June 2003 update: range safety system quote

From:: Elon Musk
Date:: June 2003 (Update 'covering events through June' 2003; HobbySpace reported its arrival on 21 July 2003.)
To:: SpaceX update mailing list

Excerpt. Only this much of the email has been made public.

it is a bit sad to spend so much money and effort on a system that we hope will never be used.

About this email

Only one sentence of this newsletter survives in the source found: on the flight termination system, Musk remarks that it is a little sad to spend so much on something SpaceX hopes never to use. HobbySpace's paraphrased summary says the update also covered Falcon Heavy pricing, a slip of the first launch to January, ablative chamber tests and turbopump progress.

Notes

Excerpt only: these are the passages that HobbySpace's RLV News quoted verbatim from the newsletter when it came out; HobbySpace's own paraphrased highlights are not included. The complete newsletter was posted on spacex.com (Updates section), which is no longer online, and no full-text reprint was found. The rest of the HobbySpace item (21 July 2003) is a paraphrased summary by Jonathan Goff. The quote is a sentence fragment as HobbySpace printed it.

Where it came from

Published by Musk; attribution single-source.

HobbySpace RLV News (Clark S. Lindsey)

SpaceX, newsletter. Tags: spacex-update, falcon-1, range-safety, turbopump

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