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Certainly not a Saturn V, but still interesting:

http://www.spacex.com/index.html?section=falcon&co ntent=http%3A//www.spacex.com/falcon_v.php

Well, you would love the SpaceX Falcon then. Reusable first stage. And, to their credit, the initial cut-rate launch costs are based on the assumption that the recovery parachute doesn't work, instead of assuming that everything works perfectly.

a) the vehicle may blind by reflected light at a considerable distance (100m - 1km or more- think of the wildlife [handwring]).

b) it ideally uses pure liquid hydrogen fuel; this means that the fuel tank ends up pretty heavy relative to the fuel (heavier than the space shuttle, because the Space Shuttle tank also holds LOX, so the average propellent density is rather better.) The ratio of the vehicle weight full/empty is critical in a high performing rocket- so this rocket doesn't perform as well as you would hope- it's not a SSTO solution, not quite, so he has a drop tank or two.

c) got a few billion? The lasers are very expensive... note that conventional rockets can be designed for *well* under a billion if you don't do anything fancy (see SpaceX)

d) it works best when you are launching a lot, but then again, just about any launch system gets cheap real fast if you launch a lot; and this one is expensive up front, so you have to launch even more to offset this.

Still, it's a very cool idea, and he's still working on it. But I can't shake the feeling Jordin has missed something that will move the idea up one more notch.

There are plenty of people developing new space transports. Most notably spacex. But there are many more such as the mysterious Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos and of course Burt Rutans followup to the SpaceShipOne.

And even if these efforts all fail, there are plenty of relatively cheap launchers available today, most notably the russian proton and the zenit sea launch.

And we most definitely do not need a new shuttle. We need cheap access to space, and the shuttle was a total failure in this regard.

The first test flight of Bigelow Aerospace will use the cheap Falcon V launcher that is currently developed by Elon Musk, the former owner of paypal. So there is a good cooperation between the different private companies in the alt.space community.

With the Space Shuttle still grounded, the new generation of American boosters still being developed, and demand for reliable launching rockets building up around the world, the prospect of having a huge already-constructed supply of giant boosters built by the most experienced and reliable rocket engineers on earth has been embraced around the world.

I say: Yeah right! The shuttle hasn't launched a satellite in years, let alone a commercial payload. And the 'new generation' of American boosters aren't 'still being developed', they exist right now: the Pegasus and Taurus (Orbital Sciences Corp) at the low end of the market, and the EELVs, i.e. Delta IV and Atlas V (Boeing and Lockheed respectively), at the high end of the market (NASA 'next-gen' launch vehicle will most likely be one of the EELVs). Yet Boeing and Lockheed both claimed they couldn't get sufficient commercial launch contracts for their EELVs, and thus jacked the price up on the DOD launches they were slated to do. Even Pegasus and Taurus launches are rare. Why? Because the cost a crapload! Launch costs can be a significant fraction (up to 50%) of the cost of a satellite. Commercial contractors are launching on Russian rockets because they can do it for 1/5 to 1/10 of the price of a US launch.

The only 'next-gen' launch vehicle likely to put a dent in that anytime soon is SpaceX's Falcon, which promises launch costs on the order of $6M. If they can actually pull it off, Falcon has the potential to be a game changer in the launch market. Until then, cheap Russian launches are the way to go.

Currently, satellite launches can cost in the hundreds of millions.

Currently, satellite launches can cost anywhere between a couple of hundred thousand (as a secondary payload) to hundreds of millions. It depends a lot on what you are trying to launch, and to where. The expensive launches are typically large (1000's of kilograms) satellites going to GEO. That said, $5M a launch will be a significant reduction for primary launch capability, but it will probably intially only be to LEO altitudes.

Who needs 'big aerospace' anyway? :)

Vega is a solid-fueled launcher based on the Ariane V boosters. Solid-fueled launchers are great for the military since they can launch at a moments notice, but other than that they are a big PITA.

Since they arrive at the launch complex fully fueled, they are a major safety risk. There have been numerous accidents with solid-fueled boosters. The last major accident was in brazil, and it killed several people and completely destroyed the launch complex.

