Give credit where credit is due. Falcon 1 chocked up its first success today. Of course, 1-3 does not a track record make, but it beats 0-4, and we'll see where things go from there.
One can certainly say that Falcon has flown at least one more time than ARES ever will.
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Spoken like a gentleman, sir.
Random success?
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in the long term, the SpaceX success starts the END of ALL space agencies, since, NO one government agency of the world will be able to compete with private space companies on COSTS and FAST development TIME
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then, NASA may survive about 15-20 years from now if it will succeed in the ESAS plan or less than 10 years if the Orion/Ares-1 won't work (or will be delayed to 2018 or later) or LESS than 5 years if the VERY DANGEROUS and USELESS Hubble Servicing Mission 4 will FAIL, as explained here:
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http://www.ghostnasa.com/
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The real question is not whether it is possible for SpaceX to launch- given enough money that was inevitable- the question is whether they can really hit their cost to orbit numbers in the long term. Elon is just beginning the journey to supporting actual customers with real payloads that cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each. They tend to be very concerned about their satellites and insist on a quality and design control system that gives them 100% mission success- or pretty close to it. SpaceX will find that these boring support costs dominate the cost of launch- not the metal in the rocket. If he finds a way to streamline that horrid process then he deserves some sort of prize.
Gaetano Marano is bitter and no idea what he is talking about. Better to read the National Enquirer for your NASA news than ghostnasa.
You forgot to add that Gaetano Marano is also clueless
Anyone that believes COTS is going to save the day is whacky. The real cost of flying Falcon reliably is yet to be determined. Just ask Orbital about the Pegasus cost timeline: $6M-$10-almost $30M over time. And Elon's wet dream wasn't even configured thermally to recover the first stage this time. By the time he makes those changes, adding risk along the way, and probably another failure or two, his $3M- already $8M- soon to be $25M rocket will cost what the economics of our physics here on planet earth demands.
As far as I know SpaceX isn't planning on flying the Falcon 1 much past booster development, and perhaps only as a booster in the future.
Clearly you must be able to see the intrinsic value of a Merlin 1C class engine in a clustered configuration. If not, too bad for you.
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