NASA Chooses Musk’s SpaceX to Negotiate Launch Pad Lease | Hacker News Reader

NASA Chooses Musk’s SpaceX to Negotiate Launch Pad Lease

bloomberg.com

94 pointsbrianmartinek22 comments

From what my friends on the edge of the space industry tell me, the Blue Origin and ULA bids and protests on this pad are nothing more than a series of attempts to throw up roadblocks for SpaceX.

For background, the pad in question is one of two Apollo/Shuttle pads. These two pads were designed for bigger rockets than any currently flying in the world. NASA is keeping the other pad not up for bid for it's far future SLS system.

ULA is Lockheed/Boeing. ULA currently does all US military launches (outside of the small stuff Orbital Sciences puts up). Neither ULA nor Blue Origin have current or publicly known future vehicles that would need this huge pad.

The theory is that by going to congress to force NASA to make this a shared pad, SpaceX's competitors hope to make the pad all but unusable by SpaceX. If the pad must be shared, all improvements must be run by all of the other's that are "sharing" the pad. Launch times and schedules must also be run by competitors. In addition, everything installed by SpaceX would need to be potentially uninstalled, if a competitor requested the pad for some reason.

It's odd they'd caption their picture of Musk calling him 'Chairman of Tesla' -- when he is (more importantly) a founder, but even more importantly the owner of SpaceX, the company at topic,

Calling Musk a founder of Tesla is stretching the word a bit... "Tesla Motors was incorporated in July, 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who financed the company until the Series A round of funding. Elon Musk led the Series A round of investment in February, 2004, joining Tesla's Board of Directors as its Chairman."[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors#History_and_financ...

I thought Elon Musk was working on a electric car project as "founder" and the initial team of Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning were separate. The two teams combined to form the Tesla we all know.

That's mostly correct, in fact there was a lawsuit to determine who could call themselves Tesla's "Founders" and the outcome was that Eberhard, Musk, Tarpenning, JB Straubel, and Ian Wright all agreed to be Co-Founders. [1]

TeslaRumors has a much more descriptive version of events that summarizes how it all came about:

So in 2003, JB Straub phoned Musk and invited him to meet so that they could discuss space and electric car related interests.

[...]

During their lunch meeting, Straubel mentioned a company called AC propulsion that had developed a prototype electric sports car using a gasoline-powered kit car.

[...]

When Musk visited AC Propulsion, he not only was demo’d the car, he also got to drive it. He was impressed. He tried to for months to convince AC Propulsion to commercialize the electric vehicle and even asked them to make one for him, but they had no interest in doing so. Instead, Tom Gage, the president of AC Propulsion introduced Musk and Straubel to another team that shared the same interest so that they together they could increase their potential for success in commercializing an electric vehicle. The other team included Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning and Ian Wright.

[...]

Fortunately, one day Wright's neighbor, Martin Eberhard, started to chat about having just incorporated a electric car manufacturing company. Wright thought the idea was far-fetched but did the neighborly thing and offered to take a look at Eberhard’s business plan.

[...]

They joined forces that year and formed Tesla Motors Inc. Straubel became CTO, Eberhard became CEO, Marc Tarpenning became CFO, and Elon Musk became the Chairman and the Head of Product Design. Ian Wright became Tesla Motors’ first employee as VP of Vehicle Development. Musk provided the majority of funds for the startup with $7.5 million of his own personal cash in the first round of capital investment as well as contributing to subsequent rounds. [2]

1 - http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10357665-54.html

2 - http://teslarumors.com/HowTeslaBegan

He definitely considers himself a co-founder at least.

Part of the confusion might be that Tesla also produced a Founder Series of 20 - 30 cars for both the Roadster and Model S. Musk also has a large Founder badge on the back of his Model S (which has been shown in a few videos), I'm not sure if that is on all of the Founder Series cars or not.

I think the badge is. I've seen it on two cars so far in Palo Alto.

That is odd; I imagine they did that because describing him as the founder of SpaceX in the caption would have been redundant so they opted for describing what else he does?

"Bezos, the new owner of the Washington Post (GHC) newspaper,..." is also amusing.

Will SpaceX use this launch pad send people to space?

The pad is much more than they need for the Falcon 9, which is what they plan on crew rating in the near future. From what I understand, the pad is overkill even for the Falcon Heavy. Using it for the Falcon Heavy could still be possible though, and that could potentially include manned launches. I suspect SpaceX is really interested in the pad for the planned MCT.

In case anyone else was wondering, MCT is short for

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Colonial_Transporter

I've got a friend who works over at Blue Origin...damned fine bunch of engineers, and I'm hoping that when they finally decide to make news it'll be something fantastic.

Bezos is serious business.

Bit off topic but the photo in the article looks like a moment from the Iron Man movie :)

The photo is not from the movie but Spacex's facilities were used to shoot scenes from Ison Man 2 and Elon has a small cameo. And it's been reported that Tony Stark is loosely based on Elon.

According to wikipedia, Tony Stark made his first appearance in comic books in 1963, 8 years before Elon Musk was born.

"And it's been reported that [the movie version of] Tony Stark is loosely based on Elon."

You could maybe search both sides of the statement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Awards_and_recognitio...

Right, yes, the movie version "was inspired by".

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/23/business/la-fi-mo-el...

This is really great. There are so many fields where companies can revolutionise the world but who would have thought about making a space company that would one day stand along NASA ... Possibilities are endless.

Privatized space transit and logistics have been the strategies pursued for at least a decade by the US Congress and NASA, so I'm not surprised by this.

The idea is that NASA will focus on hard and expensive "future" space science now that trans-atmospheric transit is commoditized.

NASA Completion of the COTS program here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjpIv4B1W-g , worth a watch if you're interested in this

Why can't both companies use it as a launch pad? Something to do with equipment/setup for a particular vehicle being unique?

They absolutely can, and Space X has already said they are willing to make it available to other commercial users. This is just who gets the rights to negotiate the lease rights to it. Presumably Space X will sublease/contract launchpad rights to other companies from there.

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