On Friday, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX Vice President of Business Development, was a guest on The Space Show. While the entire interview is worth listening to, some items of particular note include:
- If Falcon 9 successfully proves reusability, the company expects to reduce prices up to 50% over time;
- Over the next couple of months, SpaceX is moving into a new half-million square foot manufacturing facility in Hawthorne (I have covered this previously);
- The new facility will have a capacity to manufacture 3-6 Falcon 9s at a time and an equal number of Falcon 1s and Dragons;
- The company is in preliminary discussions with Wallops for Falcon 9 launches;
- The company will be accepting 50-60 Merlin engines per annum at its McGregor, Texas facility;
- The company expects a stock market Initial Public Offering after a couple of Falcon 9 flights;
- 60-70% of the funding for the NASA/SpaceX COTS Space Act Agreement is coming from the company (this percentage seems very high, so I wonder how it is calculated);
- In May, the company hired 30 new employees and expects to continue this hiring pace for the next couple of months; and
- The company's gross margins on the Falcon 1 are in the single digits, while its gross margins for the Falcon 9 are healthier.
On another note, Wired has a nice cover article about SpaceX in its June edition, with a play-by-play of the March launch of the Falcon 1. Some of the nicer parts of the article are the large pictures, especially a full page head-on photo of a Falcon 1 first stage.
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