SpaceX, breaking its own previous records, launched the first national security space mission rocket on Sunday. The company had won the US Air Force’s National Security Space (NSS) contract, in 2016, and was planning to launch the rocket earlier last week. But, due to some bad weather conditions, the launch got delayed and finally, SpaceX’s 21st flight took off on Sunday.
The two-stage rocket, Falcon 9, lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, along with the first GPS III satellite from the US Air Force. Lockheed Martin has built this $500 million GPS III satellite. The GPS has been given the nickname Vespucci. The GPS is owned by the U.S. military and operated by the Air Force.
Image Source: spacenews.com
The secretary of the Air Force, Heather Wilson, said, “This next-generation GPS satellite is three times more accurate than previous versions and eight times better at anti-jamming. It’s the first in a series and nicknamed Vespucci after the 15th-century Italian explorer who calculated Earth’s circumference to within 50 miles (80 kilometres).”
The successful launch of the satellite can be considered as one of the victorious moment for Elon Musk as he had been trying hard to enter the market for military space launches dominated by Lockheed and Boeing Co, from years now.
In 2014, SpaceX had sued the US Air Force as it awarded the non-compete contract for 36 rocket launches, worth a multibillion-dollar, to United Launch Alliance. As a result, the Air Force agreed to open up competition for the next contract and in the next year, SpaceX won the $83 million contract for the GPS III after it demonstrated the reliability of Falcon 9 system and fulfilled all the certification requirements from the Air Force. The company dropped the lawsuit in 2015.
The GPS III contract will have a lifespan of 15 years. According to Lockheed spokesman Chip Eschenfelder, the satellite is the first to launch out of 32 in production by Lockheed under contracts.
The Col. Robert Bongiovi, director of the Launch Enterprise Systems Directorate at SMC, said, “This launch is a milestone for many reasons. For us, it marks the first competitively-awarded launch in over 10 years, the first national security space launch with SpaceX, and the first launch of a GPS III satellite. This really is an exciting time to be in the launch business.”
The other satellites in the series are still in the testing phase, and the next GPS III satellite may have its launch in the mid-2019.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
Team Indus a Bangalore, India based technology startup is one of few companies in the world and only company from India that have ventured into highly costly and research intensive aerospace industry. Team Indus (Axiom Research Labs) founded by Rahul Narayan, Dilip Chabria, Indranil Chakraborty, Sameer Joshi and Julius Amrit has plans to land on moon. ISRO a Govt. of India organization is the only agency in India that works in aerospace field and has been working on a mission to mars called Chandrayaan since 2003. There are only three countries in world that have soft-landed on moon (China, USSR & US). Soft landing means lading with controlled speed without any damage to spacecraft and surface.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
This Indian space startup is participating in Google Lunar XPRIZE competition and working on a spacecraft that will be capable of landing on the moon along with a rover that will explore moon. Google will be offering $30 million as prize money to the winners of this competition (cost of this kind of project is way hire than prize money offered by Google). Team Indus was one of five teams selected to compete in the Milestone prizes and they won $1M as a Milestone prize for their landing technology. To win the contest participating team has to land a robot on the moon, cover 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send data and pictures back to the earth.
Team Indus started working in 2010. The team which had no experience in space technology worked hard for three years and came up with first design in 2013. Adimurthy, a retired ISRO scientist rejected their design after first review in 2013. Indus team worked hard and was ready with a new propulsion system in a year.
Propulsion technology innovation
Since propulsion technology used by other countries is highly confidential and inaccessible, Team Indus decided to design their own propulsion system. Team Indus is going to use a propulsion systems that has never been used before for such critical space mission. They are using a combination of small fixed thrust engines and produce the variable thrust effect using control algorithms. So what other space organizations have been doing with hardware, Team Indus is trying to do with software algorithms.
Team Indus is being led by Rahul Narayana along with more than 20 ISRO scientist. Team Indus with more than 100 employees has secured funding to the tune of $35 M from Pallav Nadhani (Fusion Charts), Subrata Mitra & Shekhar Kirani (Accel Partners), Sharad Sharma (former Yahoo India R&D head), Vivek Raghavan (chief product manager of UIDAI), Pallaw Sharma (director of analytics at Microsoft), Bala Parthasarthy(AngelPrime angel investors), Sunil Kalra(entrepreneur & investor) and Paras Chopra.
Team Indus has acquired a launch vehicle (PSLV) from ISRO on commercial rates for sending their spacecraft and rover to moon from Sriharikota in 2017. It would be interesting to see who lands on moon first, ISRO, Team Indus or Elon Musk‘s SpaceX which has already started booking for earth to moon flight.
