A cheap alternative to satellites is starting to take off
IT TAKES chutzpah to tweet “rockets are tricky” shortly after one you have just launched has deliberately blown itself up. But Elon Musk, founder and boss of SpaceX, is not a man who lacks self-confidence, and he did just that on August 22nd after the terminal malfunction of one of his company’s Falcon 9 vehicles. That Arianespace, a French rival of SpaceX, announced on the same day that two satellites it had tried to launch to join the European Space Agency’s Galileo constellation (intended to rival America’s Global Positioning System), had entered a “non-nominal injection orbit”—in other words, gone wrong—shows just how difficult the commercialisation of space can be.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “The west wind blows afresh”
From the August 30th 2014 edition
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