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FAA Grants Sub-Orbital License to SpaceShipOne

Posted by simoniker on from the mote-in-moon's-eye dept.

abucior writes "The FAA announced today that Scaled Composites has been granted a launch licence for a series of sub-orbital flights over a one-year period for Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne. Is X Prize finally entering the end-game? Space.com has more information on the move."

26 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Awesome by TheKidWho · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At least the government isnt getting in the way. Im for one am glad to see the X-Prize might actually have a chance of revolutionizing the space industry!

    1. Re:Awesome by Fuzzy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My bet is that this is the first of MANY applications that the "government" will approve. Space belongs to those who are willing/able to go there!

      The Moon, the planets, and the great unknown beyond should not be 'owned" by a government. Like the unexplored world that existed in the 1400's, they should belong to those willing to make the sacrifices, and devote the resources to explore and colonize the unknown!

      My bet is that the "governments" of the world will get out of the way and allow the exploration and colonization of the known and unknown universe. To do otherwise implies a vision and long range planning capability that does currently exist in ANY govenment that I know of.

      Space, like the "old West" of the US [my appologies to the Native Americans], belongs to those who are willing to go there!

      John [looking for Ringworld] Miller

    2. Re:Awesome by dspeyer · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Why does everyne think the X-prize will revolutionize space?

      Just because someone's doing something for money they will necessarily do it well. Microsoft does stuff for money. It's not like the X-prize will turn space into a real industry -- real industries aren't dependant on private philanthropy.

      I'm all for throwing more resources into spaceflight, but having many small teams keeping secrets from eachother doesn't sound like a big improvement on having a few large teams that work together. Having many small teams that work together might be better still, but probably not by much. Remember, improvements in spaceflight will be built by engineers -- no one else. If the engineers are serious about what they do (and any who revolutionize spaceflight would have to be) then they'll concentrate on the problem at hand and ignore where their funding comes from, be it government, corporate, private, academic or bank fraud.

      It seems to be an article of faith among many slashdotters that anything the government does it will automatically mess up. It might be worth remembering that all achievements in space flight so far have been government-funded, and that the so-called commercial airlines exist only because of government supsidies.

      --

      Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right

    3. Re:Awesome by gfody · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm all for throwing more resources into spaceflight, but having many small teams keeping secrets from eachother doesn't sound like a big improvement on having a few large teams that work together.

      You don't know much about engineering do you? The more people that work together, the less likely it is that anything gets accomplished. Read up on competitive learning, competition in general and its role in society. Then think about where we would be today if nobody had a competitive spirit and just shared secrets with eachother.

      --

      bite my glorious golden ass.
  2. Re:eek by simcop2387 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    only if they launch out of the US (which i believe most of them actually are... correct me if i'm wrong) but i'm betting that if they need to all they have to do is make it to international waters, right where they held the secratariat v. tadum fight anyway

  3. A good thing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Corporate and private interest in space is always a good thing. The driving force behind alot of innovation in the last half of the 20th century has been, for better or worse, corporate greed. Innovation in space travel is A GOOD THING, and so this IS A GOOD THING.

  4. Re:eek by in7ane · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Potential financial liability is likely to be covered by insurance (which will be costly no doubt), which anything that can reasonably be expected to fly and has adequate funding to get it to outer space should be able to afford.

    Keep in mind that stuff like this will not be launched form populated areas (deserts, etc. probably) so any liability only comes in if it can make it far enough to hit something, which in itself is a sign that it has potential, and so is more likely to be sufficiently safe. Think of it this way: conditional on it being able to make it as far as a populated area the probability that it will crash it low.

  5. Re:what happens? by Jjeff1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    After reading about the problems Carmack and Armadillo Aerospace encountered trying to get H2O2, I don't think you'd be able to get enough fuel or parts to build anything un-noticed.

  6. Re:Crock of Shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Yeah anybody should be able to fly wherever they want. It's our air, too. Who cares if a few they cross through flight paths. What's a few near misses amongst friends.

    Dumbass.

  7. Come on by seanmcelroy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I heard this story on NPR driving home just a few hours ago. They headlined it as "bringing space flight into the reach of ordinary Americans". Come on... considering raw costs alone, it'll be decades before 'ordinary Americans' can afford this kind of luxury travel.

    (Especially if they're all out of work because their jobs went overseas! ;P jk)

    --
    Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
    1. Re:Come on by fucksl4shd0t · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Don't underestimate what a leap an efficiency the X-Prize represents.

      Not that I disagree with you, just keep one foot in the part of reality that remembers that X-prize isn't going to LEO, and isn't even getting close to LEO. Unless you hit LEO, your reusable spacecraft is just a great ride. :)

      Don't get me wrong, though. After they've hit the low target they've set with the reusable requirements they've got I expect the design to be pushed to LEO pretty quickly, pretty much as soon as it gets covered up with funding from both the X-prize itself and all the VCs and other investors that learn by virtue of the X-prize that you have a viable technology.

