You've burned your own music, picked your own mutual funds, installed your own solar panels. But have you launched your own space program? It's easy. Just ask Elon Musk, last seen selling PayPal to eBay for stratospheric amounts of dough. His El Segundo, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is scheduled to send an unmanned rocket, dubbed Falcon I, into orbit in October. In 2006, SpaceX plans to test Falcon V - yes five, as in, five Merlin engines instead of just one. Think you can do better? Give it a shot. But be warned: You'll need to pick up a few things.
Home Space Program: A Shopping List
Cash (start with about $100 million)
Light-industrial space (roughly 100,000 square feet; try El Segundo, former "aerospace capital of the world")
Veteran NASA engineers (as many as you can get)
Reliable engine design (very)
Contract to launch government satellites (you can charge about $6 million per pop … defray some of those costs)
South Pacific island (one, to use as a launch site - Vandenburg Air Force Base gets busy)
- Spencer Reiss
credit CSAimages.com
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Cruising at 12,666 Miles Per Gallon
Roll Your Own Rocket
