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Private companies working for governments maybe. Relatively inefficient companies whose launches are very expensive.

The meaning I had in mind was the one that the X Prize sponsors had in mind.
http://www.xprize.org/xprizes/ansari_x_prize.html

They are promoting and encouraging the development of much cheaper launches. As I noted in my original post, that will mean a lot more launches. Even hydrogen fuel has to be created using some kind of energy. Suppose we use electrolysis. The pollution won't occur on the launch pad but will occur at some coal fired power plant.

Of course, no matter how much pollution the space industry creates it will pale beside the amount created by the airline industry. http://vanfossen.wordpress.com/2005/11/08/global-w arming-and-airline-industry/ I'm so depressed.

But what if a pair of crew members are married, like Mark C. Lee and Jan Davis of STS-47? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-47

I have vague memories that they were on different shifts.

You should read Anousheh Ansari talking about how astronauts get along --- she was deeply impressed at how professional they are. I'd expect that a decent astronaut wouldn't do anything like that, simply because there's too much of a risk of making life harder for his or her co-workers.

Actually, she (like all other cosmonauts) went through several months of training in Russia before the launch.

For those of you curious about such things, the X Prize (which Anousheh Ansari funded) is hosting an official Anousheh Ansari Space Blog. Before her launch, Anousheh posted some descriptions of her pre-launch training and her thoughts on going to space. There's also some commentary from Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize.

Some other interesting bits of info:

* She's carrying a small carbon-fiber piece of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne up with her into orbit.

* According to an interview with MSNBC's Alan Boyle, she had initially planned on bringing some science projects up with her, but this was scratched when the launch date was suddently bumped from being 1-2 years to being a few months away. However, she's purchased some datalink time in order to do live communications with groups at MIT and Google.

* Her company Prodea is working with the Russian space agency and Space Adventures to build a suborbital spacecraft which will launch out of spaceports in the UAE and Singapore.

* She rathes dislikes the term "space tourist." From an interview with space.com:

SPACE.com: You don't like the term "space tourist" and call it an "over simplistic label to a complicated process." Can you further explain that?

AA: Absolutely. In a way I take offense when they call me a tourist because it brings that image of someone with a camera around their neck and a ticket in their hand walking to the airport to go on a trip somewhere and coming back to show their pictures. But I think spaceflight is much more than that.

I've been training for it for six months. I think if it is to be compared to an experiment or an experience on Earth it probably is closer to expeditions like people who go to Antarctica or people who climb Mount Everest. I mean that requires a lot more preparation, thinking, and studying or appreciation of the environment. So I would probably compare it more to an expedition than I would to a touristy trip to another city.

This sort of incentives-based policy is in the tradition of American values. It should be no surprise that such values are being eroded as the 'nation of immigrants' changes from pioneering independence to bureaucratic dependence. The use of a socialist bureaucracy to explore space is a fundamentally different experiment that other proven American approaches to expanding the resource base available to humanity.

In 1989 I was working on grassroots legislation to reform NASA's launch services policies. This led to the passage of P. L. 101-611, The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 which required NASA to procure launch services from private vendors whenever possible. This is common sense if proper boundaries between public and private functions are to be maintained. As radical as this may sound to many who see NASA as a space transportation company, it was, in fact, Presidential policy at the time and the legislation was therefore, in fact, redundant, but bureaucratic inertia demanded separate acts by the Legislative branch to reinforce the Executive's own command structure. This legislative effort started out as an attempt to passsomething along the lines of the Kelly Act of 1925 (which formed the basis for Jerry Pournelle's recommendations first put forth by his Citizen's Advisory Council for Space Policyin 1980), but compromised when it became clear that resistance from NASA, and its contractors, to citizen involvement in space policy was so intense that serious reform would be impractical. My testimony before Congress legislative follow-up to P.L. 101-611 made recommendations for a focus onincentives for commercial investment, rather than plans or "programs". An example of incentives-based legislation, applied to fusion energy policy, was recommended for passage by Bussard, R. W., one of the founders of the US fusion program in a letter confessing some of the subterfuge to which technical leaders resorted. It is still quite relevant today given the reliance on Middle Eastern oil and problems with fission energy. The point here is that incentives are more effective in general than governmental programs.

