The most intense meeting occurred in an ornate, neglected, prerevolutionary building near downtown Moscow. The vodka shots started—“To space!” “To America!”—while Musk sat on $20 million, which he hoped would be enough to buy three ICBMs that could be retooled to go to space. Buzzed from the vodka, Musk asked point-blank how much a missile would cost. The reply: $8 million each. Musk countered, offering $8 million for two. “They sat there and looked at him,” Cantrell said. “And said something like, ‘Young boy. No.’ They also intimated that he didn’t have the money.” At this point, Musk had decided the Russians were either not serious about doing business or determined to part a dot-com millionaire from as much of his money as possible. He stormed out of the meeting.

The Team Musk mood could not have been worse. It was near the end of February 2002, and they went outside to hail a cab and drove straight to the airport surrounded by the snow and dreck of the Moscow winter. Inside the cab, no one talked. Musk had come to Russia filled with optimism about putting on a great show for mankind and was now leaving exasperated and disappointed by human nature. The Russians were the only ones with rockets that could possibly fit within Musk’s budget. “It was a long drive,” Cantrell said. “We sat there in silence looking at the Russian peasants shopping in the snow.” The somber mood lingered all the way to the plane, until the drink cart arrived. “You always feel particularly good when the wheels lift off in Moscow,” Cantrell said. “It’s like, ‘My God. I made it.’ So, Griffin and I got drinks and clinked our glasses.” Musk sat in the row in front of them, typing on his computer. “We’re thinking, Fucking nerd. What can he be doing now?” At which point Musk wheeled around and flashed a spreadsheet he’d created. “Hey, guys,” he said, “I think we can build this rocket ourselves.”

Griffin and Cantrell had downed a couple of drinks by this time and were too deflated to entertain a fantasy. They knew all too well the stories of gung-ho millionaires who thought they could conquer space only to lose their fortunes. Just the year before, Andrew Beal, a real estate and finance whiz in Texas, folded his aerospace company after having poured millions into a massive test site. “We’re thinking, Yeah, you and whose fucking army,” Cantrell said. “But, Elon says, ‘No, I’m serious. I have this spreadsheet.’” Musk passed his laptop over to Griffin and Cantrell, and they were dumbfounded. The document detailed the costs of the materials needed to build, assemble, and launch a rocket. According to Musk’s calculations, he could undercut existing launch companies by building a modest-sized rocket that would cater to a part of the market that specialized in carrying smaller satellites and research payloads to space. The spreadsheet also laid out the hypothetical performance characteristics of the rocket in fairly impressive detail. “I said, ‘Elon, where did you get this?’” Cantrell said.

Musk had spent months studying the aerospace industry and the physics behind it. From Cantrell and others, he’d borrowed Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts. Musk had reverted to his childhood state as a devourer of information and had emerged from this meditative process with the realization that rockets could and should be made much cheaper than what the Russians were offering. Forget the mice. Forget the plant with its own video feed growing—or possibly dying—on Mars. Musk would inspire people to think about exploring space again by making it cheaper to explore space.

Voici les 87 fusées qu’on a lancé dans l’espace en 2015
 
Cette vidéo compile tous les lancements de fusées spatiales qui ont eu lieu pendant l’année 2015, en réalité il y en a eu 87, ce qui est quand même pas mal, mais les créateurs de la vidéo n’ont pas réussis à trouver les images de 4 lancements chinois.

État-Major Armées @EtatMajorFR
 
Forces armées en Guyane : + de 700 km² d'espaces aérien, maritime et terrestre sécurisés pour le tir #Soyuz #VS13  
 

After failing to land its Falcon 9 rocket at sea twice last year, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is hoping third time’s the charm. The company will attempt to land its vehicle on a floating barge after it blasts off on January 17, reports Reuters.
 
SpaceX will use an older version of the Falcon 9 than the one that successfully landed last month at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Falcon 9 v1.1 doesn’t have as much thrust as the latest version and will also ostensibly require less fuel to land at sea.
 
This mission will see the SpaceX’s vehicle carry a NASA Jason-3 ocean monitoring satellite.
 
Roughly two minutes after the Falcon 9 takes off from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the first stage of the rocket will separate, flip around, fire engines to slow its descent, deploy landing legs and attempt to touch down on a floating landing pad in the Pacific Ocean.
 
If it succeeds, SpaceX will attempt to recover its boosters from more of its space missions to help reduce costs. The first stage of its Falcon rockets sell for about $61 million each.
 
Last month, Musk said at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco, “With reusable rockets, we can reduce the cost of access to space by probably two orders of magnitude,” or a factor of 100.
 
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016 [...] et-at-sea/