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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..
As any fule know... :-)
If we're postulating mass space tourism, we can probably get away with postulating efficient solar or fusion power to go with it... they're both pipe-dreams hovering somewhere in the technological middle-distance. Then you can have your hydrogen by electrolysis without trouble.
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. So nobody's going up there without some major breakthrough that would massively reduce the resources required.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
So if I get in, do I get adamantium claws?
Erik
YOU ARE SAYING IMPUDENCE TO ME! THAT IS IMPUDENCE!
the ones who do cut corners are likely not te be able to collect their price... they can offcourse imediately apply for darwin award nomination :-)
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Let's hope that the X-Prize foundations 'end of 2004' deadline doesn't inspire people to cut corners on safety.
Unless Lance Bass really gets to go this time. Then, let's not.
This is a potentially dangerous endeavor for Carmack, as he is used to releasing games with bugs, and patching them down the road. You can't do that in space. To quote Khan, "It's very cold in space..."
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.
If this is cheap enough, maybe they can bring extra cargo aboard the rocket, so maybe 10+ years in the future, little kids will be buying "Satellite Kits". Build your own sattelite and bring it aboard the Canadian Arrow or Armadillo! Only $100 per kilogram! Take pictures of the moon! Take pictures of Earth from orbit! Get Your Kit Today! I can't wait. Mmmm... my own satellite... Hopefully!
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.
How about Pamela Anderson? Zero-G boobs already primed and ready for test flight! Plus she's probably the best-known Canadian world-wide ... I'd suuuuure like to be the guy auditioning all those wannabe asstronauts if she walked in the room.
I'd dim the lights just a touch and in she walks... beautiful delicious Canadian flesh, right there in front of me! The strapless evening-wear would probably burst at that point, and I'd jump her then and there in front of all the lesser dudes on the committee. Oooohh. Powerrrr.
somebody slap me
coffee. i need coffee
If we're postulating mass space tourism, we can probably get away with postulating efficient solar or fusion power to go with it...
they're both pipe-dreams hovering somewhere in the technological middle-distance. Then you can have your hydrogen by
electrolysis without trouble.
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. So nobody's going up there without some major breakthrough that would massively reduce the resources required.
That's only true of real mass-space tourism, something which is still some way off.
What's more likely,is the development of limited space tourism, for the very rich only... it has already started, and as the price drop a bit it will get more common.
Most likely, this will use traditional rocketry in a cheaper form, and it will polute a LOT. In particular, the upper atmosphere will suffer.
In short: if there is a way to make "cheap" space trips, space tourism will develop. Wherever it's polluting or not is sadly not the question.
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
True. Several recent articles on space telescopes have commented on the dofficulty of getting rid of waste heat. Viewers generally want to be as cold as possible - obviously infra-red, but is seems tha other sensors benefit from being very cold. But the sun heats it, power supplies, actuators an electronics all generate heat. With no convection or conduction to the environment, there is only radiation left to get rid of the heat - and that isn't very efficient at low temps.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
One of the reasons for the X-Prize is to encourage private space development. One of the side ffects of this will likely be more efficent earth to orbit transport. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen eventually..
I think Pam lost a lot of her sex appeal when she contracted a DEADLY, CONTAGIOUS VIRUS.
In her (immune system's) defense, as one late show commentator said, "If you are married to Tommy Lee and all you walk away with is Hepatitis-C, you did O.K.!"
Rad bod or not, I like my liver more than PamAn.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
"Let's hope that the X-Prize foundations 'end of 2004' deadline doesn't inspire people to cut corners on safety."
...) This goes especially for John Carmack and Armadillo. They've stated that their taking it step by step building small first, then build larger things and IIRC their not registered for the $10.000.000 X-Prize contest.
Some might, but the seriouse competitors won't (Canadian Arrow is serious, at least with PR and blowing someone up in space, well
Look a monkey!
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.)
don't give that clean fuel / hydrogen crap
Who the hell other than NASA would use that fuel system? dangerous, unstable, harder to deal with..
More than likely they'll use a simple kerosene/oxidizer rocket... more thrust per pound of fuel, easier to get, doesnt explode violently when you get a spark in the tanks.
