SpaceX Lifts NASA Astronauts to Orbit, Launching New Era of Spaceflight
In all the doom and gloom around us, here is a yet another pioneering chronicle of disruptive tech, engineered by, non other than the private sector, the key stone to “Original Ideas@The Great American Dream” In contrast, elsewhere, instead of being pioneers, predatory private sector dominos, caught on the wrong foot, working overtime to reduce debt by selling stake in their telco businesses that are waiting to be disrupted by pioneers like SpaceX through its 'Starlink' initiative !
Earlier this year, after a $500m funding round led by Bailley Gifford, one of the largest investors in Tesla, SpaceX's valuation now stands at $33.3B, even while Morgan Stanley estimates SpaceX to reach a $120 M valuation soon riding on its Starlink program.
More recently, SpaceX asked the US government to spread out its Starlink satellites to cover more of Earth's surface sooner, Eric Berger at Ars Technica first reported.
SpaceX does have competition from other companies that are launching or planning to launch global satellite-internet constellations, such as OneWeb and Amazon's forthcoming Project Kuiper.
But Mark Handley, a computer-networking researcher at University College London who's studied Starlink, previously told Business Insider that SpaceX's "is the most exciting new network we've seen in a long time," adding that the project could affect the lives of everybody.
One thing Morgan Stanley Research's report does not seem to account for, though, is SpaceX's planned Starship launch system. If realized, according to Musk, it may reduce the cost of access to space by 100 to 1,000 times by being fully reusable. Mass estimates also suggest the towering 400-foot-tall system could launch hundreds of Starlink satellites into orbit at a time.
Read more at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-nasa-astronauts.html