{"id":7993,"date":"2016-12-05T23:29:26","date_gmt":"2016-12-06T06:29:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7993"},"modified":"2016-12-09T23:33:56","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T06:33:56","slug":"rocket-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/12\/05\/rocket-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Rocket Men"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Guardian<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Rocket men: why tech\u2019s biggest billionaires want their place in space<\/h1>\n

Forget gilded mansions and super yachts. Among the tech elite, space exploration is now the ultimate status symbol<\/strong><\/p>\n

by\u00a0Dan Tynan<\/a>\u00a0in San Francisco<\/p>\n

\"RichardRichard Branson with a Virgin Galactic space aircraft at the company\u2019s Mojave desert headquarters. Photograph: Barry J Holmes for the Observer<\/em><\/p>\n

The\u00a0explosion<\/a>\u00a0could be felt 30 miles away. At 9.07am on 1 September, a SpaceX rocket containing 75,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene\u00a0ignited into a fireball that could be seen from orbit<\/a>, billowing black smoke into the gray sky around its Cape Canaveral launch pad.<\/p>\n

On board was a $200m, 12,000lb communications satellite \u2013 part of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s Internet.org project to deliver broadband access to sub-Saharan Africa.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg wrote, with a note of bitterness, on his Facebook page that he was \u201cdeeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX\u2019s launch failure destroyed our satellite\u201d. SpaceX founder\u00a0Elon Musk<\/a>\u00a0told CNN it was the \u201cmost difficult and complex failure\u201d the 14-year-old company had ever experienced.<\/p>\n

It was also the second dramatic explosion in nine months for SpaceX, following a \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly<\/a>\u201d of a booster rocket as it attempted to land after a successful mission to the International Space Station.<\/p>\n

Later that day,\u00a0Nasa\u2019s official Twitter account<\/a>\u00a0responded: \u201cToday\u2019s\u00a0@SpaceX<\/a>\u00a0incident \u2013 while not a Nasa launch \u2013 reminds us that spaceflight is challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet despite those challenges, a small band of billionaire technocrats have spent the past few years investing hundreds of millions of dollars into space ventures. Forget gilded mansions and super yachts; among the tech elite, space exploration is the ultimate status symbol.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Guardian Rocket men: why tech\u2019s biggest billionaires want their place in space Forget gilded mansions and super yachts. Among the tech elite, space exploration is now the ultimate status symbol by\u00a0Dan Tynan\u00a0in San Francisco Richard Branson with a Virgin Galactic space aircraft at the company\u2019s Mojave desert headquarters. Photograph: Barry J Holmes for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}