SpaceX is one of the companies working with Spaceport America to bring Commercial Space Flights to New Mexico. They were at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Space to give an update on where their company is headed.
SpaceX is taking part in commercial space by transporting Cargo to space stations. Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development, Barry Matsumori says there are three keys to succeeding in Commercial Space.
“You have to be reliable, if your not it doesn’t matter what you’re doing,” Matsumori said. “You have to have schedule assurance. You have to be able to offer it on a timely basis to when the customer wants that product. And then pricing, it should be competitively priced.”
And the only way a commercial space company can continue to offer this is through innovation.
“We’re putting legs on flight vehicles,” Matsumori said. “So, We are proving what we are doing in the lab will work in the real world. As it turns out, this vehicle, we did land vertically over the atlantic, we are not quite allowed to land on land just yet. But we’ve proven that we can land vertically on a body of water.”
He says they have one goal and destination in mind.
“We want to make access to space very routine,” Matsumori said. “The only way to make it routine is you do something about cost. You keep the high reliability, schedule assurance, but you have got to do something about cost per kilogram to orbit.”
One way they hope to achieve that is through their rocket that will land vertically, and be reusable.
“The thing is completely autonomous, and what are we doing we are innovating how reliable software works,” Matsumori said. “Because this thing is guiding itself the whole time. There is no humans involved. No human could possibly control this thing fast enough.”
Test flights of this vehicle will eventually be brought to Spaceport America.
