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Getaway to Club Mir
Willie_the_Wimp writes "A venture capitalist is turning Mir into a vacation getaway. I thought this story was really interesting. With all the Silicon Valley millionaires sprouting like poppies, I bet they will have a waiting list a mile long. I know the risks, but sign me up! "
NASA doesn't really like all these attempts to save Mir because they are concerned that Russia can't build enough rockets to satisfy their commitment to ISS as well as Mir. Although ISS can be supplied via the space shuttle, crews have to be launched on Soyuz rockets. This is because the shuttle can only stay in space for a couple of weeks and NASA won't leave astronauts on the space station with no way of getting down. The Soyuz capsules can stay in space for extended periods of time to provide an emergency exit for the station, so NASA decided to use them for ISS crews. I believe that the Soyuz is also necessary to reboost the station. NASA is developing a 7-person crew return vehicle, but they have to use Soyuz rockets until the new CRV is ready. See a NASA Watch/SpaceRef editorial on this here.
Just a coincidence this story was posted last month? Naaahh...
Sex in Space
So, now we know where all that Andover IPO money will be going...
Close. The last Mir crew departed several months ago, closing down systems and bringing back essential equipment. There have always been contradictory statements about whether any return flights would be financially feasible, but returning was always a technological option; Mir is still in a safe orbit for some time. Russia never intended to just let it "crash and burn"; it's far too large, and crosses too many populated areas, to risk that (remember Skylab?). The intent was always to send up a final Proton flight to de-orbit it somewhat more safely over the Pacific. NASA, as well, would prefer this.
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{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Walt Anderson isnt an anagram for Hagbar Celine is it?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
This and the Hilton-space hotel will open up a new market. Not for space hotels, no, but for zero-g porn. sure, 40M is a bit over budget for most outfits, but think of the strength of the investment--the first, EVER, weightless porn flick. Anyone wanna join in a business venture??
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Soyuz is probably a good deal safer then the shuttle...it has an escape system. Soyuz boosters have exploded before, but they've never killed their crews. The last Soyuz fatality was over 20 years ago.
What is the URL for SkeptiNews? Sounds like my kind of news ;)
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Still maybe if they can get 10 people a year they might be able to make the thing work financially.
I wonder what makes space travel so expensive? Is it the fuel (liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen I believe), the cost of the vehicle itself (the various booster stages and so on) or the maintenance costs(engineers, repairs and general upkeep).
Why haven't we developed cool spacecrafts like they had in Star Wars:TPM that can go straight into the atmosphere? It would seem to be more an economic issue as opposed to a technological issue. I guess they can't develop quite enough thrust to escape the Earth's gravity without using those huge rockets. Oh well
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
I find this strange, as from what I know of Mir.. it is now a) Abandoned b) Never to be used again c) Going to crash and burn later this year?
Oh yay! I just can't wait to spend a week in the lovely run down Mir Space Station. Sure, its a fixer-upper, but thats what makes it fun!! Please bring your own toolkit to make minor repairs...
Next: Vacation to Mars!!! Cost $125 million, chance of actually landing on Mars: 0%!!!
Sign up now!!!
J
This is just great. Commercialism starts leaking
off the earth and begins to polute the solar
system.
Replace Steve Case with your .com or computer billionaire of choice and you'll see what I mean. I mean, I've always wondered if the Challenger explosion would've set back NASA's image as much as it did (I still think that MTV's abandonment of the moon flag logo was a sign of a downturn in NASA's pioneering image) if the member of the crew were all hardened soldier types and didn't include a perky school teacher. Not that we can afford to lose hardened soldiers, just that the public perception might have been different if these were professional soldiers who might just as easily have risked death in Somalia and the Persian Gulf.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
The money should be steered to shipping the Russian module for the ISS over here so we can launch it. Or the companies could finance a 'tourist' module on the ISS :)
BTW -- anyone can get into the act.
Seastead this.
I wonder how many people will be staying at a time. A launch is awfully damned expensive. IIRC it cost about $250 million to put a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Obviously, boosting a relatively light payload into a low orbit is not quite so expensive. But suppose you're putting 4 people up at a time. At $20 million apiece, that's only $80 million for the trip. Does that do much more than cover costs, especially when you figure in the cost of renovating Mir?
Despite all the talk about "Silicon Valley millionaires", $20M is still a whole lot of money. There aren't going to be all that many folks who can just drop a wad of cash that size on a lark. This sounds really interesting, but I begin to doubt that it'll ever get off the ground.
And the brethren went away edified.
or, in my case, engineers, bongs and a welder... wouldn't it be worth the adventure? I mean, I don't think I'd be spending $25mil for a trip yet, but I've got myself a a bunch of friends with technical backgrounds, and I can weld... why not? would be a fun weekend project, I think. This all needs to get happening sometime, why not start now? First of all, where better to learn what we really need to do to build a reliable space station than in the environment itself? Yes, we can design and build great things here on earth, but this is not where they are going to be implemented. Why not work on the thing in /its/ working environment. Yeah, the mir will probably end up killing a few people, and it might not last very long, but it's the kind of grassroots thing we need to get a bigger, better, faster, whatever we want space thing sometime down the road. And the Mir is probably the best thing to start with. American sense of adventure, "We'll do anything, as long as we have a security rope." Russian sense of adventure, "We'll do anything, as long as there's vodka." Rock on russia.
-- Hi! I'm a
There are lots of independent companies and organizations who are salivating at the chance to get into space.
Some I know of(post any I miss, there are tons that I haven't saved the URLs for):
http://asi.org
http://www.rotaryrocket.com/(really cool)
http://www.space.com
http://www.marssociety.com/(with a petition)
http://www.space-frontier.org/
http://bigelowaerospace.com/
NASA doing development with X-33 and X-34. The X-33 will be flying this year. It's a test ship, so will not be reaching orbit.
"through his Bermuda-based holding company Gold & Appel,"
Anyone who's read the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea should be rolling on the floor now in peals of giddy laughter. Given that Anderson is on the board of Roton, I'd say the Mir effort is probably serious, and I applaud him for the wonderful in-joke he's playing on fnord NASA and the rest of the "government fnord space bureaucracy" with his whimsical choice of names.
But then again, maybe that's just what the Illuminati fnord want you to believe.
The following was shamelessly stolen from SkeptiNews:
Just when you thought the continuiiiiing story of "Mir in Space" couldn't get any weirder, another Western business partner has emerged to save Mir and convert it into that anti-news stalwart "an orbiting space hotel for billionaires". This time, who should it be but Gold & Appel Transfers, of the Cayman Islands. Yup, "Gold & Appel Transfers": last observed in Shea and Wilson's ILLUMINATUS! trilogy as the front organisation for neophile outlaw Hagbard Celine and his Legion of Dynamic Discord. Terrifyingly for the few who still believe that book to be fiction, G&A is a real company with funds of over $300 million. President Walt Anderson made his money as co-founder of Esprit Telecom, and is now a major investor in the Space Frontier Foundation and the Roton, the orbital transfer system that looks like a beanie. G&A have already offered $21 million to the Russian govt to maintain Mir in a serviceable orbit, with more, they say, to come. It's unclear whether the group of investors can really rustle up the huge cash needed to maintain Mir; but wouldn't it be nice if, when the ISS finally boots in the 22nd century, NASA found that a bunch of Discordians had beaten them to it? http://mercurycenter.com/premium/front/docs/mir13. htm
(Fnords? What fnords? I don't see any fnords!)