The crew of Shenzhou 7 returns (already?!) from China’s first spacewalking mission.
SpaceX gets a Falcon 1 (finally) to orbit. Good. Hopefully this is the first of many successful launches, and helps to drop the “giggle factor” regarding commercial access to space down another big notch.
That has to irk the Chinese a little, their own achievement being overshadowed by the success of an American private company. Heh. (But admittedly only a little, since the two events are apples and oranges.) But I suppose it’s too much to ask for Musk not to let this successful launch make him cocky:
“This is one of the greatest days of my life,” Musk said. Clearly buoyed by the huge win tonight, he also talked about their Falcon 9 rocket development program, “We are going to be taking over for the Space Shuttle when it retires.” You could hear the pride at the huge accomplishment of a U.S. company getting to the point where they could say that. [emphasis added]
It depends on what capabilities currently provided by the Shuttle he means, of course. It’s probably too much to expect the manned version of Dragon to be completed and tested to NASA’s satisfaction by 2010 (assuming that’s when Shuttle actually gets retired), and likewise for it’s launcher, the Falcon 9. It’s not that SpaceX couldn’t finish the hardware in that time, for Bigelow perhaps, it’s that it’s expecting an awful lot from NASA to upend its culture in only two years and allow its astronauts to actually fly on a non-NASA vehicle.
And speaking of NASA, one can’t help but wonder what sort of pressure, if any, this will put on Constellation. SpaceX has probably spent less getting this far than NASA plans to pay for the development and initial procurement of the Ares I instrument unit alone. With all the Ares I dirty laundry in the news and the blogs in the past couple of weeks, surely someone in Congress has to be asking how SpaceX seems to be doing on the cheap what NASA can’t seem to get done with a budget an order of magnitude larger.
