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TransOrbital: The Commercial Race To The Moon
apsmith writes: "Some of the companies that were preparing for a race to commercialize space and return to the moon (like Idealab's "Blastoff.com") have vanished with the stock market meltdown. But TransOrbital, a privately held company, is still plugging away, and claims to be on schedule for launch in the 4th quarter of 2001. The funding model seems to be generating lots of pretty pictures and selling them. Though for just $2500 you can also send your business card to the Moon!" Sounds like they've pushed their schedule a little bit since last mention, but considering the scope of the project, nearly any launch date would still be respectable.
"Though for just $2500 you can also send your business card to the Moon!"
Let's get cracking on littering more celestial bodies after we're done with the one we were born on.
from transorbital's web page:
45 kg (100 lbs) dry mass including payload
200 kg (440 lbs) fueled.
over 75% of the launch mass is fuel. why haven't any companies looked to interesting technology such as high-altitude magnetic rail launches, etc, instead of our low altitude (read: heavy atmosphere) extended burn launches?
-sam
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
either way does it really fucking matter?
honestly is some dork told me, "I have my business card on the moon." I would be ROFL hardcore.
$2500 to put a piece of paper up there. Hmmm. No thanks. I have no desire to even put myself in space. I have always believed that after the 0-gravity novelty wears off you would be quite bored.
It's free to send it to a black-hole (shredder) I think that is a lot more novel than having it clutter the god damn moon.
But this sort of shit just pisses me off. Just ignore what I have to say I guess.
From watching the X-Prize contenders, there seems to be a pretty consistent rule:
If a rocket company wannabe has actually flown hardware, it may be close to actually flying hardware...and beyond that, hardware that can carry things.
If a rocket company wannabe has not actually flown hardware, any tickets they sell are lotteries or fraud at best, and will not be actually redeemable for many years if ever.
The vast majority of wannabes are currently the latter. It does them no great service to hype up publicity this far ahead of actually being able to provide what they claim, and significantly harms those who are actually trying to build private launch capability.
Just what the poor, poor martians need, a whole high tech garbage bag full of poems that read like bad Robert Smith songs and buisness cards for sales reps in case the martians ever reveal themselves and need to market themselves in the global, uh, intergalactic economy.
What I don't understand is that a business card is $2,500, but 8.5 x 11 inch pages are "expected to be under $50 per page?" I don't have a business card, so I have't been paying attention to their evolution, but I hadn't realized that they had evolved to chest size placards. A much better waste of money would be on the equally idiotic residensea.
If things had kept on their original track, we might have been living on Mars. Although Apollo was a great achievement - and TransOrbital's planned missions certainly would not be possible without NASA's technological developments - Apollo mucked up the works so far as an orderly progress into space is concerned. The original concepts, as noted by Von Braun and others, was to incrementally work from sub-orbital, to orbital, to space station, to Moon, to Mars. Apollo sunk a lot of money into getting to the Moon without building any infrastructure to enable us to keep going there: SSTO's, long duration space stations, lunar shuttles, etc.
I thought other slashdotter's would like to see the opposite, a site short on promise and long on potential, and heck, even has video of rocket platform crashes and stuff. Content-free Carmack's site is not.
I'll absolutely agree with you on this point. Carmack's site doesn't have much for fancy graphics, etc - but, then again, Carmack's site doesn't have to deal with something very important to TransOrbital, Inc. Investors, and even more importantly, Customers. JC has quite a bit of money to start with, and they are taking what could be considered a somewhat low-tech approach. (BTW: Thanks to the pointer to Carmack's site - I've never looked at it before. Spent about 10 minutes reading the various reports from the site before I responded to your first post.) Thier group really doesn't HAVE to post what they've been up to online, and do it mainly to tell people what they've been up to, etc. It's not a heavily commercial venture (but, if they start tossing people into orbit, that might change ;-).
TransOrbital has got to do everything possible to impress investors and potential customers. They litterally have to promise them the moon. Comparing the two is almost, but not quite, comparing apples and oranges.
I thought other slashdotter's would like to see the opposite, a site short on promise and long on potential, and heck, even has video of rocket platform crashes and stuff. Content-free Carmack's site is not. I guess my thing is: which advances commercial spacetravel -- which is the real point here -- more; some CGI pictures of an unmanned lunar lander, or real people working on real rocketry that aren't burning money on press-releases and pretty pictures. And the pictures aren't even that pretty.
Much appreciated for the alternate point of view. But your original post come across more as a troll than a serious "Hey guys - take a look at this. These guys are actually getting somewere." Sometimes it's in the presentation :-) (Speaking of presentation - damn you are right about thier CG pictures. Those could use some serious improvement.)
There's more than one road to the stars right now. All three have players now. There's government - NASA, and agencies in other countries. There's groups like the RocketMan and JC's group. Then there's commercial groups. Each has to conduct themselves according to how thier missions are geared - for instance, JC & Co. don't have to worry about glossy press releases, while TransOrbital has to spend the money on them to sell products and services. Personally, I'm happy to see players in all three fields. It's a good sign that commericalization of space is gonna happen. The interest level is there, and there's now enough people trying different things to actually make shit happen.
One more thought - ya know, after reading JC's page, I hope some of the TransOrbital people read this thread. I'd like to see pictures, and log entries like JC's group does. I can see where someone might question where constructions of the modules are at when you can't actually SEE any progress.
So the question becomes: if someone is in the race for the moon, but never even makes it to orbit, is the race really that interesting to follow? I guess we'll see come '4th quarter 2001'...
They never said THEY were launching it themselves with thier own technology. They just said they were going to be the first to the moon. That changes the race considerably - it's not that hard just to slap that puppy up there with someone else's tech, then depend on your own to get it the rest of the way. :-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
More directly to the question, rockets waste a lot of energy carrying oxygen, when they spend much of their trip into orbit flying through an atmosphere carrying quite adequate amounts of the stuff. If research into scramjets succeeds, the propellant requirement for launching rockets decreases radically.
Additionally, many of the costs of running space launches are because we do so few of them. If we were doing twenty a day, we'd be able to set up much more efficient production lines for the job. The propellant cost of a space shuttle launch is a tiny fraction of the mission cost.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)