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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."
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.
Well, the article says 15,000 people/year would pay $100,000 for a 15-minute trip by 2021. Personally, I'd want more than 15 minutes in space for $100k, but there you go.
That doesn't seem like a bad growth rate for an industry--from 0 to 1.5 billion per year in only 20 years. Of course, the PC industry puts that to shame, but I don't think a whole lot of industries have matched that growth rate.
Matt
"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
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.
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
This probably is a very pessimistic estimate. For somewhat more optimistic outlook, see Private Space Development Timeline Mind you Elon Musk of SpaceX is planning to launch his semi-reusable Falcon in January, 2004. That is, to orbit. Some other companies, like Microcosm and SpaceDev are on track to launch their low-cost orbital vehicles in quite near future too. If and when X-Prize is won, the efforts ( sub ~million per launch manned suborbital ) and current "cheap" launcher builders will converge and it isnt unreasonable to expect a couple million range manned orbital launches in this decade. Given some competition and general revitalization of industry, expect new high-tech technologies and materials to be employed real fast after initial proofs of concept, thus bringing the price down even further. Imagine, a million dollar orbital trip that could be won on lottery.
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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.
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.
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?
....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...
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.
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 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
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.