The Polaris Dawn mission made history as it reached a higher altitude than any human has traveled in five decades. A spacewalk conducted early Thursday morning also marked the first time such an endeavor has been completed by a privately funded and operated mission…
The quartet kicked off this mission by breaking an altitude record, reaching an orbit around Earth that extended as high as 870 miles (1,400 kilometers). That’s the highest Earth orbit ever traveled by humans, beating a 1966 record set by NASA’s Gemini 11 mission, which reached 853 miles.
The crew’s apogee — or farthest point from Earth — made Gillis and Menon the first women ever to fly so far from our planet.
Of course now that the entire world is waking up and realizing that somehow, overnight with no warning!, they are deeply dependent on something called Starlink and it belongs to Elon Musk!!! Russia is asking if it can duplicate SpaceX in a year, or somehow pay Elon enough to induce him to end his own monopoly?
As a child of Cape Canaveral I am watching with a strange mixture of horror and delight.
Starlink is now available in 105 countries. and expanding rapidly.
SpaceX valuation continues to climb. It is valued around ~$250 Billion.
Most of SpaceX’s revenue comes from commercial, however it is also develong a Starshield program for US Government.
Elon owns 40% of SpaceX.
There is emerging competition from Bezos’s Blue Origin, Rocket Lab and Boeing (which was the entrenched leader) but is faltering as of late.
I disagree. I think Tesla is and will be far more influential–even if Tesla itself is ultimately unsuccessful. Tesla proved there is a profitable mass market for EVs. Although the transition away from ICEs is going in fits and starts it is clear the direction things are headed. Most jurisdictions are aiming to phase out ICE passenger vehicles entirely in the future. That would not be possible unless Tesla had proved the concept was viable.
In the 2000s NASA decided to eventually terminate the Shuttle program and other launch systems and rely on privately owned and financed launch vehicles. To their credit, SpaceX won bids to provide launch services, but there were a number of other bidders as well. If SpaceX hadn’t won, another company would have been providing those services.
SpaceX (and Blue Origin) are positioning humanity to be intergalactic in a million years from now. Yes, Esoteric stuff. Rapidly Reusable Rockets (RRR) are coming. It is a more ambitious mission.
Tesla has already changed the world when it made the first mass market profitable EV. Electrification is now unstoppable (with or without Elon / Tesla)
