Rico's rants: Elon Musk for the day

The New York Times has an article by Kenneth Chang about SpaceX:

Elon Musk’s plans to get to Mars start with a really big rocket. He still needs to figure out how to pay for it. For years, Musk, the billionaire founder of the SpaceX rocket company, has been offering hints and teases of his desire to colonize the big red planet.
In a talk at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, Musk finally provided engineering details, optimistic timelines and a slick video (above).
“What you saw there is very close to what we’ll actually build,” Musk said, referring to the rockets and spacecraft in the video.
Musk estimated it would cost ten billion dollars to develop the rocket, and he said the first passengers to Mars could take off as soon as 2024 if the plans went off without a hitch. For now, SpaceX is financing development costs of a few tens of millions of dollars a year, but eventually the company would look to some kind of public-private partnership.
Each of the SpaceX vehicles would take a hundred passengers on the journey to Mars, with trips planned every two years, when Earth and Mars pass closest to each other. Tickets per person might cost a half million dollars at first, and drop to about a third of that later on, Musk said.
To establish a self-sustaining Mars civilization of a million people would take ten thousand flights, with many more to ferry equipment and supplies. “We’re going to need something quite large to do that,” Musk said. It would take forty years to a century before a city on Mars became self-sufficient, he said.
The mood at the conference was almost as giddy as a rock concert or the launch of a new Apple product, with people lining up for Musk’s presentation a couple of hours in advance.
Musk has talked of his Mars Colonial Transporter but, a couple of weeks ago, he suggested that its capabilities would be much greater. He now calls it the Interplanetary Transport System. The booster would include forty of SpaceX’s new, more powerful Raptor engines. He recently posted an image on Twitter of the first testing of a Raptor.
Mars has long been the goal of Musk and SpaceX. Much of Musk’s initial wealth came from his tenure as chief executive of PayPal, which he sold to eBay in 2002 for one and a half billion dollars. Afterward, he wanted to undertake a science experiment, to send a greenhouse to Mars and see if Earth plants could grow in Martian dirt. He said the rocket options for launching his project were so lacking that he started SpaceX, which has headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
SpaceX has established a successful business with its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket launching satellites, and by taking cargo and, soon, astronauts, to the International Space Station for NASA. But Musk has stated often that his loftier goal for SpaceX is to send people to Mars to make humanity a “multiplanetary species” in order to ensure survival in case some calamity, like an asteroid strike, befell Earth.
The new rocket could be used for even more distant trips, to places like Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter. “This system really gives you freedom to go anywhere you want in the greater solar system,” he said.
What is less clear is how SpaceX will raise the money needed to bring its Mars dreams to fruition. The new rocket is by far the largest ever.
Scott Pace, a former NASA official who is the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said Musk’s vision was plausible technically, but added, “Other than emotional appeal, however, it didn’t really address why governments, corporations or other organizations would fund the effort.” His bottom-line opinion: “Possible, but not probable.”
During his talk, Musk put up a slide titled Funding. The first item was Steal underpants, a joking reference to a South Park episode. He also listed SpaceX’s businesses, launching satellites and sending NASA cargo and astronauts to the space station, and Kickstarter.
But he admitted that SpaceX would probably not be able to do it alone. “Ultimately, this is going to be a huge public-private partnership,” he said.
SpaceX has received much of the financing for its rocket development from NASA, from contracts to take cargo to and from the International Space Station. The United States Air Force is providing thirty million dollars for development of the Raptor.
Critics of SpaceX and Musk question whether the Mars dreams are distracting the company from its more mundane business. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is grounded while investigators try to figure out why one of the rockets on the launchpad exploded this month during fueling before a test firing.
The company said the failure appeared to be a large breach in the helium system of the second stage, although what caused the breach is not known. However, the company said the investigation had ruled out any connection to the failure last year of a Falcon 9 that disintegrated in flight. (That failure was traced to a faulty strut in the second stage, and SpaceX resumed launching later in the year.)
Musk also faces competition from other billionaires with ambitious space dreams. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has his own rocket company, Blue Origin, which this month also announced a new rocket, New Glenn, that approaches the Saturn 5 in stature, but is dwarfed by SpaceX’s new rocket.
Robert Meyerson, Blue Origin’s president, said the aim of New Glenn was to take people to space, although it will also be able to launch satellites. The images the company released showed the satellite-carrying version, but Meyerson disclosed that “there are other versions that will have a space vehicle on top.”
Meyerson said Blue Origin had an even larger rocket, to be called New Armstrong, on the drawing board. Bezos has said his goal is for millions of people to live in space, although he has not mentioned Mars as a destination.
With Bezos’ Amazon wealth, Blue Origin faces less pressure to be profitable as quickly as SpaceX, or public companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin that have to answer to shareholders.
NASA is still talking about its Mars ambitions, too, and its own giant rocket, the Space Launch System, for eventual human missions there. William H. Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said all of the pieces for a crewed Mars mission were in development, at least to reach Mars orbit, by the 2030s and fit within the agency’s existing budget. “We don’t think we’re going to get a big new budget,” he said. He admitted that, in NASA’s plans, astronauts’ setting foot on Mars would take longer, probably not until the 2040s.
Musk was confident that his company could pull off his vision, but he said he would not be among the first colonists, saying he wants to see his children grow up. The chances of dying on that first trip to Mars, he said, are “quite high”.

