SpaceX Delays Falcon 9 Launch

stoolpigeon writes to tell us that Elon Musk recently announced a delay to the projected summer launch for SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. "Falcon 9 is the centerpiece of SpaceX's project for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) project. NASA is hoping to be able to draw on new and cheaper commercial rockets to service the International Space Station once the shuttle fleet retires in 2010. If the trial flight of Falcon 9 early next year is a success, payload-carrying COTS missions could follow in quick succession. But the delay is worrying some observers who note that SpaceX's other rocket project, the Falcon 1, has failed during its only two launch attempts. The first Falcon 1 caught fire and crashed, and the second failed to achieve orbit due to problems during stage separation. A third Falcon 1 launch is planned for April."

Re:The change is coming soon.

[lennier]

"Another prediction is that either Carmack (with more funding) or Bezos will join this. They both speak about developing a rocket for use on earth, but their work will be of better use on the moon. In fact, I believe that one of these 2 will hook up with Musk to do the Google prize."

2008: The Large Hadron Collider is powered up.

2009: Jeff Bezos, John Carmack, and Richard Branson announce the merging of Armadillo, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic into the 'Union Aerospace Company'.

2010: The LHC detects the Higgs Boson, as well as anomalous results suggesting the existence of wormhole formation.

2012: Mark Shuttleworth is the first UAC astronaut to land on the moon at Copernicus Crater. The landing site is named 'Zenlike Zulu'.

2016: The UAC beats NASA to obtain a European Union science contract to build the Lunar Farside Accelerator, an automated facility to investigate wormhole creation.

2017: The LDA, and the entire far side of the Moon, vanishes.

2018: Undeterred, the UAC continues with plans to build a manned Mars science base on the moon Phobos...