danes homemade rocket launch a success!

An article in The Miami Herald reported Friday a Danish group of space enthusiasts launched a 30 ft homemade rocket (pictured) successfully from Bornholm island. The rocket reached five miles in altitude before retrieved later intact from the Baltic Sea. The HEAT 1X Tyco Brahe is a rocket spacecraft combo designed and built by Copenhagen Suborbitals. Rocket was named in honor of 16th Century Danish astronomer Tyco Brahe. The group states they "...are working fulltime to develop a series of suborbital space vehicles-designed to pave the way for manned space flight on a micro size spacecraft." You can view launch on You Tube. Friday's feat shows what ingenuity, $53,000 and use of a military test site can accomplish. The group seems aimed at providing public with an econo-space travel experience?

space x 'falcon heavy' to lift off in 2013

Are launch costs too high and weighing down your bottom line? Elon Musk, Space X founder, pitches his Falcon Heavy booster as right for the job to lift your prospects! In a Discovery News article, Musk says, "...we can realistically start to contemplate missions like a Mars sample return, which requires a tremendous amount of lift capability because you have to send a lander to Mars that still has enough propellant to return to Earth." Planetary Science Blog notes, the Falcon Heavy is second only to the Saturn V rocket in payload and escape velocity. The article adds 20-25 percent of mission cost is in the launch and idea of lowering your costs from $10,000 to $1,000 per pound a major selling point! A debut flight is scheduled for Vandenberg AFB in 2013. You can visit the Falcon Heavy webpage at the Space X website for more details. The sales pitch is a familiar one--"more bang for the buck"-- but will bottomline decisions translate into space exploration success? Do you trust companies and corporations to do the right thing in space?

space x launch a commercial first!

Space X, a commercial space transport company owned by Paypal co-founder Elon Musk, boosted their Dragon capsule into earth orbit atop their own Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday, Dec 8, 2010.  Dragon orbited twice and splashed down successfully 500 miles off the coast of Southern California.  Space X is the first commercial company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft.   The Dragon capsule is capable of delivering  astronauts to the International Space Station.  A pdf file of a press kit for Space X Commercial Orbit Transportation Service (COTS) Flight 1 is available here. There will be more demo flights to be followed by a test launch all in 2011.  Wow, it's pretty heady stuff!