---
title: Bring me the hydrospanners!
date: 2006-03-27 13:30:00.00 -8
tags: posts 
categories: geeky
---
The Millennium Falcon 1 [went off course at about T+40 seconds and took a turn in the wrong direction, crash landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Sponsored by one of the now wealthy founders of [PayPal](http://www.paypal.com/), the Falcon 1 design is the first commercial payload-to-orbit system and hoped to undercut NASA costs by 66%.

MJR recently posted [an mp3 of a talk he gave on computer engineering and how it can be compared to NASA's (and specifically Richard P. Feyneman's) studying space ship engineering](http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/audio/ranum-forum-2006.mp3) which sheds light on the engineering difficulties these folks are trying to overcome.

Pre-launch chatter:


<blockquote><br />
<span class="imblue">Ben</span>: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon/f1/status.html<br />
<span class="imred">Grant</span>: what is that?<br />
<span class="imblue">Ben</span>: first commercial launch of a payload that isn&#8217;t affilicated w/ gov<br />
<span class="imred">Grant</span>: oic<br />
<span class="imblue">Ben</span>: guy who started paypal&#8217;s new space company<br />
<span class="imred">Grant</span>: lol<br />
<span class="imred">Grant</span>: that&#8217;s awesome<br />
<span class="imred">Grant</span>: if some sf author had that in a cyberpunk book in the 80&#8217;s, i&#8217;d have considered it laughable<br />
<span class="imblue">Ben</span>: yea, goal is to send payloads way cheap<br />
<span class="imblue">Ben</span>: http://spacex.com/<br />
&raquo;  Space Exploration Technologies Corporation<br />
<span class="imred">Grant</span>: &#8220;founder of this first-to-launch commercial venture made his fortune founding a company allowing people to pay for things on the &#8220;Internet&#8221;, a network of computers which :confused: :wtf:...&#8221;<br />
<span class="imred">Grant</span>: me in 1985: :laugh:<br />
<span class="imblue">Ben</span>: yea no shit<br />
<span class="imblue">Ben</span>: or carmack and his rockets<br />
<span class="imred">Grant</span>: haha yeah<br />
</blockquote></p>