Tag Archives: Musk

Apollo 11's Walk of Fame plaque

Celebrities Becoming Astronauts

With Bob Geldof just having announced that he too signed up to travel into space as a passenger on a commercial space flight, let’s have a look at a small portion of this eclectic mix of celebrities, scientists, and entrepeneurs who have taken the same leap of faith already and dug deep into their pockets for it.

Scientist Professor Stephen Hawking – the man needs no introduction. Having more acronyms behind his name than a systems architect’s CV, including being a Commander in the Order of the British Empire, he is not only the most famous theoretical physicist and cosmologist who’s ever lived, but possibly also the most famous disabled person on the planet. This came to show with his appearance at the London 2012 Paralympics in which he had a major part. He is the author of several books that made space science popular with the masses and truly a living legend and inspiration to us all. Probably also the only person to receive a free Virgin Galactic ticket! Not only to fulfill his own dream of going into space, but to raise awareness for what he sees as humanity’s vital mission to explore the stars.

Designer Philippe Starck – the son of an aeronautics engineer, Starck is equally well known as an interior designer, a designer of consumer goods, and for his industrial design and his architectural creations. His concept of democratic design led him to focus on mass-produced consumer goods rather than one-off pieces, seeking ways to reduce cost and improve quality in mass-market goods. He has several restaurants to his credit and for the past thirty years has been designing hotels all over the world. Starck was also the first designer to participate in the TED Talks (Technology, Entertainment & Design).

Entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk – see here

Comedian Russell Brand – awkward! Brand’s ticket was bought for his 35th birthday by his ex-wife Katy Perry. After hosting Big Brother’s Big Mouth where he achieved notoriety, had starred in several movies including Forgetting Sarah Marshall and did voice acting for Despicable Me and its sequel just recently. In the dictionary it would probably have his picture next to the word ‘eccentric’ and while he managed to get himself fired from both MTV and the BBC in a very public manner because of his behaviour, it’s his past with drugs and alcohol that influences much of his comedic material.

Bob Geldof – Irish singer-songwriter and political activist, Geldof rose to prominence as the lead singer of the Irish rock band the Boomtown Rats in the late 1970s and early 1980s alongside the punk rock movement. He co-wrote “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, one of the best-selling singles of all time, but Geldof is these days perhaps even more known for his activism, especially his anti-poverty efforts concerning Africa. In 1984 he co-founded Band Aid and went on to organise the charity super-concert Live Aid among other pursuits. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was granted an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, among numerous other awards and nominations.

Mars

How to put a human on Mars

When the BBC starts making interactive sites ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23349496 ), you know something is a hot topic, so read on… Scientists at Imperial College London have designed a concept mission to land astronauts on Mars.

It would entail a craft existing of two parts: the Martian lander with a heat shield, in which the crew would also ascent into Earth orbit, and a cylindrical craft split into three floors. Travelling through space for long durations brings up major issues, perhaps the most important one being the muscle and bone wastage that weightlessness causes, which would render astronauts unable to walk upon arrival at their destination. To prevent this, the team explains that the two parts would, once in space, unwind from eachother on a steel cable. Short truster bursts would then set in motion the rotation needed to generate artificial gravity similar to Earth’s.

Aside from the deconditioning of the human body, another cause for concern is solar and cosmic radiation. Several solutions are proposed, including running water within the shell of the cruise craft to absorb the radtiation, while another solution would mean fitting superconducting magnets to the craft that would generate a magnetosphere similar to Earth’s.

You can read the full article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22952441

As more prominent organisations start to report of the possibilities of the first human visit to Mars, and the race to launch paying customers into space is heating up. But colonizing another planet, can you imagine? We already introduced the Inspiration Mars Foundation, headed up by business tycoon Dennis Tito. Another project out there is the Dutch Mars One which will be looking to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars in 2023 – talk about being ambitious! And then of course there is billionaire inventor Elon Musk of SpaceX who has also plans to visit the Red Planet, possibly permanently.