Hell we went to the moon that way.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Wow... it's simply an updated V2. I think that's a brilliant idea. Those rockets hit the edge of space almost 60 years ago, so the technology is certainly easy to attain today. Plus, that design is probably more bug-free than something fresh off the drawing boards today.
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.
$5 million
Um. Yup. A drop in the ocean compared to the cost of a single launch, never mind a whole programme. The US space shuttle costs ~$400 million a launch. The whole programme costs the ~$4Billion per year. The ISS is expect to cost ~$100 billion.
'not gonna be very safe'
for whom ? The passengers or investors?
IMHO this will make the DOT-COM bubble look like loose change.
Sheesh. Some people never learn! :)
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Firestar, Rogue Star, Lode Star, and Falling Stars.
Central part of plot is a corporation developing aircraft that can fly into orbit, at commercially viable cost. Good hard sci-fi reads!
$8.95/mo web hosting
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.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
To hell with launching, just give me the rocket, a tanker of orange juice and dump truck full of limes. Oh, and a big straw.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Here's a news story about it. (Which was in my submission yesterday. Whine, whine :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
... that the job application requires a non-refundable $75 fee?
Here's some pictures at the X Prize site which I included in my submission. (I even had a link to the Rocket Guy, ah well.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The Canadian Arrow X-Prize team is taking applications for its X Prize attempt.
Huh? The Arrow may have been an advanced jet, but it wouldn't be able to fly in space for the X Prize.
from all these years developing Doom and Quake?
Rickety experimental space-craft *always* wind up deserting the occupant on an alien planet infested with demons and high powered weapons.
For the pilots sake, I hope he makes sure to equip every craft with atleast a chainsaw.
Not gonna happen. Ever. The cost of fuel would make
flight to space impossible.
because you can't be a nerd and not know. Can't you at least google or just try guessing at a URL before showing off your incredible ignorance?
0xfeedface
I didn't know that Carmack's Armadillo was a GPL rocket downloadable from sourceforge. Clicking on the Armadillo link sends me to sourceforge.net, not an obvious rocket-associated page, thus I assume the "rocket" is a game similation. Sim-space-tourism?
Or is it merely a plugin for The Sims?
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
The A-4 rocket on which this one is based actually did use alcohol and liquid oxygen for fuel. Alcohol isn't that hard to make, so designing a ballistic missile that uses readily-available (more so than others, I imagine) during a major war was a wise decision. Wernher von Braun was many things, but "idiot" wasn't one of them.
However, the A-4 can't launch anything very heavy into space -- it wasn't designed to be able to. It couldn't even when made into a two-stage rocket for the WAC-Corporal program. One of its descendants finally did, though -- the Jupiter-C rocket, a modified Redstone (itself an A-4 derivative) launched Explorer 1 (the first US satellite) into space in January 1958. But Explorer 1 was not all that massive.
So the Canadian Arrow rocket is just going to end up re-creating Alan Shepard's flight, more or less. Rather just, I think, considering that he was launched by a Redstone missile.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Maybe true, maybe not but whatever it is, The Legend of the Rocket Car is easily one of the funniest storys on the net.
Well, taking Carmack's setup as an example...
Oxidizer: hydrogen peroxide. Made from, and dissolves back into, water, oxygen, and energy.
Fuel: kerosene. With the amounts he'd need, even a large-scale space tourist operation would barely make a dent in the world's supply, at least in the years, maybe decades, it will take to start mining the Moon for helium-3 and develop that as a power source (fusion == much more efficient thrust).
Isnt this pic showing the manned module (propelled by 4 jato-type rockets) disengaging from first stage while still on the ground.
Someone needs to re-explain the whatnots of this proposal to the artist who build this artist's impression... don t we think?
What on earth do you think he's been doing all this time? Those aren't games- they're training simulators. ;-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"So if I get in, do I get adamantium claws?
No, but you do stand to gain either
#1:Stretching powers
#2Invisibility
#3:The ability to set yourself on fire
#4Super strength and freakish orange features.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Aside from checking out the incredible views of Earth, I would have thought that there was at least one perfectly obvious activity to try....
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)