The first settlers in America experienced enormous causalities their first years they were in America. Entire colonies were lost. The original colonies included a substantial variety of fundamentally differing approaches to settling North America. America's frontier wasn't built by a centrally controlled bureaucracy -- and there is no reason to expect such a bureaucracy will take Americans to their next frontier.

Space policy is a touchstone of American values since Americans are spiritually a pioneering culture. Let's not forget who settled the frontier, how those "immigrants" differed from later immigrants, and what sort of "program" they had to settle the new frontier.

If Michael Griffin is for real about this he may just reawaken the very pioneering character of Americans. We must hope he is not just sincere but will be successful doing so.

Seriously, this is basically how all successful exploration has proceeded in the past.

And there I was thinking that all space projects up till this has proceeded because of the desire to show up commies and the commie's desire to do the same to us. Glad you straightened that out for me...

Not programmes. If you pay for programmes, you get programmes, not results.

Seriously, this is basically how all successful exploration has proceeded in the past.

Hasn't the space shuttle program done enough damage to the pioneering heritage of the US already?

First, NASA delivers a space transportation system with a cost per lb to leo that is an order of magnitude higher than it promised.

Then, NASA stomps out private investment in launch service companies because it would dilute the monopoly value of the bad technology NASA produced.

Then when grassroots space enthusiasts try to get NASA to stop stomping out privately financed space transportation companies, and passed legislation requiring NASA to follow the Reagan policy of purchasing commercial launch services whenever possible, NASA thumbs its nose at the taxpayers most interested in space and launches the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite via the Shuttle.

Then when grassroots space enthusiasts, totally fed up with NASA's lawlessness and detemination to destroy the pioneering spirit of the US, start offering their own launch technology prizes, NASA waits until one of them embarrasses it before providing even lip-service to the prize award concept.

Finally, a private entrepreneur is offering $50 million of his own money as an incentive for other private investors to create a de facto replacement for the Space Shuttle* and NASA responds by trying to pump taxpayer money into the same good old boy network that has so effectively destroyed hope among pioneering peoples that they can embark on a new age of exploration to escape the burgeoning bureaucracies that proclaim themselves the hope of mankind while destroying its spirit.

Kill NASA before it kills the human spirit.

*An exploding myth.

The correct way to spend such money is demonstrated by the Ansari X-Prize, the Bowery/CATS prize and the fusion prize legislation submitted by Robert W. Bussard to Congress. All of these set forth operational technical criteria for the award before it is known who will win the prize. It make it far harder for politicians posing as scientists and technologists to steal the credit and money due others.

Twelve years ago fusion prize award legislation was proposed. It had the support not only of cold fusion researchers but of one of the three primary founders of the US fusion program supported the legislation. Prizes actually work. Let the DoE go ahead and do its skeptical measurements and the let private sector do what it does best -- take risks and compete -- peacefully -- while we still can compete peacefully.

If any form of spaceship fuel creates CO2 when combusted, the X-Prize may be to blame. And now they're gonna have a new 'XPrize Cup' every year!

Ansari X Prize

Carmack's team also has a better shot at Bigelow's $50M America's Space Prize than any of the other Ansari X-Prize contenders. The 90% peroxide delay resulted in a more economical and safer methanol/peroxide(50%) mixed monoprop booster that is ideally suited for first stage reuse during orbital flights.

Official X-Prize peak height from first flight

According to those numbers, the first flight was several kilometers lower than the number given by the Mojave radar. i.e. The X-Prize foundation says that SpaceShipOne only went ~102 km, while the unofficial numbers has said ~117 km. This time SpaceShipOne only went to 368,000 (~102km) according to the unofficial numbers. (CNN said that 328,000 is the cutoff point, not the altitude) Given how much lower that number is, I'm sweating bullets until I get the numbers from the X-Prize foundation.

No, I haven't read the rules. However, this is the common understanding of the rules that has been given to the public via the media. Thus it is a good question to have answered here, is it not?

You could just read the rules, maybe?

I hate to sound like a jerk, but it's like the people on game discussion boards that ask questions you could read out of the instruction manuals - you're just wasting time and space.

