system. As designed, Dragon will be able to carry 7 astronauts into orbit - more than the 4 that would have been carried by Orion, and that are currently carried by Soyuz - and at anywhere from 1/5 to 1/10th of the cost of a NASA flight, while still meeting all of NASA's safety specifications.
Here is the Big Fucking Deal: Once the crew version of the Dragon spacecraft is proven and enters operation, it will be a commercial vehicle - meaning that anyone can buy rides. Now, this doesn't mean that SpaceX intends to become a space tourism company - they will just be selling the launch + orbiter use, and will be leaving the specific applications to users and secondary industries. For instance, space tourism companies can buy flights; universities; governments; and corporations looking to do research; etc. etc.
The initial market for Dragon being cultivated by SpaceX is the research community, both public and private, through its DragonLab program where the spacecraft carries equipment and (if desired) crew to operate it. SpaceX has held workshops on the DragonLab program, and interest from the research community has been extraordinary. However, even though we can expect that in the early years, most flights will consist of astronauts and scientists, as a commercial company SpaceX will probably also be selling flights to space tourism companies - and at a small fraction of prices paid by earlier space tourists.
This does not mean that space will be open to you and I - a ticket for an orbital ride will still be in the single-digit millions, even though that is a radical improvement over the $20-$30 million currently available through Russia. But it does explode the number of people and organizations that can afford to go into space, and the volume of launches will expand greatly as it's intended to meet commercial demand rather than operating within the fossilized framework of cost-plus military and government contracts. Supply will be a limiting factor for many years, but now that commercial space is getting on the move, ultimately it will catch up with demand - demand that has been sitting there unmet since humans first learned they could leave this world.
There is no telling how far SpaceX as an individual company will go before it settles into being just another fossilized Big Aerospace firm, is gobbled up by one, or (I hope not) goes down in flames, but today they started something much bigger than themselves: The tiny pebble rolling down a hill that brings the avalanche. I am not comparing this to the Wright Brothers, or Lindbergh, or Gagarin, because this was just a test launch - not an actual mission - but the avalanche has begun nonetheless. They Did It. Even if there are subsequent failures, the world now knows they can do it, which means that we all can do it.
Elon Musk is a hero among heroes, and I hope (and expect) the entire SpaceX team - heroes all - will be getting royally loaded and laid tonight.
