SpaceX in Orbit!

Yesterday Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, reached orbit with the first privately built liquid fueled satellite launcher.

It's a huge boost for commercial spaceflight and perhaps the biggest milestone since the 2004 launch of the suborbital rocket plane SpaceShipOne. Just as SpaceShipOne proved that a private company can send people into space, SpaceX has proven that orbital spaceflight need not be the exclusive domain of major government programs.

"Wow, this is a great day for SpaceX," said CEO Elon Musk in an email after the launch, "and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team. The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion — middle of the bullseye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake."

This was SpaceX's fourth launch attempt. The company attempted its first launch in March 2006, the second in March 2007, and the third this past August. All four launches were made from the company's launch pad in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii.

In addition to perfecting its Falcon 1 rockets since its first launch attempt in 2006, SpaceX has expanded into a former Boeing 747 assembly plant in the Los Angeles area, built out a launch facility at the home of the U.S. space program, Cape Canaveral, Florida, and made steady progress on a rocket capable of manned flight, the Falcon 9.

With this launch, of a 364-pound dummy test satellite, orbital space is now officially open for business. This is good news for any company that wants to do business affordably in orbit, including Bigelow Aerospace, which aims to launch the first commercial space station by 2010.

It's also good news for NASA, which is facing the grim prospect of losing its own access to space with the retiring of the Space Shuttle in 2010 and the possible loss of its Russian launch partner because of renewed tensions between the United States and the Russian Federation.

With the Merlin engines that will power Falcon 9 now proven spaceworthy, SpaceX seems poised to step into the American space-access gap.

"I will have a more complete post launch statement tomorrow," said Musk in his email, "as right now I'm in a bit of a daze and need to go celebrate :)"

By the way, SpaceX is hiring, big time. When you're done checking out launch footage at http://spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=30, Musk's tour of SpaceX's shop floor, including the production line cranking out Merlin engines at an astonishing rate of one engine per week--more than all the rest of U.S. rocket booster production combined.

The 76 positions open at SpaceX, according to the Careers page on the company website, include spots for engineers trained in:

Rocket engine combustion
Turbo-machinery
Advanced structural design & analysis (composite and metal structures)
Avionics, guidance & control
Embedded real-time programming
Digital and analog electronics including RF electronics


...as well as technicians skilled in:

Launch operations
Composites manufacturing
Electronics assembly (PCB and wire harness)
Machining
Structural assembly
Propulsion systems assembly
Quality Assurance

Surgery as word processing

I'm just finishing up a chapter in my DARPA book on the Trauma Pod project.

Last month I visited the project's headquarters at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, where I snapped this picture of the robot surgical system at the heart of the program.

Rick Satava, an Army surgeon, started what became Trauma Pod at DARPA in the 1990s. He left DARPA for the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command just before a successful Phase I demo at SRI last year.

What you see here is a modified da Vinci Surgical System (developed at SRI and commercialized by Intuitive Surgical) poised over a fake patient, with a robot scrub nurse awaiting instructions in the foreground. Phase I answered the question "can a robotic system treat wounded soldiers in the battlefield?" with an unqualified "Yes."

Next steps: take the remote human surgeon out of the loop by completely automating several of the most essential trauma operations, and then shrink this stuff down to a size that can roll on an armored personnel carrier or fly in a black hawk helicopter.

The goal is to enable soldiers on the battlefield to load wounded comrades into the trauma pod and have the system go to work immediately patching up hemorrhaging blood vessels and collapsed lungs, buying precious minutes in which to get to a field hospital.

Battlefield trauma surgery is just the beginning, Satava tells me. He envisions a day when surgeons compose operations on computer systems much the way writers like me use word processing software to write articles.

Here I am test-driving SRI's latest surgical robot, the M7, in a photo by SRI public relations consultant Deborah Lacy. Just like word processing? Let's just say it's a good thing there wasn't a real patient on the table. You can see the instruments I'm remotely manipulating on the monitor behind my head.

Satava's surgeon of the future (50 years from now, Satava figures) would work on a three-dimensional representation of a patient created from a head-to-toe CT scan. After perfecting the operation, he or she would hit a command to "print" the procedure on the actual patient. As Satava put it to me:

You...send the image to the surgeon. He spends a few minutes and gets...exactly what he wants without damaging the patient--being able to edit it and then just send it out--and bing, bing, bing, it’s all done by the robot immediately.

The advantage, says Satava, will be surgery done up to 12 times faster and 15 times more accurately than by an unassisted human surgeon. In other words, a procedure that takes an hour in today's operating rooms could be shaved down to just 5 minutes.