Disaster at Xichang

An American’s eyewitness account of the 1996 rocket accident at China’s Xichang spaceport, which killed six people and injured 57:

“What Campbell witnessed over the next few days has haunted him ever since. Like most veterans of the Intelsat-708 launch, he hasn’t discussed the event in public. I got to know him while gathering material for a book on the Russian space program, and during one of our many conversations, Campbell mentioned his participation in the 1996 launch. Then he went on to tell the whole story. When I asked why he was willing to talk about it now, he answered, ‘The truth shall set you free.’

“The night of the launch, Campbell and his colleagues at the hotel boarded vans and headed to the satellite processing building. As they passed the center’s main gate, they saw a crowd gathering outside to watch the liftoff. ‘Everybody was dressed in his or her best clothes,’ he recalls. ‘It was a party atmosphere. There were many dozens, if not hundreds, of people there.’ Despite the previous accidents, it seemed to Campbell that these people must have been accustomed to gathering at this spot to watch launches.”

Source: Air & Space
Published: Feb 12, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,880 words)

1 Visionary + 3 Launchers + 1,500 Employees = ?

Musk makes no secret of the end goal: Create a new civilization on Mars. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in September, he outlined the business plan—if that’s the right term for something that looks decades into the future. “If you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars to around the cost of a middle class home in California—maybe to around half a million dollars—then I think enough people would buy a ticket and move to Mars,” he said. “You obviously have to have quite an appetite for risk and adventure. But there are seven billion people on Earth now, and there’ll be probably eight billion by the midpoint of the century. So even if one in a million people decided to do that, that’s still eight thousand people. And I think probably more than one in a million people will decide to do that.” Talking about a city on Mars by the middle of this century—even as SpaceX has yet to fly its first cargo mission to Earth orbit—is one of the reasons space professionals are skeptical about Musk’s claims.

Source: Air & Space
Published: Jan 1, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,999 words)