Sunday, October 7, 2012

SpaceX Launches Cargo Flight to Space Station - Wall Street Journal [fornadablog.blogspot.com]

5:59 PM Unknown No comments

SpaceX Launches Cargo Flight to Space Station - Wall Street Journal [fornadablog.blogspot.com]

AtomicFeedback leaves feedback for you on eBay nice cannot live without it! visit www.atomicfeedback.com Visit www.freeroomshare.com if your a potential landlord or tennant or just want a whole property atomic feedback for eBay revolutionary technology see it now!

[fornadablog.blogspot.com], SpaceX Launches Cargo Flight to Space Station - Wall Street Journal

By ANDY PASZTOR

A private rocket and cargo spacecraft owned by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. blasted off from Florida on Sunday night as the company sought to begin regular commercial shipments to the international space station, a development intended to transform U.S. space flight.

The trouble-free countdown followed by liftoff at 8:35 p.m. ET, precisely as scheduled, sent the 227-foot Falcon 9 rocket toward the orbiting space laboratory. Using more than 850,000 pounds of thrust to reach supersonic speed about one minute after ignition, it carried a teardrop-shaped, unmanned Dragon capsule filled with roughly 1,000 pounds of supplies. The spacecraft is expected to dock with the space station Wednesday and return three weeks later.

During most of the preparations Sunday, there were nagging concerns that rain and clouds in the vicinity of Florida's Cape Canaveral launch complex potentially could force the mission to be scrubbed. But about an hour before the countdown clock ticked down, meteorologists said conditions had improved significantly, with showers staying far enough away to allow a launch.

Company workers are "all really pumped for this," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said prior to the launch.

The launch capped a contentious, seven-year federal effort to privatize flights to service the space station, orbiting about 220 miles above the Earth. Since the retirement of its space-shuttle fleet, the U.S. has relied on Russian flights to bring both astronauts and cargo to the $ 100 billion station. Now, for the first time, the U.S. government will use commercial terms to pay per pound of cargo successfully shipped solely on American vehicles, although proposed astronauts flights are at least three years away.

The flight also marks one more important milestone for Elon Musk, founder and chairman of SpaceX, as the closely held Southern California company is known. Barring major problems in delivering goods into orbit and safely returning items back to Earth, the company stands to receive $ 1.6 billion in revenue over the next five years.

Sunday's missionâ€"along with a total of at least 20 other cargo flights planned through the end of the decade by SpaceX and rival Orbital Sciences Corp.â€"is part of the effort to replace Russian cargo deliveries with flights conducted by private companies. Orbital hopes to launch its first test flight later this year.

The manifest for the mission included food, gear and replacement parts needed by crews manning the space station, plus some student-designed experiments. A special shipment of ice cream was also part of the cargo.

Dragon is slated to return to earth with a larger load before the end of the month, consisting of old equipment, returning experiments and blood and urine samples of various astronauts.

By 2015, Mr. Musk and SpaceX hope to leverage successful cargo deliveries into potentially larger contracts to transport U.S. astronauts into orbit.

Boeing Co. is the other well-known contender vying to build and operate what essentially would be space taxis back and forth to the station.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, however, already has signaled it could lack the money to ultimately support more than one fleet of such private spacecraft.

By itself, the timing of Sunday's liftoff was a significant victory for SpaceX. It made history in May with a demonstration flight of Dragon that docked the first privately built and operated spacecraft with the orbiting station, and then maneuvered the unmanned capsule to a safe splashdown in the Pacific. Despite that success, some critics had questioned how quickly the company could launch another craft.

The roughly four-month turnaround was somewhat faster than SpaceX was able to perform after earlier demonstration launches.

Apart from NASA and Pentagon contracts, some estimates peg SpaceX's current backlog of orders to launch commercial and foreign civilian satellites at close to $ 1 billion. As part of its aggressive expansion effort, the El Segundo, Calif., company also has plans to build its own launch facility near Brownsville, Texas.

Founded a decade ago by Internet entrepreneur Mr. Musk, SpaceX started with barely a handful of employees and commenced work on its vehicles out of makeshift offices near a strip mall. Mr. Musk, who invested more than $ 100 million of his own fortune in the company, initially faced opposition and sometimes even ridicule from established aerospace companies and Pentagon space officials.

But now, SpaceX, with a big political presence and growing lobbying clout in Washington, D.C., has become the poster child for President Barack Obama's drive to nurture development of private cargo vehicles and manned capsules to travel to the space station. In particular, this year's highly-publicized Dragon demonstration flight highlighted the depth of SpaceX's engineering and management ranks.

That mission featured some last-minute hiccups before the capsule was able to link up with the station's robotic arm. Yet SpaceX officials handled the problems smoothly, largely on their own, winning plaudits from industry and federal experts

NASA hopes to save federal dollars by relying on industry to restock and provide routine crew transportation to the station. Instead of regular trips to low Earth orbit, the agency seeks to target its spending and expertise to develop a separate fleet of heavy-lift rockets and long-distance capsules. They would tackle much longer and more difficult missions to explore asteroids over the next two decades; return astronauts near or to the moon; and ultimately send a manned craft to Mars around 2035.

Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com