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X-Prize Overview: To The Edge Of Space, Cheap
_randy_64 writes "The X-Prize competition has gotten a lot of coverage on Slashdot - either because it's cool and geeky or because John Carmack is involved. The Baltimore Sun has a decent background/overview article on the contest in Sunday's edition."
Enough of the overviews. When will I get to travel like I'm on Star Trek? And yes, I don't want to see borg.
Oh well, tick tick tick.... I wonder how much it would cost to buy a ticket to travel on one of these machines when they come out?
Despite how many people will clamor that this is good because NASA has dropped the ball lately, this is good for the scientific community because eventually we will need to find a vessel to replace the aging Orbiter.
I predict that soon, a group is going to fulfill the BARE MINIMUM requirements for the X-Prize competition, and we will see the death of non-governmental rocketry/space-travel. I mean, can't we just use Russia for space tourism?
Seriously, though, once one group has succeeded, what is the immediate benefit to other groups who may succeed afterwards? No $$ usually leads to seriously reduced efforts.
"Is This NASA?!?"
"Yes-- how did you get this number?"
"Shut UP! Listen-- I'm sick and tired of your boring launches and stupid bug experiments and... hang on..."
[toilet flushes in background]
"... anyway. hey!"
davejenkins.com |
I'm curious about the X-Prize Foundations finances.
:)]
They filed their last Form 990 for 2001 late, and their 2002 990 hasn't shown up yet so I'm assuming they requested an extention for the last year as well. As a confidence builder the fact that they can't close their books by March or so for the previous year is not super postiive.
In 1998 we had this quote:
"The X PRIZE Foundation already has raised more than half of the $10 million purse and anticipates having the remaining funds within a year."
According to their 2001 990 at the end of the year they had $3,000 in cash and $1,000,000 in liabilities.
If someone has already looked into the situation (ie, status of insurance, supporting organization holding funds etc) do let me know, otherwise I'll work to pull together some relevant information.
As I get it I'll stick relevant info up at http://augustz.com/xprize. [Nothing up at the moment and maybe nothing will ever show up...
The innovation around these projects is so cool however. Looking forward to the results!
In the article, the author makes the comment:
On May 20, 1927, the day Lindbergh's plane took off from New York, the young Boeing Corp. rolled out the Boeing 40-A, a simple plane used primarily to carry mail. By 1933, after thousands of flights and incremental improvements, that plane evolved into the Boeing 247, the first modern passenger airliner.
Looking at the Model 40-A (Boeing.com), you can see a fabric covered single engined biplane. Jumping to the 247 (Boeing.com), they are comparing to a dual engine, all metal monoplane with retractable landing gear.
I guess that you could say that the difference in the aircraft were a result of thousands of "incremental changes", but I would think that the difference is primarily the result of thousands of people being excited by the prospect of air travel - the incremental changes came later.
This should be the point of the X-Prize, rather than establishing a starting point for space travel, it should be an example of how low cost space flight could be achieved and then ignite the passions of many people with the result of space travel on a par with today's air travel.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
It would appear from hints dropped by the project lead of Mayflower, a home-made rocket vying for the $10 million X-Prize, that part of the secret of his space flight technology is based on cow feces.
"We have one [more] bit of valuable data. Cow pies in the area burned long after everything else was extinguished," Akkerman wrote to nearly 100 project supporters, after a small fire caused by a ruptured fuel hose ignited nearby cow excrement.
The team working on Mayflower may have stumbled across a way to use the excrement as a cheap, widely available and long-lasting fuel. Now all that remains is to discover a method for compacting and concentrating the potential fuel for later use.
In other news, America's dairy farmers and beef industry stocks rose as a direct result of a discovery made during a small fire caused by a Christian geek playing with model rockets. The geek claimed to be producing a home-made space shuttle, but local law enforcement believe that he may have been spending too much time near the fumes.
> "The X-Prize competition has gotten a lot of coverage
> on Slashdot - either because it's cool and geeky or
> because John Carmack is involved.
I think the X-Prize would get slashdot coverage anyway, but John Carmacks presence makes it downright fascinating.
