As you may know, NASA’s 1970’s technology Space Shuttle is about to retire, and NASA hopes to have a replacement system after a gap of a few years. Good planning, guys! Sure, the U.S. has plans to hire French and Japanese and possibly even Chinese technology until we can catch up in space.
Enter SpaceX
This completely private, completely civilian company has just launched a satellite, and has paying customers queued up for future launches. Including NASA. Kudos to PayPal founder Elon Musk for going from start-up to commercial flights in just 7 years.
So, once again I'm beaten to the punch. I had this quaint idea of geosynchronous satellites broadcasting worldwide over 30 years ago. Only, I wanted to broadcast on the K bandwidth which gives you up to about 1000 channels. All I needed then was about $300 million to take over the skies!
Now, NASA wimps out on near planet space support and my idea to use the Rutan/X Prize folks to have launches of manned support craft and satellites from refurbished C-5A aircraft is bumped, in part, by these guys. Kudos but, they can't do repairs, yet!
Anybody got a spare $100-200 million to have at least a 10 years monopoly on space repair missions? We'll be able to launch satelites, too, but that'll be another $100-200 million to get off the ground. I'd like to locate the HQ at the airport near Belleville, IL and keep up a strong aerospace tradition in the St. Louis Metro area.