Can you imagine how much money would be had selling tickets to orbit?

There is also a huge commercial potential for satellite delivery. NASA charges something along the lines of $2000 per payload pound to deliver objects into orbit. A business who can offer even a 10% discount on that will have customers lining up to have their satellites deployed and potentially make fortunes.

There is also the less glorious but certainly profitable job of running cargo for government space ventures: delivering supplies to space stations, ferrying astronauts to maintain crews or perform service visits on satellites.

If you think there’s no money in space, you don’t think at all.

Tweet I saw…

@RochellaSpace: Best comment from Space Politics.com: “SpaceX delivers a big fat STFU to all the haters. Damn that feels good.”

You can’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia.

I mean, duh. Think before you post.

So what’s this religion thingy you’ve been working on, Xenu?

I was hoping, with all the crap that Spacex was getting from Congressmen, astronauts and NASA apologists, I was praying that they’d launch to orbit this afternoon, and was really happy when this one went off without a hitch. I really love that now the word is SpaceX wants to launch a real supply mission with their third shot, in 2011.

With a few more launches under their belt, I hope they can then get someone signed up for a Falcon 9 Heavy launch, with three and a half times the payload to orbit of the standard Falcon 9. Space is about to become wide open.

And there are no health problems from living near high tension lines.

Clearly you don’t like to clutter your opinions with data gathering. Of course, I already knew that because you used the cult-word “woo”.

One major health problem associated with living near high tension lines is herbicide poisoning from the (now banned) herbicides that the power companies saturated the surrounding ground with for decades.

Of course, nowadays they use “perfectly safe” glyophosphates which have not yet been banned, since they haven’t been used long enough for their effects to be fully known. So recently built towers are currently “safe”… for relatively low values of the word safe.

High tension lines have other hazards, among them one called “electrocution” and another called “heavy falling objects”. Don’t be such a science worshipper that you lose your sense of proportion.

You wouldn’t want to sunbathe in the direct beam, though, for the same reason you wouldn’t want to sunbathe in Death Vally in August at high noon. Too much of a good thing.

And there are no health problems from living near high tension lines.

Don’t believe the woo about them.

…won’t the scatter from the energy fry anyone near the collector? And spread health problems over a much wider area? Like our own mundane high tension wires do?

(BTW am aware “maser” implies “laser”, with perfect coherence. Nothing’s “perfect”!)

Was this how people felt in the 60′s when we 1st started sending people into space?

9 minutes after it launched, it was 1/2 way across the ocean and I realized just how flippin cool it really was.

/jk