The solid fueled boosters of the shuttle make assembly much more difficult, and if a shuttle SRB were to accidentally go off while in the assembly building, it would probably kill hundreds of people. That is why NASA tries to limit the number of people working on the shuttle while the SRB are attached, which of course increases the cost and the processing time.

For a really modern and cheap small launcher, take a look at the falcon.

--

SpaceX is probably the most advanced of the new low-cost launchers. Interestingly, the man behind SpaceX is the founder of PayPal, who got out while the getting was good.

SpaceX is dedicated to creating a pair of low-cost extremely simple launchers. They've created their own engines based on a very simple design, and their own turbopump. The engines are LOX/RP1 (basically kerosene) engines, which are extremely well known, inexpensive and available.

There was a nice writeup on SpaceX in Aviation Week two weeks ago. They have been testing their engines and plan to launch their first orbital mission within a year or so.

It's always a longshot betting on any of these small rocket companies actually launching a rocket successfully. It's even harder to make money doing it. Lockheed built a small, solid fueled rocket of about the same class as the smaller of the SpaceX rockets about 10 years ago. The first one blew up, but the second and third ones succeeded. Unfortunately, the market for small launchers just didn't exist.

SpaceX has a government payload signed up for their first rocket. If it is successful, and they can really launch rockets for the rediculously small price that they quote, then perhaps they will be successful. More power to them!

thad

The X-Price vehicles itself will not compete with orbital launch vehicles. But they are a good way to learn how to build a real reusable space vehicle instead of just converted ICBMs like we have been doing for the last 50 years.

And there is a commercial rocket in production that is small compared to its competitors and has a reusable first stage. It will be used to launch satellites for the DOD, among others.

There are already plans to scale this vehicle up to a much larger size. And the first stage will still be reusable.

Single Stage to orbit, airbreathing, lands and takes off like a conventional aeroplane. A snip at $10 billion (R&D- ticket price would be about a not-totally-unreasonable $100,000).

It doesn't seem to require any handwavium or unobtainium unlike (at the moment at least) the Space Elevator.

Incremental advances seem unlikely to do it - it requires an orders-of-magnitude shift in cost.

That may well happen though. Some new launchers like SpaceX promises to be quite a bit cheaper- a combination of higher launch volume and real reductions in price due to improved vehicle design very probably can drop us by that much.

I'm surprised nobody has brought this up:

"The team hopes to send the mice into orbit in 2006 with a Falcon spacecraft, currently under development by SpaceX, a Californian company."

Assuming that the X-Prize launches stay suborbital, this could be the first new privately-built orbital launcher, excluding the old corporate launchers from Boeing/Lockheed, and rockets sourced from the Russians.

That being said, why stop at 5 weeks? Why not send up a rocket capable of holding supplies for the mice for months, with extra room for the inevitable population explosion? You could try to implement features of a self-sustaining ecosystem (a hydroponics tank, for example) to reduce the need to supply oxygen and water for the entire time period.

Of course, if you just wanted to test low-grav, we could probably build a special simulator on earth to spin the rodents up, with the floors sloped just enough to counteract earth's gravity (although you wouldn't be able to eliminate the interaction between the coriolis forces generated by the spin of the Earth and the spin of the simulator.) Doesn't generate cool press like 'Mouse-tronauts', but it could be cheaper for longer-term studies than having to loft orbital payloads on a regular basis.

That's probably not true. Check out Space X for example. Or Armadillo. The illusion needs shattering.

There's nothing inherently expensive about space (the fuel costs for putting something into space are under $50 per kg of payload for example)- it's just that right now there are so few launches that it's cheapest to throw the whole rocket away after each launch. Because it's so expensive, practically nobody goes. Catch 22.

Hmmm... perhaps you'd better tell the folks at Spacex, Microcosm, and Blue Origin about your expert insights in to the costs and benefits of entering the launch market. They may want to rethink their business plans.