This is the age of Tech Entrepreneurship and startups. From Steve Jobs to Bill Gates there are many tech founders who have made it big into technology that has changed the world and impacted our lives drastically. Today entrepreneurs are thinking beyond online ecommerce and taking huge risks to make world a better place. For many tech founders money is not the only thing that matters. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and his wife pledged to give away most of their wealth for social causes. Bill Gates is a well known philanthropist. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is running so many campaigns in the world to improve education, health and lives of people.
Elon Reeve Musk is one such great tech entrepreneur and new age philanthropist. Unlike others his philanthropy is driven by technology that aims to make world a better place to live. The real-life inspiration for Iron Man’s main lead character Tony Stark, Musk has interests in industries like automotive, aerospace, solar energy, energy conservation, satellite and high-speed surface transportation. Working more than 100 hours a week and drawing just $1 as salary, Elon is on a mission to save and change the world by investing and nurturing companies like Tesla, SpaceX, and Solarcity.
ELON MUSK
Have you heard about Blaster? Blaster is a game that was made by a bored 12 year old in 1984. This 12 year old was none other than Elon Musk. Elon Musk one of the founders of PayPal became a self-made millionaire at the age of 27, when he sold his first company, Zip2. By age 41, his estimated net worth had surpassed $1 billion, and today, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO has an estimated net worth of $10.5 billion. Most of his innovations seem straight out of a sci-fi movie.
Tesla Motors
Musk co-founded Tesla Motors, a company that designs and manufactures premium electric vehicles. Tesla was able to succeed in the electric car market where other large manufacturers failed due to lack of innovative ideas.
Elon recently launched the Tesla Model 3 at the Tesla Design Studio in Hawthorne which will hit the market in 2017. The new model starts at $35000 and accelerates to 60mph in 6 sec. This is a next level car with exciting features. It’s Musk’s vision and innovative ideas that has led to the making of this different league model. More than 1,80,000 pre-orders were received by Tesla in a day for Model 3. Tesla is also planning to enter India in 2016.
Success of Tesla has paved way for vehicles that are stylish, feature rich and cause less harm to environment.
SpaceX
Before the closing of PayPal, he had already started dreaming about a greenhouse, “Mars oasis” which he wanted to land on mars.
Musk decided to start a company that would build affordable rockets, using vertical integration and the modular approach of software engineering. Those ideas resulted in his launch of SpaceX in 2002. His long-term goal is to help humanity through SpaceX by creating a true spacefaring civilization.
Creating a reliable rocket that successfully gets into space was not an easy job. No one wanted to invest in SpaceX because everyone believed it to be over ambitious and a venture with pretty less hope of being successful . Musk invested his own personal funds worth $100M in SpaceX. However, SpaceX was on the verge of closing due to lack of funds when three attempts to launch a rocket failed. In 2008 SpaceX did a launch of Falcon 1 launch vehicle which failed. Elon took the stage and motivated employees for the next attempt saying that rocket science is not an easy thing and failures are bound to happen. Motivated team investigated the issue and was ready with next rocket in 7 weeks which otherwise would have taken a year for any other company. On sept 28th SpaceX successfully launched the rocket and became world’s first private venture to launch rocket in earth’s orbit. An achievement that was limited to only 6 mightiest nations of the world. After this SpaceX got an offer for $1.6 billion to carry out 12 launches for NASA.
Another feather was added to Musk’s cap last week after the launch of futuristic pop-up room and landing of the unmanned Falcon rocket at Atlantic sea. SpaceX resumed station deliveries for NASA on Friday and landed its booster rocket on an ocean platform for the first time.The innovations at SpaceX has resulted in cheapest cost of launching rockets in the history.
SpaceX is currently working on a new spacecraft, which will allow humans to travel in space and take ride from earth to moon. SpaceX is making a much larger rocket that will be able to bring 100 people to Mars at once. Google and Fidelity has now invested in SpaceX.
Success of SpaceX is the result of Musk’s quest of a fantastic future. His vision is worth appreciating. Take a bow!
Solarcity
The company was co-founded by Elon Musk in 2006. Solarcity produces the world’s most efficient rooftop solar panels with a market cap of just under $6 billion and has become the largest installer of solar panels in the US. Solarcity is now building the country’s largest solar panel-manufacturing factory in Buffalo.
Tesla and SolarCity companies are making a pollution free, environment friendly renewable energy future a reality.
Man at the helm for an innovative future
Musk “the world’s most remarkable living entrepreneur” is undoubtedly an epitome of an entrepreneur, inventor and a business magnate. He is truly the real life Iron Man. In case you don’t know, parts of Iron Man 2 were actually filmed inside and outside of SpaceX and musk even had a cameo in the film.
His ideas are the most ambitious ideas so far. He is a true leader who can envision and lead people to a better world and better future.
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