A2
Politics & The Nation
Obama’s win apparently hasn’t helped black politicians ....................A3 3 Republican Senate candidates offer models for comeback...............A3 Arizona governor, Obama discuss immigration ...................................A3 Kagan tested by 1990s battles over tobacco legislation .......................A4
The World
American teenager among those killed in Israeli raid .........................A6 Netanyahu maintains defiance amid criticism ....................................A6 Six researchers to take 520-day simulated flight to Mars ....................A7 China’s leaders split over ties to Washington........................................A8 Burma is taking steps toward nuclear weapons program...................A8
Economy & Business
Economy growing slowly but steadily..................................................A13 Many former lawmakers, Hill staffers are financial lobbyists ...........A14 Wal-Mart, online school to offer college credit to workers ................A14
CORRECTIONS
moth Theatre. Its run has been extended through June 19.
The Good to Go feature in the June 2 Food section, reviewing the Rebel Heroes food truck, mis- spelled the name of a co-owner. He is Rob Ochsendorf, not Ach- sendorf.
MICHAEL TEMCHINE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Dane Nester plates salads.
A photo caption with a June 2 Food article about community dinners put on by the Baltimore Development Cooperative mis- identified the man pictured as chef Matt Day. He is Dane Nester, creative assistant to the chef. The photo is reprinted here.
A Mini Review in today’s Week- end section, which was printed in advance, lists an incorrect closing date for the play “Gruesome Play- ground Injuries” at Woolly Mam-
·· E-mail
corrections@washpost.com.
A June 1 A-section article in- correctly said that the American Action Network is an affiliate of both the U.S. Chamber of Com- merce and the political advocacy group American Crossroads. It is an affiliate of American Cross- roads.
A May 30 Arts & Style article about history as theater in Wash- ington incorrectly said that four black students who staged a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960 had been arrested. None of them were arrested. It also incorrectly de- scribed the authorship of a short play about the incident at the Na- tional Museum of American His- tory. It was written by Christo- pher Wilson alone, not by Wilson and Jamila Lewis.
The Washington Post is committed to correcting errors that appear in the newspaper. Those interested in contacting the paper for that purpose can:
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I
R
KLMNO
FRIDAY, JUNE 4, 2010
One giant leap for privatization?
Successful launch of Falcon 9 rocket could give boost to commercial spaceflight
by Marc Kaufman
in hawthorne, calif.
f all goes well, a rocket built by an Internet entrepreneur in a former Boeing 747 fuselage
factory will launch into space Fri- day — from one of the storied pads at Cape Canaveral. And up into the lofty heights with the Falcon 9, the first of a new generation of more-powerful commercial rockets, will go the ambition embraced by the Oba- ma administration and NASA: to privatize spaceflight. The countdown to Friday’s launch is palpable at the SpaceX headquarters. This huge factory, across from a Lowe’s home sup- plies store in a small suburb of Los Angeles, is setting its sights on becoming an essential hub in the burgeoning U.S. commercial space industry. Started eight years ago by Elon
Musk of PayPal fame, the factory is not quite an assembly line. But it does have the resources and ambition to build as many as 12 rockets and four capsules a year. There’s a tense focus on the up- coming launch among the almost 900 men and women who work at the plant. Their tasks include molding engine parts in the buzz- ing metal shop, assembling the space capsule in a glass-sided clean room and selling SpaceX rocket services to governments and companies around the world. They know that if the Falcon
rocket lifts off successfully and puts its unmanned Dragon cap- sule into orbit, Musk’s Space Ex- ploration Technologies, or SpaceX, will become an essential player in the burgeoning com- mercial space industry. A success will also provide a much-needed boost to President Obama’s con- troversial plans to privatize cargo —and later, astronaut crew trans- port — to and from the interna- tional space station. But the company and adminis-
KLMNO
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U.S. military networks in war zones could be targeted, Alexander says
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New Cyber Command chief warns of possible attacks
something we must treat seri- ously,” said Gen. Keith B. Alexan- der, who also heads the National Security Agency, the nation’s larg- est intelligence agency. “Our De- partment of Defense must be able to operate freely and defend its re- sources in cyberspace.” Alexander spoke Thursday be- fore more than 300 people at the Center for Strategic and Interna- tional Studies in Washington. In remarks afterward, Alexan- der said he is concerned about the safety of computer systems used in war zones. “The concern I have is when you look at what could happen to a computer, clearly sab- otage and destruction are things that are yet to come,” he said. “If
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we don’t defend our systems, peo- ple will be able to break them.” James A. Lewis, director of
CSIS’s Technology and Public Pol- icy Program, said advanced mil- itaries are capable of destroying U.S. computer systems. “That wasn’t true four years ago, but it’s true now and Cyber Command will have to deal with it,” he said. The Cyber Command, launched last month at Fort Meade, was created by Defense Secretary Rob- ert M. Gates to streamline the military’s capabilities to attack and defend in cyberspace, sup- ported by NSA’s intelligence capa- bilities. Alexander stressed that the Command will focus on protect-
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ing the U.S. military’s 15,000 com- puter networks under oversight of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Congress and the administration. His remarks were aimed at assuaging concerns over the NSA’s role in helping to protect civilian and private-sector networks, as well as fears of a “militarization” of cyberspace. “We spend a lot of time with the
court, with Congress, the admin- istration, the oversight commit- tees to ensure they know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” Alexander said. This is done in classified set- tings, he said, including before the surveillance court, set up as part of the effort to protect Amer- icans from unwarranted govern- ment surveillance. “The hard part is, we can’t go out and tell everybody exactly what we did or we give up capabil- ity that may be extremely useful in protecting our country and our allies,” he said. Alexander’s confirmation was
delayed for months by congres- sional concerns over the com- mand’s role and scope of action, how its operations would affect Americans’ privacy, and a lack of clarity over rules of the road in cy- ber warfare. The rules are still being debat- ed and formulated, he said. So are the rules of engagement for work- ing with the Department of Homeland Security and private industry in protecting the private sector’s systems, which is perhaps the most difficult challenge. But Alexander has his hands full just hardening the military’s systems. DOD systems are probed by unauthorized users more than 6million times a day. “While our front-line defenses are up to this challenge, we still have to devote too much of our time and resources to dealing with relatively mundane prob- lems,” such as poorly engineered software and missing patches, he said.
