Narcissus

A busy day. This morning I drove over to Fakenham to a talk by a U3A member on the History of SpaceX, which was absolutely fascinating. Elon Musk is not everybody's cup of tea, but what he's achieved with SpaceX since setting it up in only 2002 is astonishing. The goal is to establish a colony on Mars, but obviously that all needs funding and the commercial side of the company needs to, and has, thrived. They initially tried to buy three ICBMs from Russia, that was too expensive, so they decided to build rockets from scratch in-house. His is the only company to have developed the technology to re-use most of the Falcon 9 rockets, thereby significantly reducing cost. His company develops all they need in house (including the space suits), thereby having control over all aspects of the design and build, improving integration, reliability, safety, and speed and efficiency of build and use. They launch satellites (including Musk's own Starlink satellite constellation), re-stock the international space station, transport astronauts to the ISS and more. In 2018 it became the leading global commercial launch provider. Boeing was provided funding by NASA at the same time as SpaceX to also provide such services, but they rely heavily on the traditional model of using third parties for supplying parts they need and so far this has proved quite unreliable and even dangerous - so SpaceX has a clear run. Falcon Heavy was developed and first successfully flew in 2018, carrying very heavy payloads. Since 2019 SpaceX has also been developing and testing Starship, which will enable large-scale transit of humans and cargo to the Moon and Mars. All achieved since the company was set up 23 years ago! This afternoon I did some gardening, although I decided it was too windy to put in even some of the more robust plants I bought last week. I couldn't resist another Narcissus photo from the garden.