New year arrived a day early for Elon Musk’s SpaceX as the United States department of defence announced on the new year’s eve that Spacex have bagged a $ 150.4 million contract from the Space development agency of pentagon.
Read on to find out the details..
The rising space giant Spacex.
It was just 18 years back when Elon Reeve Musk CEO of Tesla and the founder of paypal, launched the ambitious space exploration programme called Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Or simply SpaceX.
In the initial years SpaceX was discarded as a mere dream and obsession of the billionaire, which was destined to fail. This was a time when the space sector was strictly government sponsored, with little or no private players.
But in recent years SpaceX have grown into prominence. With the government promoting participation of private individuals in the space sector, SpaceX have turned out to become quite a prominent player.
The company is headquartered at Hawthorne, California in the United states. The goal of the company in it’s founder’s words is the reduction of cost involved in space exploration so as to facilitate the “colonisation of mars”.
The reported revenue collection for the year 2019 of the company was $ 2 billion.
The various achievements of the company include:
- 2008- First liquid propellant rocket to reach orbit (by a private company)
- 2010- spacecraft dragon’s successful entourage till orbit, (first private company to do so)
- 2012-dragon sent to the International Space Station (the first such feat by a private company)
- 2015- Falcon 9’s successful mission
- 2017- successfully used the Falcon 9 again
- 2018- first private company to launch a spacecraft in the orbit of the sun.
- 2020- successfully sent astronauts to the ISS and the orbit.
The latest contract
On 31 december the space giant won the contract by the Space development agency worth US $ 150.4 million.
The contract for which the company bidded in October includes sending 28 small and medium sized satellites into the orbits at around 950 km in a cluster of 14 each.
According to the reports twenty will be data relay satellites while the rest will be missile warning satellites.
SpaceX in a statement said the satellites would be launched by the end of the year 2022 from the Vandenberg air force base in California.
SpaceX had quite a busy year in 2020 with several satellites launched including many government satellites as well as satellites for its own starlink programme, it looks like the company is yet again set for a busy and prosperous year ahead..
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