The key question is whether or not it's possible for privately funded groups to get things into space. Right now every successful launch vehicle program that I'm aware of has been funded by a government. Which has led many people to believe that it costs so much to build a launch vehicle that only a government could afford it. Personally, having observed government space orgs an action, I'm more prone to believe that because launch vehicles have been government funded they cost a lot to build. Hopefully the X-prize guys, and groups like Elon Musk's SpaceX can validate that belief for me.

The problem with incremental development of RLVs is that there's a huge leap between the size and difficulty of putting something into space for five minutes (as in the current X-prize contenders) and putting it into orbit (as in the shuttle). That will make it difficult to evolve our way into a commercial space program.

If you attempted to go directly from an X Prize-class suborbital RLV directly to an orbital RLV, I would agree with you. However, there are intermediate steps along the way, notably suborbital RLVs with varying amounts of crossrange. Most of the X Prize vehicles are designed to take off and land at or very near the same place. Following generations of suborbital RLVs could be designed to travel downrange hundreds or thousands of kilometers, perhaps as incremental/scaled-up versions of X Prize-class vehicles. (Indeed, the X Prize organizers have discussed having, as a follow-on to the X Prize, a "Y Prize" that would require vehicles to also travel some distance downrange.) This opens up new markets, like rapid cargo delivery, and also pushes the designs of the vehicles closer to what's required for an orbital RLV. There will still be a leap from suborbital to orbital vehicles, but with careful design it need not be a huge one.

This incremental approach is also applicable beyond suborbital RLVs. Elon Musk's SpaceX has a similar incremental approach for its orbital launch vehicles, from the Falcon to the Falcon Heavy to an even larger vehicle that would use the two Falcon stages as upper stages. Note that Musk also has an interest in human spaceflight, and those requirements are being incorporated into the design of the Falcon and its successors.

Jeff Foust
The Space Review

Boeing recently canceled their Delta IV program due to a lack of customers in the commercial satellite business.

You didn't read the article. Boeing has not cancelled the Delta IV. Their launcher is still being considered for the manned OSP program, and has plenty of orders from the US military. Boeing only stopped taking new commercial orders for the Delta IV. This isn't a sign that space is stagnant, they're just coming to terms with the fact that their expensive rocket can't compete in a marketplace that passed them up years ago.

Space is heating up. Right now all the launches are going to countries with better rockets, but there are some startups like SpaceX and Orbital Recovery which have a good chance of turning things around for the American space industry.

This probably is a very pessimistic estimate. For somewhat more optimistic outlook, see Private Space Development Timeline Mind you Elon Musk of SpaceX is planning to launch his semi-reusable Falcon in January, 2004. That is, to orbit. Some other companies, like Microcosm and SpaceDev are on track to launch their low-cost orbital vehicles in quite near future too. If and when X-Prize is won, the efforts ( sub ~million per launch manned suborbital ) and current "cheap" launcher builders will converge and it isnt unreasonable to expect a couple million range manned orbital launches in this decade. Given some competition and general revitalization of industry, expect new high-tech technologies and materials to be employed real fast after initial proofs of concept, thus bringing the price down even further. Imagine, a million dollar orbital trip that could be won on lottery.

I thought I might point out the following webpage: http://www.hobbyspace.com/Links/RLVNews.html
I recently discovered this page, and it is really up-to-date with all sorts of initiatives with reusable launch vehicles, including a lot of promising commercial ones.
The enthousiasts there also seem to have given up on NASA. I share their opinion that to do it "Faster, better, cheaper", you need to steer clear of the good old NASA. I am especially interested in the Burt Rutan initiative, and the SpaceX rocket, which should fly beginning next year.

From the flash file:

"Ethernet Local Area Network connects computers and the vehicle to the ground."

From this we can ascertain:

- They're only gonna be able to put stuff into orbit at 2000m altitude, since they are using Ethernet media.

- They would have to simulaneously provide an amphibious vehicle with an attached Ethernet transciever to circle the globe below.

- The satellites they put into orbit will require propulsion to compensate for the severe friction that would occur at 2000 m altitude.

- They have found a way to encircle the globe without crossing public right-of-way (since it is a LAN, not a WAN).

Impressive.

