Elon Musk And Spaceship Enterprise

It was an emotional day for millions of space enthusiasts around the world as spaceman Don Petit successfully hooked up SpaceX's cargo vessel Dragon, that was flying by the station. ``Houston, looks like we've got us a Dragon by the tail,'' he said.

The moment marks the success of private enterprise in space transportation and a change of the old order. US entrepreneur Elon Musk, the founder of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), is going fast where no private company has gone before. Only four agencies have ever been able to launch a vessel into space and bring it back to earth- they are in chronological order, the governments of Russia, the United States, China and Musk’s SpaceX.

Dragon was launched this Tuesday and is carrying 544 kg of food and supplies for international astronauts living on the station. It will return to earth on May 31 with material from the space station, making a water landing into the Pacific Ocean off California. The vessel is very obviously a test for SpaceX’s capability to successfully launch and bring back a manned mission in the next few years. It was launched from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX-built rocket, Falcon 9.

Elon Musk takes up the American space transportation mantle abdicated by NASA last year, when the shuttle flew back from its last mission. SpaceX started from scratch ten years ago- and makes most of its components in-house, in one big facility at Los Angeles. It is clearly a venture that aims at bringing frontier space exploration back to the realm of possibility.  The financial meltdown and the end of the cold war have forced budget cuts in Russia and the US. But President Obama, who visited the SpaceX facility last year, has been encouraging of private ventures entering the business.

Musk, who is one of the founders of Paypal put up $100m of his own money to follow his dream of inter-planetary travel. The South African emigrant to Silicon Valley has funded two other very high-profile start ups. The first Tesla Motors to manufacture high-end electric vehicles and the second SolarCity to design, finance and install solar panels. But SpaceX is by far the wildest of his projects founded he says in an interview to CBS's 60 minutes, by his belief that ``humanity should be a multi-planet species.’’

The rocket carried the ashes of Star Trek actor James Doohan, who played the starship engineer `Scotty’ in the popular television series. His ashes, and those of about 300 others, were strapped on the second stage of the rocket and were jettisoned into space after about ten minutes of launch. ,Each `participant’ in the for-profit-burial had to pay about $3,000 to rest in orbit.

This commercial edge will give space programs new legs for this century. Though it is fashionable to compare the project cost (about $500m) with NASA’s multi-billion dollar budgets- it is undeniable that a lot of this would not have been possible without a huge leg up from NASA. The launch facilities at Cape Canaveral for instance, are NASA-owned and so are several designs for the rocket. But the real joy from the SpaceX story is not just its ability to make space commercially viable. It is also how Musk's dream of space exploration has been able to take shape from scratch.

So, if a regular physics-grad without any experience of the manufacturing or space transportation, can launch a rocket from scratch- You can do it too Anand Mahindra!

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