Date: 28/10/2008
| There has been two recent events in rocket science that have really advanced the state of the art for private enterprise getting into space. This is exciting on a number of levels, both from the little kid point of view, "wow rockets!" and the more mature, "finally someone other than the government doing it right" point. Generally governments are not good at long term development, and when politics get involved things go sideways (e.g. the shuttle debacle) for a long time. Anyway, here they are:
Armadillo won the level 1 prize of the Lunar Lander Challenge this week. I've been watching Armadillo for a very long time and they finally won something, which is well deserved for all the blood, sweat and tears they put into their rockets. Well done Armadillo!
Secondly, SpaceX put their Falcon1 into orbit, which is a great step forward towards cheap privately funded space access. SpaceX got it right on try number 4 after going so close on the previous 2 attempts. And it's really good to see them get to orbit.
Obviously Scaled Composites won the X Prize a while back, but great things are still happening in the space industry.
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