Canadian Arrow Taking Applications for Astronauts

Christian Nally writes "The Canadian Arrow X-Prize team is taking applications for its X Prize attempt. It's going to be a show down between this group and many others including John Carmack's Armadillo. Let's hope that the X-Prize foundations 'end of 2004' deadline doesn't inspire people to cut corners on safety."

Comments

Sweeet!

[Shafe]

Jeez, you guys are so damn pessimistic. You're missing the whole point. Some teams will spend more than $10 million, the prize, to compete in this project. The objective is to find a cheap and easy way to get to space! Such a fantastic goal! And you all keep whining about safety.

Grow some balls.

Re:Prize is just at $5 mllion

[Bartmoss]

I assume that the success itself is worth far more.

Nah Re:resources

[WolfWithoutAClause]

However I just can't ignore the incredible amount of resources this 'fun' is going to cost

No.

The fuel cost is very, very low actually; less than $10/lb of payload.

I worked out that if I was to go into space, I'd have to spend about as much fuel putting me there, as my car burns in a year. But unlike my car I ain't doing this every week or even every year. The number of people going into space for the forseeable future is only a few thousand; the number of cars out there are incredibly high, in the hundreds of millions, so the relative environmental impact of rocketry is quite, quite negligible.

And there are plenty of space technologies that have a positive environmental impact. Would the ozone layer hole have been found without satellites? I actually believe that overall, space will have a very significant net positive environmental impact.