January-May 2005 update: Falcon I development essentially complete

From:: Elon Musk
Date:: June 2005 (Covers January through May 2005. Space.com called it 'a just-issued SpaceX update' on June 8, 2005; HobbySpace noted on June 8, 2005 that 'the latest SpaceX update is now available'.)
To:: SpaceX update mailing list

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

Falcon I development is essentially complete [...] There are also a number of other customer discussions that are quite mature. It appears quite likely that we will receive one or two more launch contracts over the next few months [...] Not yet mentioned on our manifest or in any press release is our classified launch business, for obvious reasons [...] JSC is the primary NASA center for human spaceflight and, since human transportation is the primary long term goal of SpaceX, we are likely to be doing a lot of work in partnership [...] Now that development of Falcon I is almost over, we are turning our focus to Falcon 5 [...] We have tripled in size from a year ago and are now at about 130 employees

About this email

Musk's first long newsletter of 2005, issued after the May 27 Falcon I hold-down firing at Vandenberg. Only the sentences Space.com quoted from it could be retrieved: Falcon I development is essentially complete, more launch contracts are expected, attention is turning to Falcon 5, and the company has about 130 employees.

Notes

Full newsletter not retrieved; no surviving reprint was found. These are only the passages Space.com quoted, in the order the article gives them, each as quoted (some are sentence fragments and end where the article's quotation ends). The article attributes all of them to the written update. The newsletter's own title was not seen on any retrieved page, so subject is left blank. The update also described the May 27 pad firing as 'picture perfect'. Text was retrieved through a page reader, so punctuation and paragraph breaks may differ slightly from the original page.

Where it came from

Published by Musk; attribution single-source.

SpaceX, newsletter. Tags: spacex-update, falcon-1, falcon-5, launch-manifest, nasa, hiring

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