Behind the Scenes With the World’s Most Ambitious Rocket Makers
Popular Mechanics

An improbable partnership between an Internet mogul and an engineer could revolutionize the way NASA conducts missions—and, if these iconoclasts are successful, send paying customers into space.

Mueller’s ambitious moonlighting caught the attention of Internet multimillionaire Elon Musk, who met the engineer at the warehouse in January 2002 as Mueller was trying to attach his homemade engine to an airframe. Fresh from the $1.5 billion sale of PayPal to eBay, Musk was seeking staff for a new space company, soon to be called Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. He eyed the rocket engine and asked a simple question: “Can you build something bigger?”

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Officials from SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corporation pushed commercial alternatives to NASA’s human spaceflight program in a recent interview with the Houston Chronicle’s Eric Berger.

SpaceX has ugraded its Falcon 1 launcher and raised prices sharply.

SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket

SPACEX PRESS RELEASE

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) announces the addition of Marv Vander Weg in the role of Vice President of the EELV Customer Office, where he will be responsible for acquiring and managing EELV missions for SpaceX’s US Government customers. He will be located at SpaceX Headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

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Not a giant leap
But private firm’s rocket launch a baby step in space commercialization.
The Global Post

“These guys are entrepreneurs,” said David Livingston, host of the Internet radio site, The Space Show. “They want to lower the cost of putting payloads into orbit so that other entrepreneurs can figure out how to do new things in space.”…

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Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk has drawn in Draper Fisher Jurvetson to lead a $60 million round in rocket startup Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, according to peHUB.

Elon Musk’s talk at ISDC last week covered many familiar topics about the exploration of space.

Artists conception of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft in orbit

Elon Musk said today that his company SpaceX could fill most the gap between the end of space shuttle flights in late 2010 and the beginning of Orion mission in 2015.

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The changing face of aerospace
Press-Telegraph (Long Beach, CA)

Because major defense companies such as Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Raytheon have such large operations in the South Bay and Long Beach, the region’s economy has often reaped the benefits of federal spending on aerospace.

This week’s announcement by Defense Secretary Robert Gates that the Pentagon wants to shift priorities and stop spending billions on F-22 jet fighters and the C-17 Globemaster, however, was worrisome. Both those programs support thousands of jobs in Southern California.

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SpaceX has confirmed the date for its next Falcon 1 launch as April 21. The rocket will take off from Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands with Malaysia’s RazakSAT communications satellite and two secondary payloads. It will be the El Segundo, Calif.-based company’s fifth launch of the rocket, which has succeeded one and failed three times.