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Florida and New Mexico Compete for X-Prize
N8F8 writes "Looks like the fight for the location for the first X-Prize competition is in the final stage. Florida and New Mexico are the finalists. New Mexico is courting the X-Prize officials heavily. Living in Satellite Beach, Florida, it isn't hard to guess where my vote is going! It's too bad Governor Jeb Bush isn't putting much effort into lobbying for Florida though other efforts may be under way. Getting in on the ground floor of private space entrepuraneurism would be priceless. X-Prize officials have delayed the final decision to April 16th."
Shouldn't the location be characteristically close to the future real launch venue? I don't think it'll help much if everybody test launch in antarctica :)
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
For the uninformed like I was, here's X-Prize's webpage. The news is summed up nicely in the following paragraph:
Hegler said Cape Canaveral was the first choice, even though the Kennedy Space Center is not directly involved, and Cecil Field in Jacksonville is an alternative location.
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I keep hoping for news of mineral resources somewhere in the solar system, that would make space travel profitable.
The prohibitive cost of this would make it unprofitable though. Say there's a huge repository of gold somewhere out there. The cost of going there and lugging it back would be so expensive that it would have to be a really *huge* amount of gold to make it worthwhile. Then the problem becomes liquidating that much gold on the market -- it would create such a glut that gold prices would fall sharply. The only chance of this making sense would be for something which is extremely rare on Earth, yet is in very high demand so that they could effectively monopolize the market.
There has to be a way to make money off of outer space, but what is it?
One of the easiest ways is tourism. The first people to setup shop in space charge others for the service of travelling in space or simply staying in an orbiting hotel. Substitute "space" for some remote corner of the planet, and the profit motive is similar. Moon/Mars safari, anyone?
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I live in New Mexico. Of course it exists... you may have been joking when you posted this, but you would be surprised at how many people don't realize that there's something between Texas and Arizona or south of Colorado... I can't count on my fingers the number of times where people have been stupified when I tell them where I live.
I once called an airline for reservations and was told that they only dealt with the continental United States and that I would have to call the international number...
BTW, New Mexico is the 47th state. We are the 5th largest state in terms of land area. 1.8 million people live here.
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Colour me confused, but I thought the X-Prize was a straightforward "First one to get a person 60 miles in the air wins" thing. Where does lobbying fit in?
The vehicles need to launch from somewhere, therefore several places are lobbying to have the X-Prize guys choose their backyard to be the official launch point.
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I keep hoping for news of mineral resources somewhere in the solar system, that would make space travel profitable. There has to be a way to make money off of outer space, but what is it?
Diamonds are relatively common. Artificial scarcity is created by the DeBeers monopoly and market manipulation. It's such that DeBeer's executives can't step foot in the United States without being subject to arrest. However, given the pro-corporate enviroment with this administration, they could get off the hook.
I digress. Any mineral resource you can dream of will always be cheaper to obtain on the terra Earth, no matter what.
Sending a launch vehicle and infrastructure to obtain minerals in outer space just is not feasible.
Even if it was a reusable jet plane that could reach outerspace, it still would outway heavily the costs of finding (or manufacturing) the mineral/substance on Earth. That also goes for medicines that might be manufactured in zero G. If there was a medicine that was invented/made in zero G, the huge economic incentive would drive (and find) an alternative manufacturing/substance discovery on Earth.
That ultimately is the truth of the situation.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The X-Prize is like the Orteig prize that inspired Charles Lindberg to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. The X-Prize Cup is like the annual air races (Thompson Cup, Bendix Cup, etc.) that fostered competition and quickly led to commercial aircraft industries.
The X-Prize competition will happen wherever the teams want to launch. BTW - Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, will be winning the X-Prize very soon. They're in Mojave California. Lots of info including pictures here.
And, please, no more references to "orbit". The X-Prize competition is for suborbital flight, which is essentially up and down, similar to the Redstone missions in NASA's early days. There is no requirement for a large horizontal component of velocity as would be needed to achieve orbit.
I found it interesting that New Mexico has a department responsible for space development. Finally, some government is actually looking to the future instead of being dragged kicking and screaming into it.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
Given that the X-prize competition is (currently) geared towards suborbital launch vehicles I'd say there's no "if" about it. Whether or not they'd be nice enough to land in your backyard is separate question.
Quoted from 'The High Frontier' byGerard K. O'neill, 1976. 3rd edition c2000 Space Studies institute. Apogee books ISBN 1-896522-67-X www.cgpublishing.com Chapter 4 page 35 "A typical Apollo sample contains by weight, more tha 20% silicon, more than 12% aluminum, 4% iron, and 3% magnesium. Many of the Apollo samples contained more than 6% titanium by weight. ... Finally, the lunar suface is more than 40% oxygen by weight." end quote.
Also, as we know from the Clementine missions, on the moons' south pole we found.. WATER!!
Further quoting from "The High Frontier";
"It has been shown by analyzing the spectra of sunlight reflecting from asteroids that some of them are rich in carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen - they are about as good a source of petrochemicals as oil shale. " end Quote.
Not to mention the nickel- iron ones which are nearly solid metal! Man, it's raining soup out there!