We might see the day when we will look up at the sky, and see our second home, like a red dot in a vast ocean of space. It might make us redefine our place in the universe… who knows.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk (1971)

Billionaire genius, inventor and entrepreneur through and through, founder of companies like Tesla, Paypal and more relevant here SpaceX… who is the man they sometimes refer to as “the real Tony Stark” (aka Iron Man)?

Born in South Africa, Musk taught himself how to code and sold a game he programmed – called Blastar – when he was only 12 years old. Leaving home at 17 to avoid military service (this was during the time of the Apartheid), he ended up studying in Ontario, Canada (his mother was Canadian) for two years before pursuing business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania in the US.

After completing both those degrees, Musk then moved to Silicon Valley and started a PhD at Stanford, but dropped out after two days already to start Zip2 (with his brother Kimbal) which provided online content publishing software for news organizations – it got acquired by Compaq four years later for $307 million in cash and another $34 million in stock options!

Musk once said he considered three areas he wanted to get into that were “important problems that would most affect the future of humanity”, as he said later, “One was the Internet, one was clean energy, and one was space.” So, after Zip2, he founded Paypal which changed the way we pay online. After that he founded SpaceX which is now a major player in the race for space, and bidding for NASA contracts. Then came Tesla, which might some day change (or debatably has already changed) the way we all look at our cars, and he is also the chairman and main chairholder of SolarCity… the man has no limits it seems.

Focusing on SpaceX, which he founded with $100 million of his early fortune and of which he remains its CEO and CTO, the company won a major NASA contract in the first program to entrust private companies with delivering cargo to the International Space Station. Worth between $1.6 billion and $3.1 billion, it has become a cornerstone of the Space Station‘s continued access to cargo delivery and return. But aside from cargo missions, Musk’s goal is to reduce the cost of human spaceflight by a factor of 10 and much like Stephen Hawking’s thinking wants to secure the future of the human race by “expanding life beyond this green and blue ball“.

In the coming years, Musk will focus on delivering astronauts to the International Space Station, but as he stated before, his personal goal is that of eventually enabling human exploration and settlement of Mars. At SXSW this year he joked: “I Would Like to Die on Mars, Just Not on Impact”.

 

SpaceX Dragon

Dragon

In May of last 2012, Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to successfully rendezvous and connect with the International Space Station (ISS) and with that it put SpaceX firmly on the map. For those curious on how that would have looked like, check out the following link and make sure to drag your cursor around. Resupply missions aside (regular cargo flights started in October 2012), SpaceX is developing a crewed variant of the Dragon called DragonRider, which will be able to carry up to seven astronauts to and from low Earth orbit – those seven will probably be best of friends by the time they arrive as the pressurized part of the capsule is only 10 cubic metres “big” inside so it will be quite a cramped ride.

Taking the more conventional approach (unlike Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo combination), Dragon sits on top of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket for lift off. The capsule is made up of a disposable cone, the spacecraft itself housing the astronauts (or specialized cargo) and the trunk, which can carry up to 14 cubic meters of cargo. You can see the specifications here. Its second resupply mission will take place this November, but Elon Musk, SpaceX‘s billionaire founder and CEO is already looking towards the future. In March this year he gave away some details about the second version, and it won’t be your conventional capsule anymore either. The next version will have side-mounted thruster pods and pop-out legs so it can land on solid ground. More details to be unveiled later this year; no more tweets telling them to go fishing then…

For a time table of milestones to look forward to, December 2013 will see a pad abort test (in which Dragon will use its abort engines to launch away from a stationary Falcon 9 rocket – it’s one of the safety tests required), followed by an in-flight abort test coming April 2014 (same test, but this time in flight), and the first crewed Dragon (DragonRider) flight is currently scheduled to happen mid-2015. The last in a series of impressive feats will then see a crewed spacecraft dock with ISS no sooner than December 2015.