I've wondered if John has more fans than any other slashdot user. Check out his fan list. Does anyone come close? How about that steak sauce guy, Perens ? Sorry - SexxyGal doesnt count, since the letters "Sex" causes so much confusion in this community.
The first time there is a safety problem with any of the spacecraft, all hell will ensue.
The public will become fearful of visiting space on a private tourist craft, and the governments of many western nations will undoubtedly begin passing laws to regulate the industry.
Space tourism has a future, but I'm not so sure it's as lucrative as the foundation would have us believe.
Since the Apollo program, manned space flight has been an expensive and dangerous waste of time. Nothing's been accomplished by the space shuttle that couldn't have been accomplished by unmanned craft. The "science" carried on by shuttle astronauts has been worthless PR-driven junk (see http://www.aps.org/WN/WN03/wn022103.html).
What we need is all funding currently thrown at manned space flight to be spent on projects which result in genuine science. Take the Hubble telescope: the total cost, including repairs, was $200m. Each shuttle launch costs $400m: ten times as much per tonne of payload than the cheap launch vehicles used by the Russians and Chinese.
The X Prize just encourages the believe that manned space flight is a worthwhile end in itself. It isn't. To the extent it succeeds, it will continue the popular and political obsession with manned space flight and waste more money and lives.
Especially if they could get William Shatner to do the ads again, it would be perfect....
Sponsored by the X Prize Foundation in St. Louis, the contest aims to accelerate the development of low-cost spaceships for travel and commerce.
if they had to lunch their ship from that kick ass arch they have there.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Across the world, how many people ride motorcross bikes? Jump out of planes? Go rock-climbing? Or, if you're arguing that the people that like those kinds of activities can't afford $100,000 to go to space, how many rich dilettantes like to race Porsches - an activity that can easily chew up well over $100,000 in a single season.
I would argue that there are plenty of rich people who will view the risks phlegmatically enough to keep a space tourism operation expanding for a while.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Well although the parent is quick to point out the $200m cost of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in comparison to the $400m shuttle launch cost thats just plain incorrect.
The correct figures are as follows (taken from http://hubble.nasa.gov/faq.html + NASA STS-82 docs):
Initial Cost: $1.5 Billion
Yearly Cost: $230-250 Million
STS-82 Repair:
Parts: $387 Million
Flight: $430 Million
So if we tally the costs over the first 15 years of operation (up to say ~2000) we come to: $5.3 Billion
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
It involves big big machines. It involves complex formulas. It involves a lot of money. It uses gruff test pilots (who may not survive!). It involves a lot of speculation. It involves a lot of speculation and play by play action!! not to mention competition! ... etc, but the goal will be for mass-suborbital-transportation! Yeah! Sign me up. Lead Polymer Designer here I come!
Wait!
I have a great idea for a slashdot theme... lets give geeks a sport! It'll be called... Make it to Space! and it will have all the qualities of football/basketball/baseball
Where's my girlfriend!? Where's my ho!? I'm bigger than jesus! Lead Polymer Designer! yeah!
At least that what this comment reads like. Hmm Everest has been climbed, why climb it again?
Tourists are even happy to pay for trips to Antartica to get covered in penguin shit. And some tourists are daft enough to try crossing the Australian desert in summer. The only thing that seems to slow them down is fear of something less likely to kill them than a car accident back home. Something = anything from SARS, bombing, snake bite, shark bite, lightning strike etc. They don't usually think of death by thirst, jellyfish stingers, crocodiles, or wombat/roo/donkey/camel/sheep/sandhill/washout car accidents).
I just hope that successful space trips don't give corporates a new excuse to continue trashing the only planet we've got.
That's my rant for the day...
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
To give up and go home would be uneconomic. Building a suborbital hopper isn't cheap. Gotta commercialize it, to pay the bills. Tourists first, then superfast intercontinental travel. That means commodity parts, spaceports, refuel/repair infrastructure. All of which will help when they announce the prize for LEO...
If this private commercial space travel industry really starts to take off in the coming years, I wonder how goverments will start responding to it. NASA isnt just about sending scientists up into space to see how frogs would do in zero gravity. Alot of thier work in space is directly linked to the US military and I can imagine theres some pretty top secret sensitive stuff happening up there. I can see some very big fights going on in the near future. Will goverments try to pull some kind of crap where they act like they own space and control who goes into it? I'm sure they can wrap it around something to do with possible terrorism and have it all nice and ready to go in time for The Patriot Act version 3.0.
