Douma witnesses speak at OPCW briefing at The Hague

 Laid bare in front of the world. However, it sadly won't make a difference. If they were sure it happened the way they say, they would be eager for an investigation by anyone qualified. Alleging the attack and naming the culprits while refusing to conduct a proper investigation look worse either way.

No attack, no victims, no chem weapons: Douma witnesses speak at OPCW briefing at The Hague RT : 26 Apr, 2018

Witnesses of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, including 11-year-old Hassan Diab and hospital staff, told reporters at The Hague that the White Helmets video used as a pretext for a US-led strike on Syria was, in fact, staged.

“We were at the basement and we heard people shouting that we needed to go to a hospital. We went through a tunnel. At the hospital they started pouring cold water on me,” the boy told the press conference, gathered by Russia’s mission at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague.

Hassan was among the “victims” seen being washed by water hoses in a video released by the controversial White Helmets group on April 7. The boy and his family later spoke to the media and revealed that Hassan was hurried to the scene by men who claimed that a chemical attack had taken place. They started pouring cold water on the boy and others, filming the frightened children.

“There were people unknown to us who were filming the emergency care, they were filming the chaos taking place inside, and were filming people being doused with water. The instruments they used to douse them with water were originally used to clean the floors actually,” Ahmad Kashoi, an administrator of the emergency ward, recalled. “That happened for about an hour, we provided help to them and sent them home. No one has died. No one suffered from chemical exposure.”

Hassan was among the “victims” seen being washed by water hoses in a video released by the controversial White Helmets group on April 7. The boy and his family later spoke to the media and revealed that Hassan was hurried to the scene by men who claimed that a chemical attack had taken place. They started pouring cold water on the boy and others, filming the frightened children.

“There were people unknown to us who were filming the emergency care, they were filming the chaos taking place inside, and were filming people being doused with water. The instruments they used to douse them with water were originally used to clean the floors actually,” Ahmad Kashoi, an administrator of the emergency ward, recalled. “That happened for about an hour, we provided help to them and sent them home. No one has died. No one suffered from chemical exposure.”

Halil al-Jaish, a resuscitator who tended to people at the Douma hospital that day, told the press conference that some of the patients had indeed experienced respiratory problems. The symptoms, however, were caused by heavy dust, which engulfed the area due to recent airstrikes, and no one showed any signs of chemical warfare poisoning, al-Jaish said.

The hospital received people who suffered from smoke and dust asphyxiation on the day of the alleged attack, Muwaffak Nasrim, a paramedic who was working in emergency care, said. The panic seen in footage provided by the White Helmets was caused mainly by people shouting about the alleged use of chemical weapons, Nasrim, who witnessed the chaotic scenes, added. No patients, however, displayed symptoms of chemical weapons exposure, he said.

Ahmad Saur, an emergency paramedic with the Syrian Red Crescent, said that the ward he was working at did not receive any patients exposed to chemical weapons on the day of the alleged incident or after it. All the patients needed either general medical care or help with injuries, he said. Saur told journalists he came to speak at The Hague independently of the Red Crescent, and that he was testifying freely and without any pressure.

One reporter asked what would happen to the eyewitnesses and whether they would “stay in Europe to testify.”

“We’re going back home, and see no problem with that. The situation is a lot better now. We’re Douma residents, like many others,” Hassan Ayoun, a doctor with the emergency department, said.

Six of the Douma witnesses brought to The Hague have already been interviewed by the OPCW technical experts, Russia’s permanent representative to the OPCW, Aleksandr Shulgin, said.

“The others were ready too, but the experts are sticking to their own guidelines. They’ve picked six people, talked to them, and said they were 'completely satisfied' with their account and did not have any further questions,” Shulgin revealed. He added that the allegations by “certain Western
countries” ahead of the briefing that Moscow and Damascus were seeking to “hide” the witnesses from the OPCW experts did not hold water.

The alleged chemical incident was only supported by the White Helmets’ video and social media reports from militant-linked groups, but the US, the UK and France judged they had enough evidence that it actually took place and launched a series of punitive strikes against Syria on April 14. The US and its allies accused Syrian President Bashar Assad of carrying out the “attack,” without providing any proof of their claim. Notably, the strike came hours before the OPCW fact-finding team was set to arrive in Douma to determine whether chemical weapons had been used there.

Selected Comments:

* The west try to ignore the truth now. The lies of Wall Street and white house propaganda machine, that we call main stream media.

* Just like a giant snow ball rolling down a mountain the evil of the democracies will eventually smother them.

* The West blocked an investigation into an alleged crime. Is this how the Western judicial system works? They prefer to shoot first and ask questions later.

* In order to establish who carried out an attack, it must first be established the attack occurred.

* Since US, UK and France have declared that they don’t need UN resolution to do whatever they want, they therefore declared themselves outlaws in the eyes of international legislation. Which means, any aquatic equipment of those so called nations is now treated as a pirate vessel and is a subject to destruction. World, that’s the best hunting season ever recorded in human history - seek the outlaws and destroy on sight. They can’t run to UN for protection - they just unilaterally exited that union. Shoot at will and good hunting.

* UN was created by Washington & London in order to easily spread their imperialistic goals. In other hands, USA and UK have the upper hand at UN. The same thing is with other "international" organizations such as WADA, WHO, WTO, World Bank, IMF and others.

* It Is Amazing how America and Great Britain are now using Chemical Weapons in every Way Possible To Create Another Global Incineration War where your Body Turns Charcoal as it Roast to Black Cinders in Madness of Political Global Lunacy.!!!

* No white helmets are ever poisoned but they are always around when poisoning is even mentioned. Are these guys carrying the stuff with them?

* The CIA Director Mike Pompeo  has admitted that he fooled Trump into believing the chemical weapons attack in Syria (2017) was launched by the Syrian government. The U.S False flag attack, which actually originated from CIA rebel groups in the region, resulted in Trump launching Tomahawk missiles into Syria, killing 15 innocent civilians and 7 Syrian soldiers. So what Pompeo is admitting to is, at best, providing the President with faulty intelligence.

* Secretary Of Defence John Mattis admitted that there has been no evidence of any use of chemical weapons by Assad.......that was reported in Newsweek on the 8th of this month. Google it....it makes for stark reading but with propaganda being peddled as news, they get support and recognition in the
"court of public opinion" because their populations are predominately sheep.

Boxer Muhammad Ali & Vietnam War

Over 3 million Vietnamese killed in the Vietnam war by U.S. soldiers. The Vietnam U.S. vets who burned villages raped young woman after raping them they machine gun them and killed their children .

They carpeted bombed all Vietnam and used "Agent Orange" chemical millions got cancer ....crimes against humanity, done by the U.S. and two nuclear bombs in Japan .

April 28, 1967
"I ain't draft dodging. I ain't burning no flag. I ain't running to Canada. I'm staying right here. You want to send me to jail? Fine, you go right ahead . I've in jail for 400 years. I could be there for 4 or 5 more, but I ain't going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people. If I want to die, I'll die right here, right now, fightin' you, if I want to die.

You 're my enemy , not no Chinese, ,,No Vietcong..... no Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom. 

You my opposer when I want justice.

You my opposer when I want equality. Want me to go somewhere and fight for you? You won't even stand up for me right here in America, for my rights and my religious beliefs. You won't even stand up for my rights here at home .

- Muhammad Ali.- April 28, 1967

On April 28, 1967, with the United States at war in Vietnam, Ali refused to be inducted into the armed forces, saying "I ain't got no quarrel with those Vietcong." On June 20, 1967, Ali was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to five years in prison, fined $10,000 and banned from boxing for three years.

British 'war on terror' & strategic ties with radical Islam

British had been infamous since her colonial days of using "Dive & Rule" policy by even supporting Islamist militants to further her interest and inflict damage on the image of Islam.

Stench of hypocrisy: British 'war on terror' & strategic ties with radical Islam
John Wight
RT : 19 Apr, 2018


Britain's strategic relationship with radical Islam goes back decades and continues to this day.

There is no more foul a stench than the stench of hypocrisy, and there is no more foul a hypocrisy than the British government painting Bashar al-Assad as a monster when in truth he and the Syrian people have been grappling with a twin-headed monster in the shape of Salafi-jihadi terror and Western imperialism. Both are committed to destroying Syria as an independent, non-sectarian state, and both are inextricably linked.

Author and journalist Mark Curtis charts in detail the contours of this history in his book 'Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam':

"British governments, both Labour and Conservative, have, in pursuing the so-called 'national interest' abroad, colluded for decades with radical Islamic forces, including terrorist organizations. They have connived with them, worked alongside them and sometimes trained and financed them, in order to promote specific foreign policy objectives. Governments have done so in often desperate attempts to maintain Britain's global power in the face of increasing weakness in key regions of the world, being unable to unilaterally impose their will and lacking other local allies. Thus the story is
intimately related to that of Britain's imperial decline and the attempt to maintain influence in the world."

As far back as the First World War, when the Middle East began to assume strategic importance in the capitals of Western imperial and colonial powers, the British ruling class went out of its way to identify and recruit loyal local proxies in pursuit of its regional objectives. Britain's relationship with the Arab tribal chief, Ibn Saud, who would go on to establish Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s, began in 1915 with the Darin Pact, demarcating the territory then controlled by Saud as a British protectorate.

The following year, the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans erupted. Begun and inspired by Saud's fierce rival, Sharif Hussein, head of the Hashemite Arab tribe, the revolt was heavily bankrolled and supported by the British – a period immortalized in the exploits of British military agent T E Lawrence, known to the world as Lawrence of Arabia.

But whereas Sharif Hussein was a follower of orthodox Sunni Islam, Ibn Saud adhered to the radical doctrine of Wahhabism, which Winston Churchill was moved to describe as "bloodthirsty" and "intolerant." Regardless, when it came to its imperial interests there was no tiger upon whose back the British ruling class was not willing to ride during this period, and which, as events have proved, it has not been willing to ride since.

The most egregious example of this policy, one that continues to have ramifications today, was the support provided by the UK to the Afghan mujahideen in the late 1970s and 1980s. The insurgency's objective was the overthrow of Kabul's secular and left-leaning government, whose crime in the eyes of the Islamist insurgency's US and UK sponsors was that it had embraced the social and economic model of Moscow rather than Washington during the first Cold War.

British support for the mujahideen, married to the huge support provided by Washington, was indispensable in the eventual success of these self-styled 'holy warriors' in taking control of a country that had embraced modernity and turning it into a failed state mired in religious oppression, brutality, backwardness and poverty.

Mark Curtis again:

"Britain, along with the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, covertly supported the resistance to defeat the Soviet occupation of the country. Military, financial and diplomatic backing was given to Islamist forces which, while forcing a Soviet withdrawal, soon organized themselves into terrorist networks ready to strike Western targets."

While Washington's primary role in channeling military and financial support to the Afghan mujahideen, known as Operation Cyclone, may until have succeeded in overshadowing London's role in this dirty war, declassified British government cabinet papers which were made public in 2010 and reported in the UK media make grim reading.

They reveal that three weeks after Soviet forces arrived in Afghanistan at the request of the Afghan government in Kabul, struggling to deal with an insurgency that had broken out in the countryside, the Thatcher government was planning to supply military aid to the "Islamic resistance." A confidential government memo provides a chilling insight into the insanity that passed for official policy: "We trust the Western leaders are prepared for the enormous beneficial possibilities that could just possibly open up if the Afghan rebellion were to succeed."

It will be recalled that out of the ensuing collapse of Afghanistan emerged the Taliban, under whose rule the country was turned into a vast militant jihadist school and training camp. Many of the most notorious Islamist terrorists began their careers there, fighting the Soviets and then later broadening out their activities to other parts of the region and wider world. In this regard, Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda loom large.

Other notorious names from the world of Salafi-jihadism for whom Afghanistan proved indispensable include the Jordanian Abu al-Zarqawi, who founded Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) during the US-UK occupation, an organization that would over time morph into ISIS.

Abdelhakim Belhaj and other Libyan Islamists cut their jihadist teeth in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Returning to Libya, they formed the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in the eastern city of Benghazi. Though the group may have been disbanded in 2010, having failed to topple Gaddafi despite repeated attempts to assassinate the Libyan leader with, it's been claimed, the support of Britain's MI6, former members of the LIFG, including Belhaj, were important actors in the 2011 Libyan uprising.

By way of a reminder, the uprising in Libya started in Benghazi and would not have succeeded without the air support it received from NATO. Britain's then prime minister, David Cameron, was key in pushing for that air support and the sanction of the UN under the auspices of Security Council Resolution 1973. Though protecting civilians was central in wording of this UNSC resolution, it was shamefully distorted to justify regime change, culminating in Gaddafi's murder by the 'rebels.'

Staying with the LIFG, in the wake of the Manchester suicide-bomb attack in May 2017, which left 23 people dead and 500 injured, the fact that the bomber, a young Libyan by the name of Salman Abedi, was the son of a former member of the LIFG, did not receive anything like the media attention it should have at the time.

Manchester, England is home to the largest Libyan community in Britain, and there is strong evidence to suggest that when the Libyan uprising broke out MI6 facilitated the ability of Libyan Islamists in Britain to travel to Libya to participate in the fighting. Among them was Salman Abedi, who it is thought received military training in the country before being allowed to return to the UK thereafter.

This brings us on to Syria and, as with Libya, the question of how so many British Muslims have been able to travel from the UK to Syria via Turkey to take part in the anti-Assad insurgency since 2011? It also brings into sharp focus a policy that has veered between the ludicrous and the reckless.

Emblematic of the former was ex-prime minister David Cameron's claim, which he made during a 2015 Commons debate over whether the Royal Air Force should engage in air strikes against ISIS in Syria, that fighting as part of the Syrian were 70,000 moderates.

As for the recklessness of Britain's actions in Syria, look no further than the country's recent participation in the illegal missile strikes that were carried out in conjunction with the US and France, justified on the basis of as yet unproven allegations that Syrian government forces had carried out a
chemical weapons attack on Douma, just outside Damascus. The only beneficiaries of such actions by the Western powers are Salafi-jihadist groups such as ISIS (whom it was later reported took advantage of the missile strike to mount a short-lived offensive), Al-Nusra and Jaysh al-Islam.

The latter of those groups, Jaysh al-Islam, is a Saudi proxy. It was the dominant group in Douma and throughout Eastern Ghouta until the district's liberation by the Syrian Army and its allies with Russian support.

Given the deep and longstanding ties between London and Riyadh; given the fact, reported towards the end of 2017, that British military personnel were embedded in a training role with Saudi forces in Yemen; given the news that a British special forces sergeant was killed in northern Syria at the end of March this year while embedded with the Kurds, revealing for the first time that British troops were operating in the country on the ground – given all that, the question of who else British special forces and military personnel may be embedded with in Syria is legitimate.

In the context of the British state's long and sordid history when it comes to riding the back of radical Islam in pursuit of its strategic objectives, readers will doubtless draw their own conclusions.

Selected Comments:

* The UK and its agencies such as MI6 are deeply complicit in the wave of takfiri terrorrism that has covered much ofvthe globe and created an era of tension that the police state has exploited to further erode people's basic civil and human rights. The UK and especially the City of London are at the
nexus of organized global criminality.

* UK sponsoring of radical Islam goes back to the “great game” of the 19th century. Wahhabis, Salafis, taqfiris, Muslim Brotherhood are all British created and managed tools to suppress nationalism and democracy in Islamic countries. They never attack western client states.The UK government is a disgrace, complicit in the murder of countless Christians and Muslims.

* Since the west especially as represented by US , UK and France were  practically denied the opportunity to steal from weak states from late 90s, they have resorted to disaster capitalism. The idea is to create perpetual war and conflict  so that they can sell more arms to the warring factions and kill as many people as possible to justify huge military budgets. It has paid handsomely .They will continue an this route until new powers or coalitions are able to stop them, otherwise the world will never know peace.

The evolution of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket

SpaceX has tinkered with its Falcon 9 rocket for a decade. Now, it says it's done with Block 5 (i.e. 9 Merlin engine boosters) which was used successfully on May 12, 2018 to launch a satellite for the Govt of Bangladesh.

