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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."
The $10 Million cash prize will be awarded to the first team that privately finances, builds and launches a three-person spaceship to 100 Km (62.5 miles), returning safely to earth and repeating the launch with the same ship within two weeks.
It seems that non-governmental groups are a little less squeamish about taking risks and heading off this hunk of rock we call Earth.
Still...they're doing it for the sake of commercial interests, not simply for the sake of exploration and gathering knowledge, like NASA, the ESA, and the space agencies of other countries including, yes, formerly Soviet Russia.
I realize that for us as humans it's inevitable that we'll break free of Earth and go out...it's something characteristic of our species. Take the discovery of the Americas for example.
Can we be so sure that the end here (travel in space, colonization, etc.) justifies the means we as humans may need to take to get there (commercial interests)?
http://www.methuselahmouse.org
I think that progress to date since the launch last year is pretty impressive. $50,000 raised and $300,000 in pledges is far greater progress than the X Prize managed in the same period of time after launch - learning from the past and improving on it is a good thing. Check out The Three Hundred as well as a good example of how to get a certain set of people involved:
http://www.methuselahfoundation.org/threehundred.a sp
Why are prizes for research so good? Take a look at this piece on how they work and why they work so well:
http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/research_prize s.cfm
imagine if NASA was in charge of creating computer chips, and nasty companies like Intel were outlawed from any involvement in creating processors... do you really think modern computing would be anything more advanced than an Apple II? *shudders at the thought* I suppose commercial interests are good because they drive science and technology at a much faster pace than the government, burdened with rules and regulations and bureaucracy, can ever hope to do. I'm not anti-business, but it just leaves me wondering. Will outer space be cluttered with new forms of "spaceboard" advertising? Will planets be turned into tourist havens that people go to on day trips, leaving litter behind? I suppose the current system we have, in which commercial interests drive the science and technology but the government checks the growth so that it doesn't get out of control, is better than just the government or just corporations going it alone.
Most of the path of a space vehicle to orbit is vertical. New Mexico starts several thousand meters higher in the atmosphere reducing the length of travel and density of air when starting. White Sands Missile base would be a good starting point for a space port. We already launch missiles from White Sands. A electromagnetic vehicle accelerator could be run up the face of the Sandias in Albuquerque giving an initial vehicle free flight beginning at 3,000 meters. Located along the spine of the Rocky Mountains so shipping from California and points east are averaged. We dropped a shuttle on Texas and nobody got hurt except the passengers. Florida is quite crowded compared to eastern New Mexico and Western Texas. I vote for New Mexico. (My love of good mexican food may be biasing my decision ;))
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
The first customer for ICs was the military (for the Minuteman Missile project, IIRC). Later, NASA was another early adopter of the technology. The government is often the only one with deep enough pockets to buy expensive but unproven technologies. And it almost always contracts with private industry to develop them. Your "computer chips" might not even have been developed without the Air Force and NASA, since who else would have paid Fairchild, etc. to make them? A simple logic gate once cost over a hundred pre-inflation dollars...
That said, the bureaucratic monstrosity known as "NASA" is a pale, bumbling and bloated organization with little resemblance to the group that ran the Apollo project.
Sad, sad, sad...
I grew up in Las Cruces. On the other side of the mountain is White Sands Missle Range, the place where space flight started in this country. Werner von Braun and his group of scientists were taken there after WWII to start their research in this country. Every rocket this country has had flew there first(except Saturn 5 and shuttle). The lake bed at Northrup strip is where all shuttle pilots practised there landings for 10 years, and where one shuttle landed when Edwards was flooded. That place is the history of space and weapons reseach and innovation.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
And what exactly do you think motivated "the discovery of the Americas"?* Or for that matter precipitated the colonization of the Americas?** Very little in the way of exploration and eventual colonization has been done for other than commercial interests (albeit sometimes indirectly).
* Answer: the search for a faster route to the spice wealth of the Indies - there's a reason that native Americans became known as Indians.
** Answer: initially, the desire to plunder the gold of the New World.
According to this website, Jules Verne also considered Florida to be an ideal spot for launching into space. This was from his 1865 novel, From Earth to the Moon.
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