Space X's Falcon 1 reaches orbit!

This will be remembered as the dawn of the era of fast, cheap and reliable commmercial space launch availability:

http://www.spacex.com/F1-004.php

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iF-6npNsKa0n_7aLm8tJvuHWt4JgD93G1LC00

Awesome job Space-X. Congrats! There are many more great moments to come. Falcon 9, COTS demo, first mission to the Space Station, first manned mission to the Space Station, and then ofcourse missions to Mars. The odds of those happening have suddenly increased a lot today.

Comment: Has Space-X already shown that they can provide a reliable, fast availability and low-cost orbital launch system?

With this successful launch, they have already proven the cost effectiveness and speed to a great extent and silenced the naysayers- in a couple of 100 million dollars, 500 people (only now they have hit a strengthof 500) and 6 years, they have developed and built two rockets from scratch (Falcon 9 is being manufactured right now), designed Dragon, and launched Falcon-1 4 times. Also note the fast turnaround time forFalcon-1 launches. For the same scale of development and testing effort, NASA would have taken 10 billion dollars or more and 10s ofthousands of employees. Just to make minor modifications to the existing tanks and engines to transform them into Ares 1 and 2 has already cost NASA a few billion dollars, and is expected to take almosta decade. All the other supposedly private companies in orbitalspace services such Sea Launch, Mir Corp, SpaceAdventures, Orbital Sciences, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Arianne, have been doled out billions of dollarsand/or massive man-power and logistics suppor from the government to develop what they did, or have reused previously existing government-funded infrastructureto provide their "new" service.

Only two other companies come close to Space-X in the area of space services: Bigelow Aerospace and Space Dev- and they both are NOT working on orbital launch capabilties (as of now). They both do complement Space-X's launch capabilties - and hopefully will one day provide cheap space stations and a large group of paying astronauts (respectively) to Space-X.

The Clarke in the Multiverse

I read Childhood's End the first time when I was maybe 12. Another great novel of his was A Fall of Moon Dust- it was so full of suspense that I finished it in one sitting :-)

The strange thing is that I was watching Space Odyssey 2001 on Comcast in high-def just the day Sir Arthur C. Clarke died, and was mentioning to my wife how glad I was that he was still around.

Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan made me into what I am today. Clarke was the last living guru from my childhood. The three inspired me to work hard in science and maths and to get a PhD in Machine Learning (AI). Motivated by Isaac Asmiov's positronic brain, many scientists have been working on ideas that can bring AI brain-power closer to human-level intelligence, or even surpass it. Even if I personally don't succeed in something that big (though I am surely inspired enough to try), I believe one or more of the thousands of others inspired by the same great people will soon succeed in bringing about a new millenia-level shift for humanity; which breakthrough will be the first to affect us all is unknown, but that's what makes it exciting to live today - a Space Elevator, SETI discovering an alien signal from a nearby star, human-level AI, warp drive, unlimited human hibernation, ability to repair frost damaged cells, a cure for human aging, expansion of humanity on to Mars, terraforming of Mars, discovery of complex life-forms in the Europan ocean - the list is pretty long...

Here is another nice tribute article on Space.com for Clarke.

Another interesting idea: long live Arthur C. Clarke in our Multiverse; in some other Universe of our Multiverse, where longevity was discovered earlier than in ours (thanks again to one of his inspired pupils), he is still alive and kicking. Perhaps one day, from that Universe, he will figure out a way (with help from some other advances in physics and technology) to send a copy of himself back into ours. If it does not sound familiar, read Space Odyssey 3001 :-)