There's a webcast link from the people actually sponsoring it (who presumably know more than the normal press:
XPrize.Org

Interorbital Systems (IOS) is already aiming at that goal. Now I can't base my comment on anything but their website and the X-Prize site, but it seems that their Neptune rocket will be capable of doing the things specified. They plan to launch their Nano SLV in 2005 (testing and further development is in progress) It being the first privately developed launch vehicle capable of putting sattelites into LEO. Their site states that theyr aim is having the Neptune ready for space tourism by 2006. A wee bit optimistic maybe, but - still - they may have a head start.

Their X-Prize page and their (WARNING! all .jpg page) home page.

John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace also said some stuff about DaVinci. He also wrote a pretty interesting summary about his recent zero-gravity experience.

It's not really their fault they are tied to regulating something that is blatantly immoral.

They know people should be able to look around heck people even have the constitutional right to spread information but then they are trying to draw lines to prevent it.

That's because all the policy people haven't gotten their thumbs out about developing a system to keep intellectual development moving and if they don't they worry that some of the emerging economies with diffrent political systems will triumph.

What do you do when injustice has been working well for a long time, other countries don't have a problem not being fair if it helps everyone the most, we're just totally blind on this issue thinking that the government is in some way responsible to be fair.

We're even more stupid if we expect them to be fair when the alternative is better for everyone. Perhaps we are engaged in a self defeating political movement here (similar to the russian communist revlolution perhaps?). Maybe we should have a pretty strong Idea of what we are going to do to create idea's after the fall of publishing.

My bet is something like this

A former head of the Atomic Energy Commission's fusion program -- indeed one of the 3 primary founders of the Tokamak program, Robert Bussard, picked up that legislation and sent it to all members of the Congressional committees on energy as well as to the various physics labs. In his cover letter he admitted that the Tokamak program had been a sham program -- promoted in the wake of the Apollo program -- to try and get funding to try out all the "hopeful ideas" out there. The Tokamak program turned into a Frankenstein monster and instead started killing all the hopeful ideas they had originally set out to fund.

It's taken quite a while for the government to lose its fixation on the Tokamak.

Maybe now they'll reconsider my legislation -- especially now that the prize award approach has been largely vindicated.

Or will it take another Viet Nam, or worse, WW III for them to wake up to the stupidity of their energy policies?

Cannella is actually preparing for the X-Prize, this is just a land-based test launch.

Team Cannella's orbiter vehicle will have radiation shields made of old kettles.

Now instead of getting all our cars to drive environmentally friendlier and less expensive (keywords: electrical, hybrid, bio-fuel), we drop the effort and start producing a new kind of vehicle that flies.
And ofcourse it uses kerosine for that (ever seen an electrical plane, man-sized ?).
This gives us a whole new excuse to soup up more oil and pollute even more..

What's next ? Real personal rockets ?

Actually, John Carmack has stated that they have a business plan that does not rely on them winning the X-Prize, or getting any other sort of cash windfall (I'm summarizing, so any mistake is mine and not his). Some great insight as to their plans can be gleaned from the Armadillo Aerospace Forum at XPrize.org.

Even though they are not as polished or well-funded as Scaled Composites, their openness with their processes, plans, trials, and tribulations makes them one hell of a lot cooler and several orders of magnitude more interesting, at least in my book.

There's very little new information available from their website Da Vinci, but you can always look to the X-prize site for information about the teams. I personally think that the development of many different ways of reaching your goal is the best way to go -- facilitating as much development of future technology as possible! (Which is probably the whole point of this anyway.)

Van Allen comments that 'the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.'

Good enough for me.

Of course, last I checked, that's where this comes into play.... which pretty much invalidates his entire argument... As well, achieving something like this would put a few more nails in the coffin housing this guys argument.

In short, he's right... for now, but if these things come to pass he'll be as full of shit as this guy was when he said this (beware pop-ups if you aren't using Firefox)

We have the richest man in the USA who can't really talk about anything except maintaining the intellectual property rules that made him rich. There are a lot of alternative ways to fund innovation-prizes like the Methuselah Mouse and Xprize come to mind. Gates has the money to be a serious force changing the human condition-but I see little evidence that he's really serious about acting in that direction.

Current proposals for implementation of the Hans Moravec's original design rely on a hypersonic air-breather of advanced aerodynamic design like the Boeing DF-9 (that exists only on paper).

Can /. readers think of anything likely come along in the near future that could take paylods to 100km and mach 12?

Probably the same thing that is driving the bureaucrats to make all this noise about space elevators now.