Rico says he won't be going, but someone undoubtedly will...

The New York Times has an article by Kenneth Chang, Mike Isaac, and Matt Richtel about a SpaceX rocket, gone in seconds:

A spectacular explosion of a SpaceX rocket on Thursday destroyed a two hundred million dollar communications satellite that would have extended Facebook’s reach across Africa, dealing a serious setback to Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs the rocket company.
The blast is likely to disrupt NASA’s cargo deliveries to the International Space Station as well, exposing the risks of the agency’s growing reliance on private companies like SpaceX to carry materials and, soon, astronauts.
The explosion at Cape Canaveral, Florida intensified questions about whether Musk is moving too quickly in his headlong investment in some of the biggest and most complex industries, not just space travel but carmakers and electric utilities.
This is not the first problem Musk has suffered as he tries to create space travel that is cheap and commonplace. Each of his companies, including Tesla and SolarCity, has hit major stumbling blocks recently. The owner of a Tesla car died in May in a crash using the company’s autopilot software, and SolarCity faces major financial challenges.
“SpaceX is running a punishing schedule,” said Scott Pace, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a former NASA official. “There is probably some human factor involved here. To what extent was human error part of this? And if so, why? Are you running your people too hard? What are your safety requirements?” Dr. Pace said an internal investigation would have to look at the company’s operations as it tried to ramp up the pace of launches.
The company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, said in a statement, “Our number one priority is to safely and reliably return to flight for our customers, and we will carefully investigate and address this issue.“
The Falcon 9 rocket burst into flames in a violent series of blasts starting at 0907, spewing plumes of dark smoke around the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and sending vibrations felt by residents nearby. The rocket had been set to launch on Saturday, carrying a satellite for Spacecom, an Israeli company.
The explosion was particularly painful news for Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who is touring Kenya, promoting a program reliant on the satellite, known as Amos-6, with entrepreneurs in the country. He had promised them connectivity.
Just hours after the news of the explosion broke, Zuckerberg expressed disappointment on his Facebook page “that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite,” a swipe at Musk and his team, who were still trying to figure out what went wrong.
Musk did not respond publicly to Zuckerberg, but he posted a brief explanation on Twitter: “Loss of Falcon vehicle today during propellant fill operation. Originated around upper stage oxygen tank. Cause still unknown. More soon.”
The Falcon 9, developed by SpaceX with NASA financing, has had previous problems. In June of 2015, a rocket carrying NASA cargo to the International Space Station fell apart in-flight when a strut holding a helium bottle snapped, setting off a chain of events that destroyed the rocket moments later. This latest episode is likely to push back the timetable NASA had after hiring SpaceX and Boeing to carry astronauts to the space station by the end of next year.
NASA said it was too soon to say how the explosion would affect its space station operations, asserting that it remained “confident” in its commercial partners. “Today’s incident, while it was not a NASA launch, is a reminder that spaceflight is an incredible challenge, but our partners learn from each success and setback,” the agency said.
SpaceX’s next cargo mission to the space station is scheduled for November of 2016.
