The insistence on reusability “drives the
engineers insane,” says Vozoff. “We
could’ve had Falcon 1 in orbit two years
earlier than we did if Elon had just given
up on first stage reusability. The
qualification for the Merlin engine was far
outside of what was necessary, unless you
plan to recover it and reuse it. And so the
engineers are frustrated because this isn’t
the quickest means to the end. But Elon
has this bigger picture in mind. And he
forces them to do what’s hard. And I
admire that about him.”
Musk makes no secret of the end goal:
Create a new civilization on Mars.
Speaking at the National Press Club in
Washington, D.C., in September, he
outlined the business plan—if that’s the
right term for something that looks
decades into the future. “If you can
reduce the cost of moving to Mars to
around the cost of a middle class home
in California—maybe to around half a
million dollars—then I think enough
people would buy a ticket and move to
Mars,” he said. “You obviously have to
have quite an appetite for risk and
adventure. But there are seven billion
people on Earth now, and there’ll be
probably eight billion by the midpoint of
the century. So even if one in a million
people decided to do that, that’s still
eight thousand people. And I think
probably more than one in a million
people will decide to do that.” Talking
about a city on Mars by the middle of this
century—even as SpaceX has yet to fly its
first cargo mission to Earth orbit—is one of
the reasons space professionals are
skeptical about Musk’s claims.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has the immediate
hurdle of converting the doubters with a
track record of low cost and reliability.
Rivals know that success would hit the
rocket business like a tsunami, and at
least one aerospace engineer greets that
prospect with a mix of hope and doubt.
“Honestly, as an American, I want them
to succeed,” says Mike Hughes, who
works for a company (he asked that it not
be named) planning a competing crew
vehicle. “If I see SpaceX failing their
launches and killing crew, I will be
disheartened and weakened…. I want
them to be our competition.” But Hughes
predicts SpaceX will have to learn the
same painful lessons that every other
rocket builder has. “Over time, they will
experience failure. The failure will teach
them that they weren’t so smart when
they laid out the numbers at the
beginning. Just like us, just like NASA. And
they’re going to have to redesign stuff.
And they’re going to have to add new
tests in. And their schedules will slip, and
their customers will suffer. And all of this is
because what we do is just freaking
hard.”
No one needs to tell the people at
SpaceX that they’re pushing the limits of
technology. But Alan Stern, for one,
remains convinced that Musk is in it for
the long haul. “He wants to make people
a multi-planet species, and he’s not
going to quit. He’ll change the model, or
he’ll spend more of his own money—he’ll
do something. He’s not in it to build the
rockets; that’s a means to an end. It’s a
religion for him.”
If Stern is right, when the astronauts
aboard the International Space Station
receive their six tons of supplies from a
SpaceX vehicle launched by a SpaceX
rocket next year, they just might be
witnessing the first step in a journey to
Mars.
refer :: www.airspacemag.com