A key to the Rotovator(tm) is getting hub mass in place to keep it out of the atmosphere while it picks up mass from 100km@mach12 -- but that mass can be any old space junk -- at least at the hub where it counts the most for high strength materials like carbon nanotubes. However, you can do a Rotovator(tm) with off-the-shelf commercially available fibers and still have a factor of 2.

Nice thing about Rotovators(tm) is that they can be built with much lower capitaliztion over a much shorter period of time using existing commercial materials. All you need is a bunch of mass orbiting near earth, some quite-doable tethers, and sufficient manuverability and speed in the atmospheric leg to hook up with the tether as it reaches the nadir.

I'm still waiting for my robot maid, holiday on the moon and flying car.

Flying cars are already here, you can't spend a holiday on the moon (yet), but this guy got the next best thing, and there aren't any fully fledged robotic maids out there yet, so you'll have to do with this sucker.

The 21st century has only just begun.

Yes, the cost is already at $20 and they haven't crossed the finish line yet. This flight does not satisfy the requirements of the Ansari X-prize . But then again, who cares ? This is a historic event, not a game show. The purse isn't the prize at all. Scaled Composites developed a new rocket motor as well as a novel re-entry scheme. In short, they may or may not win 10 million dollars, but they have definately made aviation history and contributed to the school of aerospace engineering.

Please look over the X-Prize Guidelines.

According to the X-Prize organization...

"We chose 100km altitude because it is beyond the official 50-miles that the US Air Force recognizes as "worthy of astronaut wings" but not so high that the re-entry speed requires exotic heat shielding."

You have to have three people IN the thing to qualify for the X-Prize.

3. The flight vehicle must be flown twice within a 14-day period. Each flight must carry at least one person, to minimum altitude of 100 km (62 miles). The flight vehicle must be built with the capacity (weight and volume) to carry a minimum of 3 adults of height 188 cm (6 feet 2 inches) and weight 90 kg (198 pounds) each. Three people of this size or larger must be able to enter, occupy, and be fastened into the flight vehicle on Earth's surface prior to take-off, and equivalent ballast must be carried in-flight if the number of persons on-board during flight is less than 3 persons.

The X-Prize requires you to carry three 200-pound people up to 100 kilometers and return them to earth safely

Launches a piloted, privately-funded spaceship, capable of carrying 3 people to 100 kilometers

Spaceship one can do that, no? Or can it only carry one person? Thought it had room for 3.

The best way to honor the memory of "NASA's golden age" would be to top it.

NASA does excellent unmanned science, but the moon shot, cool as it was, wasn't good science or space policy.

Good thing private efforts are starting to pick up the slack.

I must add that the most awe-inspiring thing to me is that all the construction, design and launch was done on slide rules.

"The commission also endorses NASA's plans to award large cash prizes to encourage technological innovation."

The inducement prize allows one-off profits.

Profit = Prize - Cost

1. Go to Moon/Mars
2. Win prize
3. Profit!

The ANSARI X PRIZE and Centennial Challenges are the first steps.

Robert Zubrin recently had the idea of 'a competition open to all the different NASA centers and national laboratories and companies to see who could develop the most efficient Mars plan'.

...if this project makes the 2-week turnaround for re-launch required by the X-prize rules. Their launches to date have not been even close to the required frequency.

This launch, as I understand it, is just the first try. If it goes well they will prepare to do the 2 launches in 2 weeks. Still, the first manned commercial space flight is a momentous event. Go Scaled go!

Rumor has it these pranksters have high-jacked White Knight and SpaceShipOne and are now enroute to Mars.

Both Scaled Composites and XCOR Aerospace (the two leading competitors in the X-Prize competition) currently fly out of Mojave Airport.

Scaled Composites is taking part in the X-Prize competition, but XCOR is not. They are developing their products to break into a market of suborbital payloads and microsatellites, as well as the passenger market (they are currently under contract with Space Adventures to provide the space travel experience to "adventure travelers" for $98,000 when the technology is ready). You can read more about their goals on their website.

The X-Prize website hosts a list of the teams competing for the X-Prize.

Ummm... XCOR is not a competitor for the X-Prize. They are a private organization that is possibly capable of suborbital manned spaceflight, but they are not listed on the list of X-Prize teams.

