SpaceX Update and Pix

Elon Musk of SpaceX has posted a good update on their Falcon rocket and Dragon spaceship progress, including some of the pictures he showed at his talk at the Mars Society Conference a month ago in DC. Very cool. I like this guy and I get the feeling (or is it just the hope?) that he is really going to succeed in getting people into space and really validating the whole commercial space thing at a level higher than suborbital (or even orbital or $100 million Moon fly-by) space tourism. Not that there's anything wrong with any of that or that I wouldn't go in a heartbeat if I had the money to burn (so to speak).

Elon also included a note on pricing and why he's doing all this, similar to a comment he made at MSC.

I should probably say something about pricing, since some people think that it is only a matter of time before we raise prices dramatically. They are missing the point. I started SpaceX to lower the cost and increase the reliability of (American) spaceflight by at least a factor of ten and I'm hell bent on making that happen. We need to become a true spacefaring civilization, where spaceflight is affordable by normal citizens and extending life to another planet is realistic, and that requires lowering costs dramatically.

Go Elon! Now we just need some Orbiter add-on makers to take on the Dragon and the Falcon-9 (and a Bigelow inflatable space station) so we can start to practice those missions.