Jump-Starting the Orbital Economy

Why NASA’s plan to get out of the manned spaceflight business may (finally) make space travel routine

From my article in the December 2010 issue of Scientific American

Two years ago deceased Star Trek actor James “Scotty” Doohan was granted one last adventure, courtesy of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. SpaceX, a privately funded company based in Hawthorne, Calif., had been formed in 2002 with the mission of going where no start-up had gone before: Earth orbit. In August 2008 SpaceX loaded Doohan’s cremated remains onto the third test flight of its Falcon 1, a liquid oxygen- and kerosene-fueled rocket bound for orbit. Yet about two minutes into the flight Doohan’s final voyage ended prematurely when the rocket’s first stage crashed into the second stage during separation. It was SpaceX’s third failure in three attempts….read more

2 thoughts on “Jump-Starting the Orbital Economy

  1. Arcadia says:

    Can I make a suggestion? I think youve got something good here. But what if you happen to added a couple links to a page that backs up what youre saying? Or perhaps you could possibly give us something to take a look at, something that might join what youre saying to one thing tangible? Just a suggestion. Anyway, in my language, there will not be much good supply like this. New Car Loan Rates

  2. Dale says:

    Thanks a lot for sharing that information. That's a really good article. I'll probably continue reading it.delaware corporation

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: