Word: musk
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...Quake games, is test-firing rockets for the next generation of spaceliners and lunar landers near Dallas. In California, Jim Benson, founder of Compusearch, is developing a space taxi with a motor that runs on rubber and laughing gas. (Don't laugh. It works.) PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, who has a NASA contract to build a robotic Pony Express to the International Space Station (ISS), is pouring his own millions into a ship for galactic travelers at his factory south of Los Angeles. Robert Bigelow, founder of Budget Suites of America, already has a small-scale, inflatable space station...
...developed in great secrecy by Bezos' Blue Origin looks like a lopped-off nose cone. The three-seater, fueled by hydrogen peroxide (yup, the common household disinfectant, though in a highly purified form, with a touch of kerosene) appears based on an old Delta Clipper design done for NASA. Musk's SpaceX designers favor the NASA look too--of old Apollo capsules--but that translates into ocean splashdowns...
...Musk and Carmack represent the opposite extremes of the business. Musk already has a working business, operating SpaceX since 2002 out of a warren of old repair shops and warehouses in El Segundo, Calif., an area with a long aerospace history. He plans to move soon to nearby Hawthorne, into a cavernous plant that once turned out 747s. He has set aside half of his $200 million PayPal payout and has hired close to 250 people, from such outfits as Boeing and Grumman as well as from Silicon Valley...
While most of his competitors have shunned the bureaucratic NASA, he bid for and won a $278 million NASA contract to develop a delivery service to the ISS. For Musk, 35, space travel is a childhood dream, not just for exploration but as a logical next stage in man's evolution from the primordial goop. "To our knowledge, life exists on only one planet, Earth. If something bad happens, it's gone," he says. "I think we should establish life on another planet--Mars in particular--but we're not making very good progress. SpaceX is intended to make that...
...consumers and hoping to cash in on the $8.3 billion Americans already spend annually on air fresheners, candles and scented plug-ins. In August, ScentAir began offering a small home version of its smell machine for $30 a month. It comes with scent choices like eucalyptus mint, citrus musk and lavender with ylang-ylang, a derivative of a south Asian evergreen tree said to have aromatherapeutic benefits. "By comparison," says Van Epps, "plug-ins scream Grandma's bathroom aerosol...