Quotations

«Today it costs over a billion dollars for a space shuttle flight. The cost? is fundamentally what's holding us back from becoming a space traveling civilization and ultimately a multi-planet species.»

«is analogous to building part of an airplane in a factory and part of the airplane on the runway. You can imagine that's a pretty expensive way to split the construction so the fact that we can just do the entire integrated rocket, transport it as a single unit, that definitely reduces costs.»

«[What Space X ultimately contributes to space travel might please the government in other ways.] One of the significant innovations of Falcon V is that because it's got five engines on the main stage, it can actually lose an engine and reach orbit safely, ... If the space shuttle were to lose one of its solid rocket boosters the people on the shuttle would be doomed.»

«[He'd better be, because the new space race already is under way and competition is shaping up as fierce. Rutan's chief rival may ultimately be Elon Musk. A former Internet mogul who in 2002 sold his online payment company, PayPal, to eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, Musk now runs SpaceX in El Segundo, Calif., which is developing an orbital space vehicle. Musk notes that making it into orbit requires going eight times faster and producing 65 times more rocket energy than a suborbital vehicle like SpaceShipOne. Musk has already put more than $50 million into SpaceX and says he is prepared to invest $50 million more. He expects it to take at least five years to get passengers into orbit. In the meantime, SpaceX is generating revenue by booking orders to launch satellites; its first such launch is scheduled for January.] Our earned revenue will be $35 million after a little more than two years of operation, ... By comparison, the X-Prize was a one-off of $10 million, and it took Burt something like five years to do it.»

«the Internet; changing the energy cycle from petroleum-based to solar-electric; and moving into space.»

«I don't want to say specific numbers. But I've certainly spent more than I expected to spend,»

«that are happy to sign up as soon as they see a launch that works.»

«We're developing two engines. These are state-of-the-art, world-class, world-beating engines. These are not just sort of ho-hum engines.»

«The way it's looking right now, our engine might be one percent below our specifications, but still be the best engine ever done. We prefer not to...but it looks like we may be one percent low.»

«I'm very pro-environment, but let's figure out how to do it better and not jump through a dozen hoops to achieve what is obvious in the first place. There should be a categorical exclusion [for Falcon] just like airplanes that use non-toxic propellants. That would be a huge improvement,»