PJ Media: Tomorrow, if the weather holds, the first private, commercial manned spaceflight will become a reality as Elon Musk’s Space X Dragon capsule blasts off from Cape Canaveral, marking the first time in nearly 9 years that Americans will go into space launched from U.S. soil.
NASA is paying for the ride. And they underwrote much of the Dragon crew capsule’s development.
But the driving force behind the project was PayPal founder Elon Musk — a quirky billionaire who wants to establish a human colony on Mars.
Keep dreaming, Elon, and if the past is any indication, you’ll get there.
The rocket that launches the Dragon into orbit is an incredible piece of engineering. The Falcon 9 will lift the capsule into orbit and then, instead of falling back to earth and crash landing in the water, it will be guided by rockets to a pinpoint soft landing on a small landing area floating in the ocean. The reusable first stage will shave millions off the cost of launching humans into space.
But the audacity of Musk’s dream is that he put his money where his fantasies are. At least $100 million of his own money has been poured into the project with no prospect of a decent return any time soon. read more
I’ve had my doubts about Musk’s business methods and, heck, his sanity, but a successful mission starting tomorrow will make up for just about all of that. Godspeed to Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley in Dragon atop the Falcon 9.
It’s my opinion Space X doesn’t quite have this down to science fiction. People stand a good chance of dying. So I guess nothings really changed. Brave people that climb into those things.
This is exciting. After all these years of human payload USA absence, very exciting.
Scheduled for 4:33 PM EDT Today.
I like Musk, but the difference between him and Howard Hughes is that Hughes would be in the space ship flying it. Hughes wouldn’t let another man steal his glory even if it meant crashing and dying.
I’m watching, it’s about friggin time for this country to get back into the space business and quit relying on the Russians to get our astronauts to the space station. No thanks to barry who gutted NASA and wanted to use it to appease his muzloid homies. If he can pull it off and reuse the rockets by having the rocket land safely in the Atlantic Ocean he just may be a hero, maybe but we’ll see. I believe that Robert A Heinlein would approve.