Slashdot Mirror

it's a distro planned and financed by a very rich and somewhat famous man who is doing alot to promote open source in South Africa. It will probably have, if it doesn't already, the prominant local languages embedded in it.

so it may not be very well known here, but it will have an impact there. imagine one of America's most rich and famous men (besides gates) starting a distro with as much money behind it as they cared to spend, which in Shuttlesworth's case, is alot. so i wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be better than most community distros

• Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova First woman in space.
• Guion Bluford First african american in space.
• Laika first of earths inhabitants in space (baring alien abductions, etc).
• Tito first tourist.... Shuttlesworth - first guy from his whole continent...

You can check out their website here. Most of their real money-making launches have been Earth imaging of one sort or another (e.g. their current big project - the Disaster Monitoring Constellation - is all about responsive Earth imaging). However, they've also flown several scientific and experimental payloads, they just landed a contract to do some of the prototype work on Galileo, and have a good business helping other countries get space programs up and running in a short amount of time.

The X-prize is a philanthropic donation made by a bunch of really rich guys. This kind of money will help us achieve certain milestones, but once they've been achieved it will vanish. Unless we can find buisiness in space, it won't work as it did with airplanes because people don't NEED to go to space, nor does much mail need delivering.

The X-prize is modeled after the prizes that kick-started aviation in the early decades of the 20th century. It's not intended to last forever, it's intended to provide the impetus for developing things that will be self-sustaining, but aren't self-starting. People don't NEED to go into the air either - but it gets them there faster. Cheap suborbital transportation could drastically reduce point-to-point travel times. In an age of global business and "just-in-time" everything, that seems like it could make some money. I'm sure Fedex would happily charge a premium for "same-hour, anywhere in the world" service too.

These companies are aiming to serve the comsat community, which isn't doing anything really spectacular when you think of it. I agree that the technology and achievement is cool, but they're not breaking any new ground.

Read my comment again. I said smallsat launcher. Smallsats are not usually used as comsats (with the possible exception of Orbcomm), since comsats need massive amounts of power that smallsats don't have. My point was that several companies believe that there is enough of a market for smallsat launches that they're trying hard to win that market. I don't know what the business plan of all those smallsat customers is, but I can tell you that cheap, responsive launches and rapidly built smallsats open up business possibilities that don't exist right now.

They launched 1 guy, once. The other two potential customers (Lance Bass and that guy from South Africa) couldn't afford it and decided it wasn't worth the cost respectively. Given NASA's new failures, you're not going to see any new tourists in space any time soon. All this also neglects the fact that these tourists were riding on government funded infrastructure, and their costs only paid a fraction of a percent of the costs of the entire program.

Two, actually. Mark Shuttleworth went up last year. Both Tito's and Shuttleworth's tickets more than covered the cost of their flights. Sure, two flights doesn't cover the cost of the program. But two flights doesn't cover the cost of a 747 either. It's all about volume. And NASA's shuttle woes won't do a whole lot to the Russian space program - the Soyuz is well known to be far more robust than the fickle shuttle.

They're still going to lose a bundle on developing and launching the system. This is done out of nationalistic neccesity, not to be a commercially viable competitor to GPS. And few private companies today could muster the resources to launch such a program, even if the returns were guaranteed and the risks of failure were much lower than they are now.

I wouldn't be so sure about the ROI on Galileo. Sure there won't be an immediate return, but I suspect they could pay for it over the long haul. Particularly if aircraft start getting into precision GPS approaches. That's a very large number of subscriptions right there. And there are lots of other businesses that would probably be willing

In their suits I think they wear catheters (spel?) for urinal excretions and I found this link after a little insert-verb-that-means-same-as-Googling-but-withou t-using-trademark.

Space Toilet Picture

Space Toilet Description.

Well... if one of those three is Mark Shuttleworth then you probably don't have the minimum net worth to qualify for their union. :)

By the way, am I the only person why think that name is hilarious for a guy who ended flying in a Russion rocket?

It's interesting that /. completely ignored the world's second space tourist, and the first African in space. South African .com millionare Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Thawte, and who lists /., Linux and Mozilla among his favourite things, spent 11 days is space, from the 25th of April to the 5th of May.

Guess the integrity of /. is so high that $20 million can't even buy you a story...

Regards,
-Jeremy

...according to his page at AfricanInSpace.

Maybe when he's back he could do an interview for us.

A lot of information is to be found at the First African In Space website. The are also a lot of pre-launch images in their photo gallery as well as more info on Thawte's founder Mark Shuttleworth.

A lot of information is to be found at the First African In Space website. The are also a lot of pre-launch images in their photo gallery as well as more info on Thawte's founder Mark Shuttleworth.

From the africaninspace.com site, it looks like he wants to do Stem Cell research, your standard Physiology stuff (heart rate, etc.) and some Protein Crystallisation for HIV and allergy drugs.