On Wednesday night PBS aired a pilot of a new science show, Wired Science. (If you missed the show you can watch it online; the show is competing against two others to win a slot in the network’s lineup). One segment of the show featured an interview of Elon Musk, where host Brian Unger first asked him questions about his electric car startup he’s funding, Telsa Motors. Unger then turned to SpaceX and brought up a number of other commercial space ventures, like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. That led to this interesting exchange:
Unger: Who is your competition?
Musk: [long pause] We have no serious competition.
Unger: None?
Musk: Not presently.
Unger: So that Branson guy’s kind of a hack, then?
Musk: Well, what Branson’s doing—by the way, I’m a great admirer of Branson—is really a much smaller technological challenge. So their craft would be suborbital, so it would go to about Mach 3. Our craft is orbital, it goes to Mach 25, so 25 times the speed of sound. To do what Branson’s doing you need, say, about nine units of energy. To do what we’re doing you need 625 units of energy. The difference is monumental. So what Branson is doing from a technological standpoint is building something that can cross the English Channel. What we’re building is something that can circumnavigate the globe. I still think what he’s doing is great, and, by the way, I bought a ticket on his effort. But it’s not in the same league, technologically.
Unger: So you’re not particularly worried?
Musk: The things that worry me are, are we going to make a mistake? Our own foolishness, our own errors, can hurt us.
Unger: So rocket science really is rocket science?
Musk: Yeah. [laughs] It looks hard, and it’s harder than it looks.
I’ve been wondering what Elon Musk thinks of AirLaunch LLC…looks like he’s pretty dismissive. I wonder if he has some inside knowledge about how committed DARPA is to FALCON?
Or maybe AirLaunch is just so drastically underfunded compared to SpaceX that he doesn’t see a threat. (after all, the market for small sats is not profitable for the required investment, and it’s infeasible to grow Quickreach to Geo commsat size)
You don’t have to go further than Musk’s comments on Pegasus to understand what fundamental problems any airplane-launched booster has in his view. Just search for “Must Pegasus” at Yahoo or something, and it’ll be there.