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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."
"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 |
Once you gen-x folks get done with the x-prize competition us gen-y folks will have the Y-Prize to see who can build the most XXXtreme rocket. The Y-Prize will be broadcast live on MTV(what music?) and the winner will receive a lifetime supply of mountain dew.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
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.
"About 15,000 people a year would pay $100,000 for a 15-minute suborbital trip by 2021, according to a study by the consulting business Futron Corp"
Is that $100k in 2003 dollars or 2021 dollars? If it is 2021 dollars that would be about $65k in 2003 dollars (assuming 2.5%/yr inflation over 18 years). If it is 2003 dollars that will be $155k in 2021.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
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
....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...
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