• The original poster called this the "first-ever private spaceport", but it's not clear this is true, depending on one's definition of private. It is certainly not the first commercial spaceport: FAA/AST has issued commercial spaceport licenses for years to facilities in Alaska (Kodiak), California (Vandenberg), Florida (Cape Canaveral), and Virginia (Wallops). Mojave, though, would be the first commercial inland licensed spaceport.
  
  
• XCOR Aerospace is not a competitor for the Ansari X Prize.
  
  
• Technically, Scaled does not need a spaceport license to perform its flights from Mojave. (Recall that Scaled already has a launch license from AST.) As far as the FAA is concerned, SpaceShipOne's launch "site" is the White Knight carrier aircraft, which takes off from Mojave under an experimental airworthiness certificate, as I recall. Thus Scaled does not need to wait for Mojave Airport to get a spaceport license.
  

"Entrants will be required to carry an Ansari X Prize-provided flight recorder to monitor the flight profile and altitude achieved." http://www.xprize.org/teams/guidelines.html

I don't know how it works or how it protects against cheating.

Here are the official rules.

"no more than 10% of the flight vehicle's first-flight non-propellant mass may be replaced between the two flights." So no, the shuttle would not qualify. But then again, why the hell would you want to start at zero velocity, sitting on the ground, ignite a barely contained explosion (side note: the propellent used in the shuttle is much more dangerous that what is used in the rocket engine of SSO) just to get to space? When you stop and think about it, that's a pretty STUPID way to get into orbit.

"...a signal to abort the passenger may be added [to flight controls]"

Here's a picture of her with Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne.

As far as the organisers are concerned, I can't recall them ever posting here, but the plan after the X Prize is won by somebody (probably Rutan, at this stage) is the X Prize Cup, an annual festival/competition where teams will compete to launch their craft as high and as fast as they can.

If they are successful with that competition, I imagine that sooner or later they will propose a private orbital shot.

Yes, it does.

"The flight vehicle must be built with the capacity (weight and volume) to carry a minimum of 3 adults of height 188 cm (6 feet 2 inches) and weight 90 kg (198 pounds) each. Three people of this size or larger must be able to enter, occupy, and be fastened into the flight vehicle on Earth's surface prior to take-off, and equivalent ballast must be carried in-flight if the number of persons on-board during flight is less than 3 persons."

AFAIK Bush doesn't have anything to do with the X-Prize.

The X-Prize Foundation was founded in 1996, according to their web site

The commercialization of space has been ongoing for some time now. Maybe satellites aren't as glamorous as manned missions, but probably a lot more commercially lucrative.

However, if this leads to more creative practical uses of space, then I am in full support. Solar satellites with microwave power transmission, anyone?

The site shows something else interesting ... that while Xcor isn't participating in the X Prize, they do plan on participating in the X Prize Cup (which will happen later).

However, I'd expect to see an X2 prize being offered to get to LEO after this.

Actually, the next project Peter Diamandis is working on related to this is called the X-Prize Cup, i.e., the Rocket Races. Every year there will be an airshow (spaceshow?) in a yet-to-be-determined city where people who have built X-Prize-style suborbital craft can compete. Prizes will likely be in several categories, like Most Altitude, Longest Downrange Distance, Most Velocity, Largest Payload to 100km, etc. And since the competition will happen every year, this will give the crafts' designers and builders a chance to improve their designs.

The X-Prize was designed to foster a space tourism industry. The X-Prize Cup is designed to create innovation and growth in the private space arena. It will eventually lead to orbital flights.

The hope is that the rise of private companies that aren't tied to NASA politics will be able to eventually replicate the work done on the DC-X and actually get some real progress on cheap orbital launches rather than the technology of the month approach NASA's been dumping money down the last 20 years.

Don't get me wrong, I am very excited about the things NASA has accomplished and can still accomplish. They are doing great things. But the problem with their approach is that every new vehicle is a revolution, not an evolution. The best way to develop new technologies has always been to take a design that already works and tweak it slightly for your own purposes, making it a little better in the process. Unfortunately, NASA can't do that because their funding has the lifespan of a politician's term in office.

For the uninformed like I was, here's X-Prize's webpage. The news is summed up nicely in the following paragraph:

Hegler said Cape Canaveral was the first choice, even though the Kennedy Space Center is not directly involved, and Cecil Field in Jacksonville is an alternative location.