They heard the rovers were lonely and wanted to give them some company.

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Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

Maybe I'm missing something here but what is the commercial value of a venture like this?

None. Elon is raising capital with his ultra cheap low earth orbit launch service in order to fund his personal goal of landing on Mars. They could maybe partner with NASA's 2020 mission and do a Mars sample return for a tidy payout, but that too would be just a money raising mission to pay for his ultimate goal.

You gotta hand it to him. Dude wants to go to Mars, and he found a way to structure his business so they can collect a steady revenue stream from easy stuff like satellite launches, and that same tech can also be applied toward a landing on Mars.

Musk isn't interested in building wealth. He's interested in using his money to do stuff that he wants to do. Like further the electrical car industry and go to fricking Mars.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

Maybe he's thinking he can have the 1st dealership on Mars? Set it up beside the 1st Walmart, although not ideal since his car isn't exactly "their" market target.

Maybe I'm missing something here but what is the commercial value of a venture like this?

From a practical point, short term, probably none. From an advertisement, prestige and exposure point...priceless.

You need a satellite put up who do you go to...the place that has successfully gone to Mars and back.

Looking out further you may be looking at permanent settlements, colonization etc that may have more economic benefits. That's LONG term thinking that will be even beyond Elon Musk's time but how'd the footnote next to your name of "The dude that got us off the planet" look? He'd be our real life Zefram Cochran.

~Matt

Yeah, because there are so many choices in the satellite launching industry.

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

Good for them. Getting to Mars without humans isn't terribly difficult - Soviets sent their first probes back in '71 and we had Viking in '76. If SpaceX is successful getting a Dragon-sized capsule on the ground of Mars, that will be a good thing, but even then getting humans there is tough. A minimum 6-month journey means a lot of volume taken up by food and water, plus there's some nasty radiation between here and there. Further, trying to get back from Mars is an even bigger challenge due to the necessary propellant.

Yeah, because there are so many choices in the satellite launching industry.

There's quite a few that offer services, launches and or are developing. HERE and those are just the private options. Competition will only increase over the next couple decades. We are looking at 1200 satellite launches over the next 10 years.

~Matt

Well only two that currently can launch into LEO that I could see on the list. But I see your point, there will be more.

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

And not even a complete list. Where is ULA (United Launch Alliance) on the list (not Atlas or Delta)? Mitsubishi has the H-II lineup not represented on the wiki page. There are many, many choices in satellite launch services these days. Further, depending on the size of the satellite, if you can get a nanosat or similar, access to space is even cheaper - just one piggyback ride away.

FYI - one cheap way to get a satellite up is via ISS. A few years back I started an in-house program to develop a small payload return capsule. Unfortunately we couldn't secure the funding, but in the process the DoD had a satellite that had been sitting on the shelf for a few years waiting for a ride. They were able to provide seed funding to get us to build the satellite deployer for ISS. To date 2 larger satellites have been deployed from ISS - SpinSat and Lonestar. All it takes is a ride up in Dragon, Cygnus, HTV, or Progress and you are in LEO. No need for a dedicated launch as you are just one more payload on a resupply mission. Our intent was to be able to deploy satellite much larger than Cubesats (which there is also that functionality on ISS with the Nanoracks deployer).

http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/...amp;context=smallsat

Yep. In the US there's ULA (Boeing/Lockheed), Orbital, and SpaceX. Then there's European ESA out of Kourou, Roscosmos in Russia with I think now 4 launch facilities with the opening of Vostochny, India's ISRO, Chinese at Jiuquan, Japan's JAXA. Japan has ability to resupply ISS. IAI in Israel. I think that's it. A few other countries have orbital launch capabilities but aren't advertised for commercial use for political reasons. Iran, and lately North Korea. Pakistan has a spaceport but I think only for research and suborbital launches.

This article seems to have some relevance

EM drive claims are bogus. The experiments conducted were deliberately not all inclusive, meaning the chief champions of EM drive could run a test in a way that'd eliminate measuring errors, but they didn't. Further the corroborating tests by NASA and... one other agency that escapes me, measured small thrust but it was within their margins of error.

As much as we'd all like this to be the new Michelson-Morley (new physics) it is just an experimental error.

Having a drive that works in vacuum and requires no reactive mass is huge. Hugely huge. But it requires that our current understanding of some basic physics is wrong.

Much controversy with that thing. It's more of a garage project - it gets no serious funding, is often ridiculed in the press, and even if it does work, the amount of thrust it's producing is in the noise (quite literally). It doesn't even get notice at the center where it's being "developed".

Well garage projects can make it to space. Here's a show about a


They used the translinear vector principle. It is

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev