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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."
Me thinks thats not gonna be very safe
It's hard enough to remember my opinions, never mind the reasons for them..
Yeah, when columbus set sail the wrong way round the world, he made sure he took every safety precaution.
Safety is very important, but when it reaches a certain point its ridiculous. Attitudes like that will confine us to $10,000/pound low orbit flights for the next 500 years.
The Canadian web site says that an upswing in space tourism will force down the cost of space travel. They use, as an example, the growth of the PC industry and the diminishing cost of hardware. I would love to do it, but I do not see the general public rushing to get launched into space as easily as they walk into Best Buy to get a PC to play Wolfenstein. Also, when I hear the term 'tourism' I think of places to go, different things to do, etc. Other than the trip itself, what is there to do? (Like driving all the way to Wallyworld and not being able to get inside.)
I think the same sort of postulating went on about mass air transport, road transport
There has realy only been 5 revolutions in how we have powered transport over the last million(?) years
Walking
Horses
Sail
Steam
Oil
Another is electric transport but is only limited to some railways.
If clean fuels were a priority, they would already be used in the exisiting mass transport systems. Thinking that a new power source will develope through space transportation is, as you say, postulating.
To make space tourism economic, we need to either (a) make it possible to get into orbit using far less energy, or (b) make energy available much more cheaply
This is just wrong. People make a big deal about fuel costs, but that's really the smallest part of the cost of getting into space. If fuel was all that mattered, you'd be able to go to space for maybe a thousand dollars. As it stands, it costs millions. This is because NASA's launchers are fiendishly complicated, and require a tremendous staff of engineers to check, recheck, and replace tens of thousands of components.
Even the cost of the components themselves is dwarfed by the cost of paying 10,000 people for the 6 months that it takes to prep the shuttle for launch.
If we can do away with all this personnel by making the designs simpler, then we will have realized the dream of cheap spaceflight.
( and don't think it's not doable! Companies like Armadillo and XCOR may accomplish this! )
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
Why, yes they are: Armadillo at X Prize.
Burt Rutan's entry with "Undisclosed Rocket Power" sounds interesting...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Actually.. I'm a little surprised that they named the project the Arrow, considering the fate of the last Canadian Arrow(My girlfriend's father was one of the engineers on the project).
Seriously, the Avro Arrow is one of the things that every Canadian learns about in history class and there certainly wouldn't be a canadian aerospace engineer who wasn't familiar with the story. So I'm wondering if the name is some sort of inside joke to them or if possibly some suit decided it was a good name and the engineers couldn't explain the stigma that goes along with it.
Well, redardless, good luck to them.
lysergically yours