They must have invented a way to put an airplane into orbit at ~ 9000 ft orbit using a 6 million dollar rocket, with a tether for air-to-ground communications!

on his company's webiste (http://www.spacex.com/) he claims that it is one third of the cost compared to "American Launching Vehicles"

Well, sounds like someone might actually build a spacecraft. Scaled Composites has designed a sub-orbital spacecraft launched from the belly of the plane. It is in testing now. They're trying to win the $10 million X-prize, by builing a re-usable spacecraft that can send three people to space (100km) and return them safely. Looks like a neat design, and these guys are for real. Passengers would have a 5-minute micro-gravity environment during the flight. Sounds really cool. Space.com has an excellent write-up.

In other news, the Columbia investigation continues, and Space Daily has a real good (but long) write-up.

But NASA soldiers on. They have 2 Mars missions scheduled for this summer, plus the launch of SIRTF (infra-red telescope), which was recently delayed. Check out Spaceflight Now for details, and the best space coverage, in general.

Oh hell, almost missed this one. Apparently, the founder of PayPal is trying to get into the "microsatellite" launch business, although 1000 pounds is a bit bigger than micro. The company, SpaceX, is based in El Segundo. But, I think these guys are biting off more than they can chew, essentially trying to compete with Boeing, Lockheed, and everyone else. I think Scaled Composites is for real, though; they might pull it off.

Along the same lines, a bunch of rich geeks over at SpaceX are building a rocket to go to space. Who needs NASA when you have a huge chunk o cash? Combine these two projects and you can start your very own space program!

No *kidding*. The *point* of HTML is that the author should *not* care or try to force a font size on the end user -- the end user should be free to choose whatever's most convenient for them.

Unfortunately, the market got flooded with "web designers" who came straight from print magazines or got all their ideas from print magazines.

Hi-Ho, a trolling we go, eh?

Look, I'll make this very simple. Plain text webpages are ugly. XHTML compatable pages are ugly. HTML 1.1 compatable pages are ugly. Leaving the border around your image link is ugly. Not using tables is ugly.

Why do you think people hire webdesigners? Because they know how to create an eye catching site. Why do you think magazines look like they look? Because, through trial and error, they have found what works.

People want webpages to seem alive. People want an interactive web. This is something that's a foreign concept to most linux users: You are all used to seeing pages like CGIwrap's webpage that is an assault to the eyes at the expense of being compatable with all browsers including lynx and mosaic. Or, you might get as advanced as the apache webpage which is not as much an assault on the senses, but is still boring.

I don't care what this loser says, he needs to get out of the ninteys and give people what they want. It's all about target marketing. Linux geeks are content to see pages like the cgi-wrap page. HOWEVER, normal people are impressed by things that move, things that make noise, things that interact. You're suggesting we should give people a bycicle because it'll get them from a to b and it's easy to use. But there will always be a market for flashy sport compacts, and if you ignore these people in favor of backwards compatability, you're going to alienate a good section of the population.

Take a look, for example, at the 2 Advanced Studios webpage. Tell me you've seen a cooler webpage, and I'll tell you you're lying. Or, take a look at some of the work they've done.

Making a good looking, interactive page, with javascript menus, flash animations, etc, means "I have taken an interest in my work, and I care what it looks like". Some of you may have seen his XHTML bullshit at the top of this page and thought, "Oh, wow, this guy is great. This page is so readable, and so well organized." But, what most of the rest of us that live in reality said was "Jesus, that's aweful. It looks like he made it with an old copy of Frontpage 98 that was included with his windows 98 install". It looks aweful.

For example, this guy is claiming that flash intros suck. Some of them do, but done right, it definately adds to the "wow" factor of the website. And the "wow" factor makes you money, or gets you accolades, not the "this will work in every browser ever, including my cell phone and my command line" factor.

Get with the times. There are graphic designs artists and webpage designers for a reason. The reason is because they know how to make a page look better than you do.

This guy's just a douche that's to stupid to smell the change and know he's obsolete. People like him are the reason it's ok to have a website that looks like shit, and I say I've had enough.

~Will