Of course, the PC industry was based on an already successful commercial computer industry, who had already been refining the concepts of computer science and electrical engineering. The PC industry simply introduced the concept of low-cost personal computers and mass-produced consumer devices.
The analogies are very strong, especially considering how the existing Aerospace industries are totally falling flat on this idea. I am very surprised that companies like Boeing or Airbus aren't at least letting their engineers have access to their shops after hours to try a stunt like this and submit their own entry for practically pocket change, kinda like how IBM let their engineers play a bit with Linux for next to no bottom-line cost for years...with a huge ROI.
Once you hit the 15,000 for $100,000, the question then becomes how many would pay $10,000 if they could get the price per trip down?
Heck, I might be encouraged to get a home equity loan in 10 years just for an opportunity to do that myself (or help finance one of my kids for that opportunity).
The study was only talking about some real hard numbers that could be given to investors and point out the very real profit potential of commercial space transportation systems, even considering that the need to send a 747-style spacecraft to Mars will still be a century away.
100k for a 15 minute trip to nowhere is not
worth it.
100k for a two hour suborbital flight
from New York to Tokyo...the economics look
far more appealing. Right now people pay somewhere in the range of 12000 for a first class seat from New York to Tokyo and still have to endure an 18 hour flight. There are plenty of superwealthy people whos time is worth more than their money.
100k for the two hour delivery of a custom fabricated part to keep a factory running that has an idle cost of 10 million a day. Now you see
there is a market.
Now Same-day package delivery from Australia/Japan/China to the US might be worth something.
There'd be significant capital investment in space travel required. But if one courier bites, then there'd be competitive pressure to build better capabilities - higher payload, faster turnaround!
(Why does the preview say Sunday August 03, @08:00PM
when it's Monday, August 4, 8:11 AM EDT here?)
One thing worries me about the X-Prize and that is safety. During the cold war the space race was a matter of national security as well as national pride so huge amounts of money were spent on research and development. Dispite this huge spending there were a large number of systems failures and a number of deaths.
Although we may have advanced in a number of technical fields since the 1950s space flight has not significantly changed. Is offering people money to win a race to get into space a good thing to add to the mix of small budgets and amateur rocketry?
The comparison of the current technology level of space travel to the beginnings of air travel does have points, but so far we're missing a very important one:
Where are we going to go?
There are no orbiting space stations (no, the currently 2 person ISS doesn't count), no lunar base, no asteroid mining, no space colonies
When avation was beginning, there was an entire world it could open up to new travel opportunities. What is space travel going to give us?
Help find a cure for Gidget.
....my money is on Rutan.
I mean really... who in their right mind would want to return to earth strapped between hydregen peroide tanks (probably with enough contents left to be lethal in the event of a leak) on a nose first trajectory with a "crushable nose cone" to break your decent. I mean only the guy that came up with a quad powered rocket launcher jumping maneuver would think something like this up...
Just curious... Is there any opinion (informed, not the usual guesswork type) as to who will make the trip first, and survive to collect the prize money? I have followed X-Prize news over the last few years, but recently I have been too busy in my soul-robbing, non-tech job to take notice!
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
Think about it. Let's take a 5-year eligibility period. In the first year, XPrize Co. pays out an initial premium and upfront policy load. XPrize doubts anyone can hit that mark, and they really figure it will be more like year 5 or beyond that a winner will emerge (and that is proving true thus far). In the meantime, the insurance company does some investment wizardry with its risk pool, to make best use of the time with the money. The insurance company has probably made money on half a dozen contests where contestants need to peer endlessly into the bottom of their Mountain Dew cans, to determine if they have won, because some prizes go unawarded, or are delayed enough (by a bump-up system) that the investment has been more than recovered before a pay-out, which is still a reduction from the total exposure, since only single-slot winners can be bumped up to the next level (once there are more than one Nth prize winners, they are cut off), and there is no payout at position N, only N+1 up to the Grand Prize.