Coincidentally, a report released by NASA’s inspector general, Paul K. Martin, said SpaceX and Boeing were likely to face additional delays in their launch schedules anyway. Launches with crews will probably not lift off before the second half of 2018, three years later than planned, the inspector general said.
Changes that SpaceX is making to the design of the capsule, to allow landing in water instead of on land, are causing the latest delays, Martin said. In addition, NASA has been slow in examining safety reviews submitted by the companies, and as a result, late and costly redesigns might be needed, Martin said.
SpaceX lists about forty launches of satellites and other cargo on its manifest for commercial companies, NASA, and the Air Force.
Space industry experts say that Musk faces risks in balancing SpaceX’s backlog of contracts spanning the next few years without cutting corners to stay on the company’s busy schedule.
“Whenever you have a failure along these lines, you of course face delays, which inevitably sets back some of your commercial and government satellite contracts,” said Marco Cáceres, senior space analyst and director of space studies at The Teal Group, an aerospace research firm. “They have to fight the temptation to keep to a schedule, even if that means setting back their launches into next year.”
SpaceX had hoped for eighteen rocket launches this year; so far, eight have occurred. Over all, SpaceX has had twenty-seven successful launches of Falcon 9 rockets.
An episode like Thursday’s is rare. Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who tracks rocket history, said the last time such an explosion happened on a Cape Canaveral launchpad before the ignition of engines for liftoff was in 1959.
SpaceX is rebuilding a separate launchpad, one of the two formerly used for NASA’s space shuttle missions, for the astronaut launches. That launchpad is scheduled to be ready by the end of the year.
Business analysts were mixed on the effects of the explosion on Musk’s other investments at a time when he is under considerable financial pressure with the planned merger of Tesla and SolarCity. Musk draws vocal admirers and detractors, some of whom are “short” investors betting that Tesla cannot execute on its business plan.
Trip Chowdry, a senior analyst at Global Equities Research who studies Tesla’s performance, described Musk’s situation as a “double-edged sword”. “When things work out well, people believe Musk to be a superstar,” Chowdry said. But when things go wrong, like an explosion at a separate company, Tesla investors tend to make more general inferences, too. “When all is said and done, does it have any impact on Tesla stock? No,” he said. “But events at SpaceX do create headline risk for Tesla stockholders.”
The demise of the satellite, called Amos-6, puts a significant damper on Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, a grand plan spearheaded by Zuckerberg to provide wireless connectivity to nations across the world that do not otherwise have easy Internet access.
In a partnership with Eutelsat, a French satellite provider, Facebook planned to use Amos-6 to offer internet coverage to large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Along with satellite coverage, Facebook is teaming with local internet providers to offer access, and is also building its own drones, the first of which is named Aquila (Spanish for eagle), to beam internet connectivity down to cities.
Its Internet.org initiative had already sustained a setback when the company’s aggressive overtures were rejected by local regulators in India earlier this year.
On Thursday, Zuckerberg struck an upbeat tone in his post about the rocket failure, noting that the company has other strategies in the works to expand internet connectivity across the world. Aquila, the Facebook-built drone, he noted, recently undertook its first successful flight in the desert. Still, the setback will delay Facebook’s ambitious plans and even more ambitious timetable.
Shortly after his SpaceX comments, Zuckerberg struck a cheerier note by posting some “good news” from the region: A family of baby giraffes was seen on his safari.