Charles Krauthammer
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| The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Dec. 21.
. . . "[Elon] Musk predicts that the reusable rocket will reduce the cost of accessing space a hundredfold. This depends, of course, on whether the wear and tear and stresses of the launch make the refurbishing prohibitively expensive. Assuming it’s not, and assuming Musk is even 10 percent right, reusability revolutionizes the economics of spaceflight.
"Which both democratizes and commercializes it. Which means space travel has now slipped the surly bonds of government — presidents, Congress, NASA bureaucracies. Its future will now be driven far more by a competitive marketplace with its multiplicity of independent actors, including deeply motivated, financially savvy and visionary entrepreneurs." . . .
Blocks of Pluto's water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi mountains in this high-resolution image from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.
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