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! "

Comments

Space

[crayz]

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/

Re:Its about time

[SEWilco]

Well, you probably know about the X-15 which went to the edge of space.

"...It was a stepping stone to later developments - either an X-15 launched atop Navaho G-26 boosters, an X-15 scramjet version, or the X-20 - that would lead to manned orbital spaceflight. This stepping-stone approach was abandoned and the crash programs of Mercury and Apollo initiated instead..."

For that matter, you can read a paper here which estimates a low end of $5,221 per passenger on an X-33 derivative.

Ground-to-Space being worked on

[SEWilco]

We've been able to build ground-to-space aircraft for a while, we just haven't tried to do it. To have enough fuel in orbit, the easiest would have been to actually carry the spaceplane up with another aircraft. But fully self-contained is just a little harder.

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.

Re:Its about time

[Ertai]

The VentureStar is the next generation space shuttle being developed by Lockheed Martin and NASA. It is designed to go to orbit in a single stage. You can get info on the VentureStar here: http://www.venturestar.com. The X-33 is an unmanned prototype for the VentureStar. Unfortunately the X-33 has suffered delays especially due to test failures of its liquid hydrogen fuel tank. It's doubtful that the test flight of the X-33 originally scheduled for July will actually take place this year. Here's some info on that: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000114/sc/space_ plane_1.html

Re:Its about time

[DHartung]

According to this Expendable Launch Vehicle Cost Comparison, Soyuz is actually one of the cheapest ways to orbit at US$18M a pop. (It's those 27 years to depreciate base manufacturing costs that helps.) And each flight could presumably carry one cosmonaut and two passengers. I'm not sure anyone has a good way to estimate Energia's numbers, though: Russia's financial situation is such that cold hard American cash is worth far more than its paper conversion value, and they've probably run flights at a worse loss basis for the Russian government. Besides, this will help subsidize a running production line (more vehicles == cheaper costs), as well as advertise their satellite launch services.

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).

Fuels differ. LOX/LH is what the shuttle rockets use, but Soyuz uses a LOX/Kerosene fuel in all 3 stages. Figure 30 cents/kg for the combination, and you'll need something like 270,000 kg., but that's less than $100,000. The Soyuz crew vehicle is theoretically reusable, but they tend to land hard and space-rating afterward would be tricky. In practice Energia probably salvages what they can and sticks it back in the assembly line. What you're looking at are the overall costs of running the infrastructure. The shuttle has basically the same problem: if you look at pure materials and other "just this time" costs, you can come up with ridiculously low numbers (say, $60-100 million); but when you have 5 launches in a year and pay $5 billion for the privilege, you know there's more to it than that.

Soyuz launch vehicles (the type that go to Mir).

Why haven't we developed cool spacecrafts like they had in Star Wars:TPM that can go straight into the atmosphere? [you mean out of?] 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.

SSTO (Single Stage to Orbit) vehicles have been on the drawing board since the earliest days of NASA, but none has ever been built. The closest prototypes from recent years have suffered from the existence of the shuttle and other working launch systems. The DC-X was a promising vehicle, but it was damaged during a hard landing. The VentureStar project is billed as a next-generation shuttle, but since STS will be around for at least another 15-20 years it's not imminent. The X-33 is a prototype of some of its technology, but it's been delayed by problems of its own. The X-38 is a similarly-shaped (flying wing) vehicle, that would be a lifeboat for an ISS crew of up to 7; but it's an orbit-to-ground vehicle only.

Meanwhile, the non-governmental "space launches for profit" crowd has a number of possibilities close to reality. Kistler Aerospace has a two-stage reusable design, and Rotary Rocket uses an innovative rotor design to land a cone-shaped vehicle straight up (just like those 50s sci-fi flicks). The main obstacle remains a robust launching industry, with competition keeping the prices of expendable rockets low. Boeing and LockMart pretty much have this market sewn up; in fact there are more launches than can be accomodated at American facilities. A company called SeaLaunch partners with Boeing and Ukraine to orbit satellites from a floating oil-derrick-platform that lives in Hawaii. Launch facilities are being worked on in Canada and Alaska (to serve the polar orbit market), while India and China beef up their launch facilities. Indonesia and the Phillipines are proposing launch sites. It's really a wide-open market, as long as you're not talking about people yet. Give some of these systems a couple of years to mature and lower costs, and you'll have $1000/pound to earth orbit. That's when launching people will become easy.

http://www.space.com/business/launching/new_rock ets_wg.html
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Re:Mir

[Ertai]

Interesting that you should mention an ISS tourist module because the idea has, in fact, been proposed. Check out the details here:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/335153.asp

Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!

[Tackhead]

From the article:
"through his Bermuda-based holding company Gold & Appel,"
...at which point I promptly spewed coffee all over my desk.

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!)