What a great day today- Space-X & Dragon in Orbit!

SpaceX's follow on launch of Falcon 9 was a big success, and so was the splash down. I got up in the morning on the west coast (Seattle) just in time (T-6 minutes).

Watching the solid take-off of the Falcon 9 on a bright morning in Florida was an awesome sight, and knowing what it had riding on the top (first commercial manned-capable orbital spacecraft), and having followed SpaceX closely for a few years now, even if just on live webcams, made it more beautiful and inspiring than any other launch I have seen in the past, on either high-d or low-d video, because of what was riding on it: the dawn of a new era.

I was also glad to find out today that my predictions from June 2006 (see Slide 139, on the presentation in this related blog from 2006)
are still resembling reality 4 years later, given how hard it is to predict anything in this domain :-)

From that slide written in June 2006: "2021: Spurred by X-prize, NASA prizes and heating market competition, cost of large launcher that can launch humans to Moon and Mars drop radically with large, cheap private spacecrafts and launchers from many players from US, China, Russia, India. SpaceX is a prominent one among them. US scraps NASA launcher developments for Moon and Mars."

I can see now all that happening in 2021 more easily than even when I wrote it 4 years ago. Some of that is happening now, with the COTS missions in 2011.

Btw, Space-X now has Bigelow's inflatable habitats (Sundancer) on their launch schedule for 2014 on Falcon 9. And Bigelow is building 2 even much bigger ones. When they go up, in the next 10 years, the majority of the habitable volume and most of human launch capability into space would have both moved to just these two companies; Falcon 9's 9 engines are produced assembly-line style in very large numbers and Space X's factory is built to scale that up easily with demand. And Bigelow's plan is to move these stations into orbit around the Moon after that, or even to land the modules on the Moon for an instant base.

So yes, there is a real Version 2 Space Race on; not between India/China/US, but between goverment funded platforms (India and China) vs. commercial programs (US) where the government and private orgs are just launch and habitation buyers.

Way to Go Elon Musk and SpaceX. A hearty congratulations to the whole team!

I am excited and look forward to the COTS missions, and the coming into existence of the Flacon Heavy and even bigger boosters from SpaceX. They can realize their dreams now from the revenue that SpaceX generates from the NASA and other missions over the next 5 years.