Private Spacecraft Prospects

mwallis writes "Space.com has an article on the recent Space Access conference in Scottsdale a few weeks ago. The article talks about the (slowly) emerging commercial space transportation industry with interviews and quotes from Space Access Society's Henry Vanderbilt, XCOR's Aleta Jackson, Armadillo's John Carmack and many others."

Comments

Not impressed.

[moogla]

Why would you want to pay to sit in low-earth orbit for (any) period of time?

We need:

1) High-altitude high-speed space/planes to make the 3 hour trip from Chicago O'hare to Tokyo

or

2) Some sort of destination for the space trip, ala the moon.

If it's weightlessness you want, I'm sure you can buy a vomit comit for much less than funding your own rocket program.

Now, if your enterprise is purely geared towards privatizing small-scale space work, and gaining a foothold in that area, then I have to applaud that. If we're going to have an inter-sol-system trucking company we've gotta have pioneers. ^_^

Re:Not impressed.

[DNS-and-BIND]

You'd be shocked at the crap that tourists pay big dollars to go see. Moldy old cathedrals, collections of teddy bears and thumbtacks from the 1910s, chamber pots from dead towns, buddha statues, cable cars, mountains you can't climb but only see, sea beasts swimming around...there's no limit to the idiocy that people will spend money on. Heck, NASA in Houston is a major tourist attraction in its own right, and the thing is 100% ground-based.

Times article

[Xilman]

Another nice article can be found at The Times. Unlike the NYT, this Times doesn't insist on registration.

Paul

For Your Viewing Pleasure:

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we are, the top 10 ways that Star Trek would change if Slashdot replaced Starfleet. 10. "Mod me up Scotty" 9. New Starship designated: NX-31337 8. The Enterprise would mistakenly re-explore the same planets every few months 7. Parts of the crew would demand to rename the ship to GNU/Enterprise 6. Every time Kirk says anything, fifty people burst onto the bridge and repeat it 5. Open Source Shields not such a good idea 4. Captain's log full of bad grammar, typos, and poor spelling 3. Battle plans now consist of highest-moderated comments by crew 2. Q would be renamed to "root" 1. Borg would cite things as being "offtopic" rather than "irrelevant"

A whole new battlefield

[TopShelf]

How long before cheaper access to space leads to various parties messing around with satellites that are currently in orbit? If some baddie with vast financial resources (two immediately come to mind) had the gumption, he could probably wreak havoc with commercial and military communications networks.

Re:A whole new battlefield

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point about the satellites! If you want a good idea of just how crowded it's getting up there, check this out:
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/RealTime/JTrack /3d/JT rack3D.html

Re:A whole new battlefield

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm.... you really don't need space access to mess with satellites. In fact, matching orbits etc. is a real PITA - easier to do it from the ground.

Satellites are, in some ways, pretty fragile beasts. What do you need in the way of a concentrated radio blast to deafen a satellite? Or in the way of a laser to blind its sensors? Yes, I'm sure the military is taking these things into account, but its easier to escalate the ground-based technology than it is to retrofit something in space.

Cheaper space access may increase the worries, but a dedicated ground-based enemy could still damage a fair chunk of your space assets fairly cheaply. Of course, they would be bombed into the stone age immediately thereafter, but the damage woudl already be done.