nakashimae@washpost.com
tration are aware that rockets rarely perform flawlessly on a maiden voyage. “Launching a rocket and send- ing a capsule into orbit is very, very hard,” said Musk, who spends almost every waking hour e-mailing his launch team and go- ing over all the things that could go wrong and need to be checked. The pressure, he said with some- thing of a grimace, is enormous. “If I was in it for the money, then I would be crazy,” he said. “You have to want to help send people into space.” Musk’s ambition is startling:
He envisions commercial compa- nies such as SpaceX someday building a fleet of cheap rockets
ourselves.” It was that promised low cost and apparent reliability of the Falcon 9 that attracted the Oba- ma administration and NASA leaders. With the Bush-era Con- stellation program well behind schedule and over budget, the Obama administration an- nounced its demise in February and said NASA would get out of the crew and cargo ferry business and back into cutting-edge hu- man exploration beyond Earth orbit. The cancellation has led to loud protests from Congress, especial- ly from Gulf Coast lawmakers, some of whose constituents stand to lose NASA jobs under the new commercial space plan. But icon- ic astronauts including Neil Arm- strong and Eugene A. Cernan have also condemned the plan, which would bypass Bush’s pro- posal to set up a colony on the moon. Musk and his SpaceX went from being the darling of space enthusiasts to a supposedly well- connected and greedy upstart. Musk, who invested more than $100 million of his money in SpaceX, called the criticism wounding though inevitable. “They have a whole building full of lobbyists and press people who are flooding Congress and painting us as an unacceptable risk,” he said. “We have basically one guy and a few press people.” Given the strong opposition to
SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES CORP VIA BLOOMBERG
The Falcon 9 is scheduled for launch Friday. The company that built it envisions offering rockets and spacecraft for commercial use.
“If I was in it for the money, then I would be crazy,” said Internet
entrepreneur Elon Musk of his venture.
and spacecraft that would fly to a Mars transformed and made hab- itable through the even more vi- sionary process of “terraforming.” Musk, 39, still has some of his boyish appearance and boyish en- thusiasm. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, he operates out of a modest office in the open work- place that SpaceX has created. But shouting distance away, across the 500,000-square-foot manufacturing floor, workers are literally building rockets from the ground up. In one section, men attach pipes, filters and computer boards to the oxygen and kero- sene-fueled engines; enormous metal cylinders wait on the plant floor to be welded together for the fuel tanks. Falcon 9 project manager John
Insprucker, a retired Air Force rocket program specialist, said one outside wall opens for trucks carrying the assembled compo- nents. Heavy-lift cranes are at- tached to the ceiling. The Falcon 9 alone weighs 734,000 pounds, so “we need to do some heavy lift- ing,” Insprucker said. Men and women operate whir-
ring, water-spitting machine tools like those in any heavy- industry factory. The Dragon cap- sule is off-limits in the clean room, but you can see teams of su- per-serious (and often tattooed) men and women poking, probing and adding parts. Musk said he never planned the company to be quite so self-sufficient — design- ing and building often from scratch the thousands of parts that go into a rocket. But his goal of making space travel cheap and reliable made it necessary. He quickly learned that tradi- tional suppliers “were accus- tomed to charging much more than we were willing to pay. It’s a pain, but we concluded we had to do most of the manufacturing
Obama’s space-exploration plans by congressional Republicans in particular, Musk considers it ironic that SpaceX got its most important boosts from NASA be- fore Obama became president. The company won a $300 mil- lion competitive grant to help de- velop its capacity to fly cargo to and from the station in 2006 un- der the congressionally mandated Commercial Orbital Transporta- tion Services. It also won a com- petitive $1.6 billion contract to supply the space station between 2011 and 2015. SpaceX was awarded that con-
tract in December 2008. The com- pany launched a satellite for Ma- laysia on its first rocket, the small- er Falcon 1, and has 15 contracts in addition to its space station re- supply missions, including two for the government of Argentina. Obama toured the Falcon 9 launch site when he came down to make a speech defending his program. Musk said he spent 15 minutes with the president, who at one point seemed to be study- ing him.
“I think he wanted to get a sense if I was dependable or a lit- tle nuts,” he said.
kaufmanm@washpost.com
NF407 1x.5
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