Another of Elon Musk’s companies, spaceX, continues on a roll like Tesla. Wednesday morning there was a beautiful launch of a Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket’s nine Merlin engines put 60 more StarLink satellites in orbit to expand the Internet service goals of the company. We will hear much more about this in coming months. After the stage 1 booster separated, it returned to Earth and made a perfect landing on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. I was able to see the rocket from my terrace which is about  80 miles north. Atop the rocket were the 60 satellites and two fairing pieces, like a clam shell, which protect the satellites during the trip to space. A fairing is 43 ft long and 17 ft in diameter. It weighs approximately 4,000 pounds. After the two fairing halves tumbled back to Earth, a spaceX ship in the ocean with a huge net was able to catch one of the fairings. Truly amazing. The other fairing had a near miss at a second ship. A fairing costs about $6 million, so the attempts are  worthwhile. Isn’t it amazing American and Russian space agencies have not thought of re-using booster rockets and fairings after their many decades at space launches?

Tesla has now reached a market capitalization of $103 billion and Apple now exceeds $1.4 trillion. Microsoft is almost at $1.3 trillion. Amazon and Google are north of $900 billion and Facebook is approaching $600 million. Who would have thought these numbers would be possible?

The next Meet the Author event will be February 6 in Palm Coast, Florida. Additional author events will be held in Florida during the 1st quarter of 2020 and then more back in Connecticut in the Spring. The table below shows events scheduled so far. Details on upcoming events will follow. Questions to [email protected]