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.

Comments

My card on the moon...ok...

[ackthpt]

Now who has the burden of proof here? Does TransOrbital prove to me that my card is sitting on the moon (or in a well staged sandbox in New Jersey, filled with the grey dust that comes out of vacuum cleaners) or do I have to prove that it's not (in fact sitting in tiny strips under a paper shredder in New Jersey) .. Or .. should I just have faith and go around puffing about what a .biz stud I am that my card is on the moon?

If you had to ask me (which, of course you don't) these are more impressive at least someone can break into a house with one, in say, New Jersey.

Re:My card on the moon...ok...

[garcia]

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.

In John We Trust

[neolith]

Forget these losers. I think JC will beat slick marketing anytime. If anybody is going into orbit first, my money is on him. Check out Carmack's rocket site:

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/

The project logs are immensely entertaining reading!

Re:In John We Trust

[Midnight Ryder]

Forget these losers. I think JC will beat slick marketing anytime. If anybody is going into orbit first, my money is on him. Check out Carmack's rocket site:

That's nice, but, Transorbital isn't doing the race to orbit - they have thier sights set higher. Instead, they are shooting for the first commercial landing on the moon. I should put the obligatory RTFA comment here, but, instead I'll give ya a quick rundown - instead of trying to put someone in orbit, they are shooting for putting a lander on the moon. Unmanned, and you can do things like get pictures of your business card setting on the moon, plus they are planning on shooting some video, etc. Not what I'd call high-excitement stuff, but, at least someone is doing something with the moon :-)

So, in this case, Carmack isn't competing with them, unlike the $10 million prize...

Re:In John We Trust

[Midnight Ryder]

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. :-)

Where is the Craft?

[reezle]

If they are really trying for a 4th Qtr, 2001 luanch date, seems like the lander would have to be built already. All I see are CGI mockups of it. All of the literature says about the lander is that it 'will be' this, and 'will have' that. Sounds like these folks are perhaps selling pretty pictures already?

Re:Where is the Craft?

[Winged Cat]

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.

Scientific data

[zardor]

It seems that they already have one prospective customer that wants to send more than a postcard. The Foundation for the International Non-government Development of Space (FINDS) made an agreement with transorbital last year to return scientific data, to test the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) constellation at lunar distances to learn if it is possible to utilize GPS for navigation during a lunar trajectory or in lunar orbit.
Now, if there only was a market for earthlings sending postcards *home* from the lunar surface, space exploration would be a much more interesting place.

Don't even have the licenses to launch.

[A Commentor]

From there May 31, 01 press release. There where just getting applications ready to submit inorder to get approval for launch... None of the other press releases state that they have received approval, or that they have even submitted the applications...

I think they are much further off than 4th Quarter of 2001...

unfueled vs. fueled payload mass

[frknfrk]

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 Moon Treaty

[Salgak1]

As I recall, the United States is not signatory to the Moon Treaty, and as such, it has no effect on the US or commercial activities therein. . .

We are, however, signatory to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which does not rule out commercial activity, but doesn't exactly encourage it, either. . .

return ticket ?

[hrstrand]

at $2500 pr. gram, It would be something like $350M to send Steve Balmer up there on a one way ticket. Maybe we should all throw in a buck or two ?

Don't crash that thing on MY land!

[MadCow42]

Hey, I OWN a plot of land on the moon (1774 acres, actually)... don't crash that thing on My property!

Don't believe me? Go buy your own plot at www.lunarembassy.com !!

q:]

MadCow

In further news...

[jd]

The EU paid to have the entire of Microsoft HQ transported to the moon, on condition that TransOrbital's lander crashes really hard. TransOrbital could not be reached to confirm that the Blue Screen accessory was a part of the deal.

Seriously, commercial companies will not reach the moon in 2001. I honestly can't see any commercial prospects even appearing much before 2010. (Sorry, Mr. Clarke, you were just too optimistic.)

On the other hand, I can very easily see rocket geeks reaching at least orbit in the next year or two, and perhaps the moon in the next four or five. As economic and social pressures build against any kind of shared-resource society, I fully expect actual geek R&D to accelerate.

Ironically, I can very easily see enthusiasts from a wide-range of technical "hobbies" to achieve what NASA and these vaporware companies only dream of... Because they may have to. As much as I detest comparisons with over-romanticised historical events, I can see rocket enthusiasts reaching for the stars as latter-day Pilgrims, escaping increasing hostility from the established society.

Unlike Jon Katz, though, I don't see geeks as the victims of a cruel world - we can leave any time we choose to pool the necessary resources together. Every year spent on Earth, subject to the whims of beurocrats, questionable legislation and business practices far more insidious than all the religious peasents in the world could ever be, is a year spent on Earth by choice.

Current world events may tip the balance. Does anyone seriously believe model rocketry will escape the current crackdowns unscathed? Does anyone seriously believe that, should model rockets be further restricted or banned outright, that enthusiasts won't build them anyway? Just with a lot more incentive to get into orbit & beyond than they've ever had before.

Something that is poorly understood, but only too true - necessity is the mother of all inventions, with conflict the grandmother. Open Source may soon become illegal, and hobbies of alll kinds are being squelched by absurdities like the DMCA. Rocketry is a very plausable next target. We have the conflict, we are approaching the necessity, the only conclusion I can see is we'll soon have the technology. That's the way things work.

As if there isn't enough crap poetry on the net

[datatrash]

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.

Yup, you forgot about polar orbits

[vik]

We're going to orbit TraliBlazer over the poles like Clementine & Prospector did. This doesn't really need any more fuel than an equatorial orbit.

Vik :v)

Re:As a Wise Man Once Said...

[pblase]

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.

Re:It's A Scam

[dstone]

Kook-maintained web-sites don't require a tone of overhead last I checked

Actually, I've heard that kook-maintained web-sites generally enjoy a 2600Hz tone overhead. Though rhythmic bass tones can also be nice.

2600.com

Re:Spent on earth by choice?

[Goonie]

Fission rockets worked, all the way back in the 1960's, and they produce a "specific impulse" (the amount of thrust per unit time per pound of propellant) about three times the best chemical rockets. Of course, it's doubtful that you'd ever get approval to run one in Earth's atmosphere again.

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.