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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.
You don't want a hug from Jeb Bush. Go New Mexico!
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
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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You can find more information here.
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
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)?
I fail to see how "commercial interests" are the anthesis of space travel and colonization. What is so terrible about making money that it needs to be banned from space? It's not like they're sending the XPlanes up there to block out the sun in an act of cartoonish supervillany.
If someone can make money escaping the atmosphere in an attempt to speed up intercontinental flight, good for them. If someone can make money carrying satellites into space, or running experiments in zero-G, good for them. Profitability equals the survival of a venture... It's why profitable but socially negative corporations are difficult to get rid of. We want that kind of tenacity on our side. The spreading of mankind outside of our little planet is a good thing, and so long as the companies that do it are behaving in an ecologically responsible fashion, more power to them.
Theoretically, the only reason going into space would be profitable is if there was something sufficiently valuable up there that we should go. The more space travel there is, the less expensive it will be. The less expensive space travel is, the more experiments, manufacturing, and living can take place up there. There must be all kinds of ludicrously dangerous Xtreme sports for our grandkids to discover.
And, in case you haven't noticed, there are already commercial space operations out there. Far more often than NASA they're the ones putting up the satellite phone satellites and the flying transponders we rely upon. Except for the problem of junk in orbit, there isn't anything wrong with that.
The ______ Agenda
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.
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.
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.
Living in Satellite Beach, Florida, it isn't hard to guess where my vote is going!
If you live in Florida, I find it hard to believe you ever know where your vote is going!