Applying this effect back to XPrize, they have forecast some probabilities, and minimums. It is only in this year that XPrize has even started to look for a spaceport. Every time there's a governing juris diction (like the FAA) involved, that creates useful delays. It gives the insurance companies time to make more investments. XPrize creates reasonable hurdles that folks need to clear in order to win. One can engineer only so quickly. A pay-out in year 3 would really hurt the insurance company. A pay-out in year 6 means it cost XPrize Co. an extra year's worth of premiums. And that really is the greatest risk of all. Can they afford to keep paying the insurance premiums? If they cannot, well, the insurance company just made a monstrous load of cash.
If you live in a US State with a lottery, can you imagine what the contest would be like if people put money in, and rather than winning an obscene sum, won a trip into space? Sure, it goes to the schools or the environment now (Johnny, this new computer lab was brought to you on the backs of poor people who have a gambling addiction), but what if those untold millions went to space exploration instead? Insurance is just highly organized gambling, which translates to organized crime.
If there's no there there, why would anyone pay to go there?
Help find a cure for Gidget.
Hmmm... My best bet is on the "space plane" sollutions. I can't see anything based on a helo realy working. Fixed wings are much more effiecient lifters.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
My money is on Rutan I saw him this week at EAA Airventure. It sounds like he is real close. According to Rutan the best reason for XPrize is the children. He says "We cannot afford to bore our children"
I saw Rutan at Oshkosh this weekend . He said he was amazed at how expensive his program turned out to be. While he couldn't reveal the exact dollar amount only that it was as expensive as one Hour of science on the ISS. Oh and for those of you who were wondering the sigificance of N328KF. 328,000 feet is the goal. IMHO he is close, real close. If I had to pick a date it would be 10:35 AM December 17th 2003.
IMHO he's absolutely right about that. Nothing grabbed my pre-teen and early teen attention like astronauts, space-walks, and moon walks. I wonder how many kids went into the sciences after watching our astronauts.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The X Prize just encourages the believe that manned space flight is a worthwhile end in itself. It isn't.
You are so right. For that matter, we should start phasing out comercial air travel. It uses enormous amounts of fuel, causes occasional spectacular loss of life, and to what end? The vast majority of people who travel anywhere by air go right back to where they came from within a month or so. What little real good is accomplished by maned air travel could just as well (and much more safely and cheaply) be handled by phone and parcel post.
And don't even get me started about human travel in automobiles. What lunitic thought that up? Why more people don't telecommute is beyond me. Heck, you can even get your groceries delivered. What do you need to go out for? To get gas for your car? Bah!
Now, some people will say I'm going too far, but I don't see why anyone wants to leave there own house, let alone their home planet! What's so interesting out there, anyway? Meeting people? Heck, that's what the internet is for. Intertainment? Same deal. In fact, name one thing that you think you can only get by leaving your house and I bet I can find it for you on the internet in under fifteen minutes!
Space? Phooie I say! Download some good games and get over it.
-- QsukraM
When there's a bad car crash, do we shut down the Interstate system? When there's a bad air accident, do we ground all flights? While tragic, it's also expected, normal and routine that there will be occasional safety problems with all forms of transportation.
But in space travel - which is nose-on-your-face obviously the most dangerous transportation system - we get all freaked out whenever there's an accident, and burn down entire programs.
Is it because 1950s NASA engineers sold us the dream that we could have perfectly safe space flight because of our modern technological superiority? Why is it that the most dangerous way of traveling can't be satisfied with the same safety record as its mundane counterparts?
-Graham
I bet that inter-continental trips will be shortly behind the X-prize (i.e. 5-10 years) for business execs that don't want to ride in a plane for 36 hours and want to write off a thrill ride with a zero-g lay-over as a business expense. Heck, some of CEOs with large saleries might actually show "good business sense" by cutting a day or two of traveling out of a 3-5 day business trip (they make $300,000/per day at $100 million/year saleries).
science is a religion
Has anyone considered whether a small suborbital vehicle could be used in conjunction with a space elevator? I suspect extending the elevator down to the surface might have serious problems (aircraft collisions, wind effects, etc.) What if a small suborbital vehicle could climb up to and capture the end of the elevator, from which it could be hauled up to higher orbit. Now you have a practical space transportation system! Any rocket scientists out there think this makes sense?