Block 5 rocket launch marks the end of the beginning for SpaceX

Eric Berger - 5/3/2018

Less than eight years after its maiden launch, the Falcon 9 booster has become the most dominant rocket in the world. Modern and efficient, no rocket launched more than the 70m Falcon 9 booster launched last year. Barring catastrophe, no rocket seems likely to launch more this year.

In part, SpaceX has achieved this level of efficiency by bringing a Silicon Valley mindset to the aerospace industry. The company seeks to disrupt, take chances, and, like so many relentless start-up companies, drive employees to work long hours to meet demanding engineering goals.

While founder Elon Musk’s ambitions to settle Mars get most of the public’s attention, the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which almost never leaves Earth orbit, is the reason SpaceX has soared to date. And on this vehicle, Musk’s company has imprinted its ethos of disruption and innovation by seeking every opportunity to improve the rocket.

Although this has caused headaches for customers like NASA and some suppliers, constant tinkering has allowed SpaceX to maximize performance of this rocket. By regularly upgrading the Merlin engines, shedding weight with lighter materials, and using super-chilled rocket fuel to maximize density, the Falcon 9 rocket now is about twice as powerful as it was during its initial flight. Rarely during its more than 50 launches since June 2010 has a Falcon 9 rocket not had a handful or more changes from the previous edition.

All the while, SpaceX has had a singular goal for the Falcon 9 rocket: to build the most perfect and efficient orbital rocket it could. Now, finally, the company seems close to taking a final step toward that goal by closing the loop on first-stage reusability. As soon as next Monday, but more likely a bit later this month, SpaceX intends to launch the “Block 5” variant of the Falcon 9 rocket for the first time. Musk has said this fifth revision of the Falcon 9 should mark the final major change for the booster.

The company has a lot riding on the revamped booster. SpaceX intends to fly each Block 5 first stage it builds a minimum of 10 times and—depending on your willingness to accept Musk’s enthusiastic outlook—perhaps many more. Ten flights would be hugely significant, as SpaceX has thus far only ever reused each of its Falcon 9 rockets a single time. Additionally, the company hopes to reduce the turnaround time between launches of a Falcon 9 booster, now several months, to a matter of weeks.

Achieving such a nirvana of low-cost, rapid access to space would represent a tremendous feat for SpaceX. For a company that aspires to one day land humans on Mars, this is the essential first step. Moreover, by freezing the design of the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX can free up its engineering talent to focus on the “Big Falcon Rocket” and its upper stage spaceship. And by flying each Block 5 booster multiple times, it can release its skilled workers to assemble that much, much larger booster.

The upcoming launch of the Block 5 rocket, therefore, marks the end of the beginning for SpaceX.

Close calls

To find a Falcon 9 launch of comparable magnitude to the forthcoming Block 5 launch, one probably has to go back to December 2015. The stakes were incredibly high then, too. Six months before, in June, SpaceX had suffered the first failure of the Falcon 9 booster, a catastrophic break-up of the second stage at about 150 seconds into the flight. The Dragon spacecraft ascending into space, laden with NASA cargo valued at more than $100 million, was lost.

SpaceX spent nearly half a year assessing and fixing the problem before returning to the launch pad. For that December flight, SpaceX doubled-down on its philosophy of taking risks. The Falcon 9 booster standing at the pad three days before Christmas was the first one using a much more powerful variant of the rocket, known as the Falcon 9 Full Thrust, or Block 3.

This ambitious booster had about 30 percent more capability than its predecessor, with more powerful engines and slightly larger tanks that accommodated super-cooled liquid oxygen and highly refined kerosene. Other modifications included upgraded grid fins to steer the rocket on its return through Earth’s atmosphere and landing legs.

But with this return to flight mission, it was not enough to debut an entirely revamped rocket. For the first time, SpaceX would also attempt to return a booster to Earth for a vertical landing along the Florida coast. Always be innovating, pushing.

Later that night, after the successful flight and landing, Musk held a teleconference with reporters. Ars asked Musk how confident he had been in success of the mission, both launching the new booster and sticking the landing.

"I wasn't at all confident that we would succeed, but I'm really glad of it," he replied. "It's been 13 years since SpaceX was started. We've had a lot of close calls. I think people here are overjoyed."

