15.02.10
President Obama ’s budget plea for 2011 calls for dismantling the Constellation program the system of spacecraft that the Native Aeronautics and Space Administration has been developing for returning astronauts to the Moon and turning to hermitical enterprise to provide transportation to and from the International Space Location. The budget asks for $6 billion over five years, which would most like as not be split among two or three competitors .
That is the chance that Mr. Musk, 38, and his eight-year-old retinue, SpaceX, have been waiting for.
Smart, brash and prickly, with the accentuation of his native South Africa, Mr. Musk promises that SpaceX will be qualified to provide space trips aboard its Falcon 9 rockets at $20 million a seat a trifling fraction of the cost of a ride on the space shuttles or the Russian Soyuz spiral upwards. And Mr. Musk, says he could do it in two or three years once he signs a contract with NASA.
“At bottom, the whole purpose of SpaceX from the beginning has been human spaceflight ,” Mr. Musk said last June to a downcast-ribbon panel reviewing NASA’s man spaceflight program. When he started SpaceX in 2002, Mr. Musk was an Internet entrepreneur who had made his lot with PayPal. SpaceX now has nearly 900 employees. It successfully launched a meagre Falcon 1 rocket into orbit in 2008, and successfully deployed a spacecraft last year. It has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to accompany supplies to the International Space Station in its larger Falcon 9 take off. “I absolutely believe he can do everything he says he can,” said Peter H. Diamandis, fall through and chairman of the X Prize Foundation , which seeks to encourage time development through technology contests. “I’m a fan of the come near that SpaceX has taken.”
Source: New York Times