Word: nasa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Many NASA critics take it further. The agency's role, they say, should be to explore the far reaches of the universe by roving robot, leaving Earth's orbit and the moon to the private sector. "We're in this transition zone, where the Lewis and Clark role of NASA has been done on the human side," says space activist and rabble rouser Rick Tumlinson, founder of Orbital Outfitters. "Now it's time for the settlers and shopkeepers to move...
...radical breakthroughs in space travel) that year and removed, once and for all, what Carmack calls the "giggle factor" in private spaceflight. "This is real. We're not dreaming anymore," Branson says, all signs of his Necker Island playfulness gone. "You could argue," he says, taking a swipe at NASA, "that we've wasted 50 years...
...being developed in great secrecy by Bezos' Blue Origin looks like a lopped-off nose cone. The three-seater, fueled by hydrogen peroxide (yup, the common household disinfectant, though in a highly purified form, with a touch of kerosene) appears based on an old Delta Clipper design done for NASA. Musk's SpaceX designers favor the NASA look too--of old Apollo capsules--but that translates into ocean splashdowns...
While most of his competitors have shunned the bureaucratic NASA, he bid for and won a $278 million NASA contract to develop a delivery service to the ISS. For Musk, 35, space travel is a childhood dream, not just for exploration but as a logical next stage in man's evolution from the primordial goop. "To our knowledge, life exists on only one planet, Earth. If something bad happens, it's gone," he says. "I think we should establish life on another planet--Mars in particular--but we're not making very good progress. SpaceX is intended to make that...
...aerospace testing center at the desert site but is taking it "slow and steady." (His company motto is Gradatim ferociter, which roughly translated means "Step by step, fiercely.") It's unclear how much funding Bezos, 43, is putting into the venture, but he has been doing it the NASA way, spending huge amounts of money to hire engineering Ph.D.s...