Musk has since told confidants that it was this Block 3 version of the Falcon 9 rocket that put SpaceX on top of the commercial satellite launch competition, elbowing out Russia, China, and Europe’s state-run rocket companies for a lot of this business. The more powerful Block 3 rocket also allowed SpaceX to begin launching heavier payloads for the US military. With Block 3, Musk felt as though he had the best rocket in the world.

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And now, the Block 5

Musk wasn't wrong. It is true that SpaceX suffered another serious setback in September 2016 with the loss of a Falcon 9 during a launch pad test. Within the industry, there were murmurs that SpaceX was all hype, that it played too fast and loose to ever build a safe and reliable rocket. What good were low prices, competitors said, if the rocket had a non-trivial chance of blowing up, and customers had to wait years to get into space?

But then, the Block 3 rocket and its successor, the Block 4, began to shine. In 2017, SpaceX finally unleashed the “steamroller”—an industry buzzword for the company's ability to fly the low-cost Falcon 9 rocket more frequently. SpaceX flew 18 missions last year with the Block 3 and Block 4 versions of its rocket, and the company has completed seven flights of the Falcon 9 rocket through April of this year.

Now comes the Block 5. This new version includes myriad changes and upgrades that SpaceX anticipates will optimize the Falcon 9 for reusability. (Although the company has not released any official information, the reddit community has created a list based upon various statements made by Musk and the company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell).

The changes reflect what SpaceX has learned after that fateful December 2015 landing. The company has since recovered more than 20 rockets by land and sea, meticulously studying the wear and tear on the first stage booster structure, engines, and fuel tanks. The Block 5 version will therefore include modifications such as improved thermal shielding around the Merlin engines, unpainted components to save mass, and changes to the octaweb structure that holds the engines so they can be inspected, refurbished, and tested more quickly.

Shotwell and other company officials have said their initial goal with the Block 5 rocket is to fly each booster 10 times before significant refurbishment and to bring down the time between a rocket launch from months to weeks. In the aerospace industry, such rapid reusability of a rocket’s first stage is unheard of. But it is not a stretch to say that SpaceX may well pull this off.

“My experience with SpaceX has been that it has achieved its engineering goals,” said Carissa Christensen, an expert in commercial space analysis and founder and chief executive of Bryce Space and Technology. “They have set audacious, ambitious, and exciting goals before. And if SpaceX is saying that is the engineering goal, just based on past experience, it would be foolhardy to say they won’t get there.”

But given that SpaceX has already grabbed a significant chunk of the commercial launch industry with a booster that flies at most twice, what extra impact would an ultra-reusable rocket have?

How much it will cost

The answer depends on several questions. How much will SpaceX charge for launching on the Block 5 rocket over time? How much will it cost SpaceX to refurbish the Block 5 rocket? And if SpaceX reduces the price of launch, will demand over time increase?

In regard to price, SpaceX does not intend to discount the price of a Falcon 9 launch on the Block 5 rocket right away. “There’s no change,” company spokesman James Gleeson told Ars. There is speculation that eventually SpaceX may drop the price by 20 to 40 percent for Block 5 launches, from $62 million for a standard Falcon 9 launch down to around $40 million.

But for now, there is no immediate incentive for SpaceX to drop the price of a Falcon 9 launch. The company already has the lowest-cost orbital rocket in its class flying today. In dropping the price, Musk would be undercutting himself.

Down the line, one potential incentive for SpaceX to cut prices for the Falcon 9 rocket would be to increase the overall pool of customers. If it costs less to get into space, does that lower the barrier to more applications?

Dramatically cheaper launch costs may help close the business case for other ventures in space beyond traditional science, television, and observational satellites. Several companies, including SpaceX, are developing constellations of hundreds to thousands of satellites that could deliver Internet access from low-Earth orbit. Cheap launches might also help close the business case for space-based solar power, but that technology remains a ways off.

David Alexander, the director of the Rice Space Institute, noted that Japan has announced a nearly $1 billion space technology innovation fund and that countries such as China, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Europe are pushing for more data from remote sensing observations in low-Earth orbit.