So gambling is a crime? Maybe in the sense that it's illegal in some places. But it's not illegal everywhere, and anyway I get the impression that's not what you mean.
So you're saying that gambling is some kind of universal moral wrong--a "crime against humanity", perhaps?
Does this mean that all forms of risk-taking are morally wrong, or criminal acts, or whatever?
Please explain.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Go up, land halfway around the Earth.
X-Prixe-3 - Land having circled the Earth. (not orbit, but parabolic boost + glide)
X-Prize-4 - Orbits + return.
After all when someone won the first Kremer Prize and did the figure-8, there was a new prize to cross the English Channel.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
not irony, stupidity.
Agreed!
Manned space flight has achieved nothing of note since Apollo. Nothing scientific, nothing cultural, nothing economic. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
Agreed again. You forgot "ziltch" and "the big goose egg" but otherwise I agree withyou completely. I mean, here we keep sending these people into a mind bogglingly enourmous repository of natural resources, with more much energy, gold, iron, hydrocarbons, you name it than humanity has used in its entire existance just floating around for the taking, and they don't even bring us back a lousy t-shirt.
Who needs 'em, that's what I say! We should just stay right here and focus on killing each other to gain control over the little bit that we've already got instead of chaising after pie-in-the-sky. Do you realize how many bombs we could have bought with the money we waisted on that stupid manned space program? Heck, we could own the place!
And don't give me any of that nonsense about the dinosaurs. I mean, look how long they lasted without a space program! We've probably got lots of time left right here! Besides, if we all stay home (work from home, shop from home, socialize from home, explore from home, you name it) like I was saying in my previous post, we can conserve a lot so we probably won't run out of anything important for a long long long time.
Do we think alike, or what!
-- QsukraM
Instead of the cost-plus accounting that has kept space agencies so expensive, NASA should issue its own X-prize(s).
First, award a contract for 20 heavy lift vehicles (100-ton+ payload) to the first company that can bring the cost to launch down to $1000/kg to LEO at a cost of $200 million per vehicle, or something close to that. This would finally open up space to NASA. The space station could have been built with three launches.
NASA needs to stop throwing bricks into space with the shuttle and focus on getting there and staying there, not just coming back down once we've finished. We need to get our eggs out of one basket.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
You speak like this was your money they were spending. NASA is, X-Prize isn't. They've explicitly disallowed state help or funding. It's the contenders' own money and they can spend it however they please, including on things you consider frivolous. Likewise they can risk their own lives, who the hell are you to tell them not to?
Oh, and space flight isn't an end in itself (except to tourists and adventurers), but nor is it only there for some dry academic's miserly conception of "genuine science". It's a tool towards the real end: colonizing the solar system, then the stars. If you think differently, you underestimate the wanderlust and expansion-instinct which are natural to the human species.
Just the idea of the possibility of flying in space excites me. Feeling accelleration of lift off, being in free fall, watching sun rise over the Earth, seeing plasma stream by the windows on re-entry.
I suspect that this is similar to the excitement of a hundred years ago, seeing a man take off and fly around a field. Being excited about flying isn't about going somewhere.
As for there being places to go 100 years ago, why would you assume that 100 years ago there were places to go by air? The idea of flying New York to Washington by a heavier than air craft was considered science fiction at best.
It was the first few pioneers that got people excited about flying who then went on to make the thousands of incremental changes that made flying practical.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Shouldn't you be working on Doom 3? I mean, Christmas is right around the corner. Chop! Chop!
I am the inventor of the hilarious refrigerator alarm.
Incidentally, if Slashdot doesn't post info about the Xprize often enough for you, we (my design firm) just launched some message boards on the site. Hit www.xprize.org/messageboard to join in the fun. __________________________
I don't know why people are excited by fast cars. If you are not fast enough to orbit, you are too slow!
I was worried for a while that the lack of interest and funding to the space program would result in an end to space exploration before it even began. But thanks to private groups such as those mentioned in X-Prize, even without NASA, we'll still be conquering space.
- Nick Busey
www.pedalbmx.com
www.nickbusey.com