The maiden voyage of the Falcon 1 is set for this Friday, November 25, with a launch window of 4 p.m. EST to 8 p.m. EST. I am stoked to see what happens on the launch, but in most respects, SpaceX is primed to change the space launch business no matter what happens in this launch. SpaceX is committed to at least 3 initial launches, only one of which absolutely needs to be a success in order for the company to continue. The chances of at least one success out of three tries seems very high. Then the company can work through its strong order book.
I have many thoughts about where all of this is headed, but first things first. As Elon Musk has said, SpaceX immediately has need of an additional $100 million in capital to complete the entire Falcon rocket campaign (Falcon 1, Falcon 5, Falcon 9). Once again, I bring up Sergey Brin and Larry Page as possible investors. I do not know of anybody else who has $100 million to spare, has publicly expressed interest in entrepreneurial space launch, and who is not already tied up in other launch ventures. If the investors aren't Brin and Page, and Musk doesn't do a financing round with several investors, we should expect another Silicon Valley type to step up to the plate.
After the financing issue has been put to bed, I am most interested in seeing just how elastic the space launch services market is. The microsatellite market might be created in earnest by the Falcon 1. Related to this, it will be interesting to follow how the size of payloads are impacted by the availability of cheap, large launchers. Will other entrepreneurial satellite companies be advantaged by this?
Another potential market is human spaceflight. Is the design and launch of a human capsule included in the $100 million additional capital figure? (I would guess not, but who knows?) Is SpaceX hoping that NASA will fund the development of the human capsule in some fashion? Previously, I wondered at the extreme infrastructure requirements for manned spaceflight, but maybe I imagined the costs unrealistically high. As an aside, I do not have a good sense of how the Russians do their manned launches versus their unmanned launches.
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