Carried Away

The Value of a Human Life -- DARPA Urban Grand Challenge

Congratulations to Carnegie Mellon for winning the 2007 DARPA Urban Grand Challenge, held last month at an abandoned military base in California.  Carnegie Mellon 's vehicle "Boss" was able to traverse a 60-mile urban course at 14 miles per hour without a single traffic violation and without human intervention.  The grand prize was $2 million.  The second-place finisher was Stanford's "Junior."  Motor Trend has a good blog post about the event.

Carnegie Mellon's "Boss" SUV, the winner of the 2007 DARPA Urban Grand Challenge (Motor Trend)

Here's the reason why this is cool and important stuff.  According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2006, there were 42,642 people killed and 2,575,000 injured (1.5 MB PDF) in traffic accidents in the United States, incurring an economic cost of about $230 billion, or about 7.6 cents each mile traveled (2000 estimate).  Over the past couple of years, it has become clear that these traffic accidents are almost entirely avoidable by cars driving themselves.

Bezos Or Page Running SpaceX; 60-Foot Ceilings

Inc.com named Elon Musk its Entrepreneur of the Year.  Its profile of Musk, written by Max Chafkin, seems to hit the salient points, including some of Musk's thoughts about his prior ventures and the qualities needed by a SpaceX CEO.  Regarding who could run SpaceX besides himself, Musk says

This may be presumptuous, but I have not met anyone who could do this. . .  Well, wait, that's not true. Jeff Bezos could do this. Larry Page could do this. Bill Gates could do this. But there's just a really small list of people with the sufficient technical and business ability to do this job.

It's nice to know that two out of the three people who he mentions are indeed involved in the new guard of the space business, in one way or another.

However, I chuckled when Chafkin wrote of Musk's marveling at the 60-foot ceilings at the new SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne:  "There's something strange and touching about a man this intent on reaching the heavens who can pause to marvel at a really high ceiling."  I daresay that Musk had Mars in mind rather than merely a neat high ceiling.  The first stage of the Saturn V has a diameter of 33 feet.  Some of the kerosene-fueled Nova "Mars Rocket" designs had first-stage diameters of about 70 feet.  I question the advisability of going with jumbo rockets, but if you are going jumbo, then you need very high ceilings.  The Falcon 9 -- a large rocket -- has a diameter of 12 feet and was bumping up against height constraints at the old factory.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 First Stage in Production

I would be interested in knowing the dimensions of SpaceX's new hangar that's under construction at Cape Canaveral.  It might give us some clues about the maximum size of the rockets that Musk is contemplating.