“I think the biggest benefit is the broader access it would provide to a wide range of space entrepreneurs,” Alexander said of the potential for the Block 5 rocket to lower the cost of launch. “Cheaper access to space will only accelerate this.”

However, this seems unlikely to push demand for launches right away. Several experts Ars spoke to noted that the market for the launch of large satellites to low-Earth and geostationary orbit has remained fairly static. Because these satellites cost so much, saving $10 million or $20 million on launch costs probably won’t significantly increase the number of them being launched.

“I don’t think halving the launch cost makes a huge difference,” Christensen said. “Demand might be somewhat stimulated by lower prices, but space is expensive, and launch is a small part of it.”

Profit-taking, maybe

Several sources suggested SpaceX may reduce the price of the Falcon 9 rocket to further pressure its beleaguered competitors, including US-based United Launch Alliance as well as international providers in China, Russia, Europe, and elsewhere. However, none of these competitors is likely to go away, at least not soon. In the United States, United Launch Alliance remains a trusted partner of government agencies, and none of the other global space powers is likely to abandon its launch industries soon.

Despite these potential incentives, SpaceX will probably keep the Falcon 9 at more or less the same price point for a while and seek to profit from a decade of investing in innovations such as reusability. This makes sense, because it is not clear whether SpaceX is profitable at the current price point of a Falcon 9 rocket used once or twice.

The company now has in excess of 6,000 employees, and just meeting that payroll and keeping large facilities in California, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere operating probably costs on the order of $1 to $1.25 billion, experts told Ars. At a rate of $62 million per launch, it would take 20 launches a year just to cover these expenses. And this assumes that vehicle production costs are zero, which of course is not true.

This over-simplistic calculation suggests that the privately held SpaceX has been able to sustain its low launch prices to date thanks to development contracts from NASA for commercial cargo and crew services. It stands to reason therefore that, for a time at least, the company may just pocket any reuse “dividend.” Certainly, as SpaceX ramps up production of the Big Falcon Rocket—for which it has already acquired land for a manufacturing plant—it will need fistfuls of money.

Musk's madness

Every orbital rocket since the dawn of the Space Age, except for components of the space shuttle, has been thrown away after a single flight. The space shuttle mastered the art of re-flying a spacecraft, with Discovery launching and landing a record 39 times. However, NASA was never able to substantially cut the turnaround time between the landing and launch of an orbiter, a period that typically lasted six to 12 months. (The record is 54 days, between the first and second flight of Atlantis in 1985). More importantly, shuttle refurbishments were costly. Over the entire lifetime of the program, the incremental, per-flight cost of a space shuttle mission came to about $1 billion.

SpaceX has an opportunity to change this paradigm—to truly achieve rapid, reusable, low-cost spaceflight. And it has done so quickly. Should the Block 5 succeed in under a decade, SpaceX will have gone from a company that had never flown a rocket into space to having developed the most efficient orbital booster ever flown.

Because of this success, and its growing share of the commercial launch market, the Falcon 9 rocket has sent virtually all of SpaceX’s competitors scrambling to develop new boosters to try to compete. The Falcon 9 has pushed many of them to look into reusability, too.

For SpaceX, however, having caught and largely surpassed its orbital competitors, it is now time to move on. Sure, it will maintain a skeleton crew to continue fabricating a few Block 5 rockets. But if you really can fly a rocket like this 10 times, how many do you need to build a year?

So the company plans to turn its sights toward the larger Big Falcon Rocket that may one day enable human settlement elsewhere in the Solar System. In reporting this article, one source expressed amazement at this apparent madness. Why would SpaceX want to obsolete its own, dominant products?

A bit of history helps answer this. In the early 2000s, Musk was told he could never privately finance an orbital rocket. Then, he was told it was madness to try to land them on a boat. And then, he heard how foolhardy it was to try to strap three rockets together and light 27 engines at the same time. Elon Musk does not care all that much to hear about his madness.

Perhaps it is mad for SpaceX to work feverishly to obsolete its Falcon 9 rocket, which it has spent a decade perfecting. But this was not a company founded to appease shareholders, plural. It was founded to appease a single shareholder. And he wants to go to Mars, damn it.