Month: September 2018

Enlarge / The Falcon 1 rocket ascends toward space on its fourth flight. (credit: SpaceX)

They bunked in a double-wide trailer, cramming inside on cots and sleeping bags, as many as a dozen at a time. In the mornings, they feasted on steaming plates of scrambled eggs. At night, beneath some of the darkest skies on Earth, they grilled steaks and wondered if the heavens above were beyond their reach. Kids, most of them, existed alone on a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was the middle of nowhere, really.

And they worked. They worked desperately—tinkering, testing, and fixing—hoping that nothing would go wrong this time. Already, their small rocket had failed three times. One more launch anomaly likely meant the end of Space Exploration Technologies.

Three times, in 2006, 2007, and 2008, SpaceX tried to launch a Falcon 1 rocket from Omelek Island in the Pacific Ocean, a coral shelf perhaps a meter above sea level and the size of three soccer fields. Less than two months after the last failure, the money was running out. SpaceX had just one final rocket to launch, with only some spare components left over in its California factory.

Enlarge / The Rocket Report is published weekly. (credit: Arianespace/Aurich Lawson)

Welcome to Edition 1.18 of the Rocket Report! Lots of news on medium- and large-sized rockets, including milestones for the Delta II and Ariane 5 rockets, as well as a round-up of SpaceX's big announcement of its first customer for the Big Falcon Rocket. Oh yeah, we even try to make some sense of propulsion based on quantized inertia. (We fail).

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Georgia's spaceport gets a tenant. The Camden County Joint Development Authority, which seeks to develop a spaceport near the Atlantic coast, announced this week that it has reached an agreement with ABL Space Systems to establish an integration and testing facility for the small launch vehicle that company is developing. The RS1 rocket, which has a test launch planned for 2020, is designed to place up to 900kg into low Earth orbit at a price of $17 million a launch, SpaceNews reports.