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    2. Re:Come on by DerekLyons · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Basically that means once you've built a winning X-Prize craft, the only real relaunch costs are fuel. Compare that to the massive cost of each shuttle launch (between 3 and 5 hundred million dollars per launch), and you're talking about reduing launch costs by a factor of 100 or more.
      You are also reducing the capabilities you get for your money by a thousand times or more. The Shuttle is orbital (with all the problems that all orbital craft have), an X-prize vehicle is suborbital. The Shuttle has 60,000lbs of cargo capacity and up to 9 passengers/crew, an X-prize vehicle has essentially no cargo capacity and up to 4 passengers/crew.

      Not to mention the fact that the Shuttle launch costs you note covers more than fuel, it also covers all the maintenance, prepation, testing, etc. that a craft in service must have, while a vehicle that only has to fly twice can get away with far, far less infrastructure. (The key to reducing costs isn't reducing vehicle costs as many believe, but in flying the hell out of the vehicle and spreading the costs across many vehicles and flights. Ask the airlines.)

      Don't underestimate what a leap an efficiency the X-Prize represents.
      Don't overestimate it either. The X-Prize vehicles are highly specialized test and experimental vehicles, it's a long leap from there to vehicles capable of routine operations. (Not just in general concept, but in raw performance.) Consider the long step between the Wright Flyer and the Ford Tri-Motor or the DC-3. That's how far the X-prize vehicles are from useful and cheap space transports.
    3. Re:Come on by GileadGreene · · Score: 4, Insightful
      The Shuttle has 60,000lbs of cargo capacity and up to 9 passengers/crew

      The shuttle's 60,000 lb cargo capacity is wasteful and useless. It costs more per pound (even accounting for inflation) to launch on the shuttle than it did to launch on the Saturn V. It'd be fine if the shuttle provided an economical way to launch bulk cargo, but it doesn't. Better to stick with unmanned expendables for that kind of stuff - at least for the time being. As for the 9 passengers/crew, they cost so much per person to launch that only a small elite are permitted to fly. The 4 passengers on an X-Prize vehicle may only be going suborbital (for now), but at least they're going.

      The key to reducing costs isn't reducing vehicle costs as many believe, but in flying the hell out of the vehicle and spreading the costs across many vehicles and flights.

      True. But that's part of the point of the X-Prize. The shuttle design simply cannot support a flight rate sufficient to make its costs reasonable. Plus it requires a standing army of several thousand just to operate it. The shuttle is not capable of operating in an airline mode. The X-Prize is encouraging designs that are capable of rapid turn-around (and thus high flight rate), and require minimal infrastructure. The X-Prize designs will (hopefully) be capable of airline-like operations.

      Consider the long step between the Wright Flyer and the Ford Tri-Motor or the DC-3. That's how far the X-prize vehicles are from useful and cheap space transports.

      The first flight of the Wright Flyer involved a mere 12 seconds of flying time (the third and longest flight of the day attained a whopping 59 seconds). Only 10 years later the airplane was a major player in the Great War. Ok, the world had to wait another ~20 years for the DC-3. But commercial aviation was already well-established before the DC-3 came along. Useful and cheap are relative terms. The X-Prize vehicles may be closer to both of them than you think.

    4. Re:Come on by DerekLyons · · Score: 2, Insightful
      That's what excites me. Look at how cheap and safe air travel is now. Wright brother's flight was in 1903, right? In less than 20 years you had airplanes EVERYWHERE.
      Certainly you had airplanes 'everywhere', but great deal of them were barnstormers or air mail. Travel by air was limited to major cities and wealthy individuals. Air travel for the masses didn't become common until the mid-late 1960's and didn't really become affordable until deregulation in the 1980's.
      Today, 100 years later, I can buy an airplane ticket for a couple day's worth of barely-better-than minimum wage barely-part-time college work.
      That's because of the great demand, intense competition, and decades of the air lines honing and polishing their operations. And it's only in the last few years that prices have really dropped.
      If this is like the Wright brother's flight, then we're in for one hell of a century, and it's gonna be a good one.
      There is absolutely no reason to believe that. It took WWI and II to push technological development, and decades of engineering experience after, and some fairly unique economic circumstances for air travel to become as cheap and ubiquitous as it is today. (Not to mention the fact that air travel is popular because it links *places*, which space travel does not.)
    5. Re:Come on by GileadGreene · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Most S-V costings don't account for the overhead and infrastructure cost, while every Shuttle one does.

      I'd be willing to debate both of those assertions. However, I do agree that it depends a lot on what you include in your launch cost roll-up (and what you define as "overhead" and "infrastructure cost")

      The reality is that the marginal cost for a Shuttle flight is around 150 million a flight, but the overhead kills it when spread across so few flights.

      The reality is that the shuttle cannot support a higher flight rate, so the marginal cost is somewhat meaningless (and is dominated by the fixed costs anyway).

      The passengers on an X-Prize vehicle are no more going somewhere than are the riders of a roller coaster.

      Cute analogy. But you are conveniently missing the point. The X-Prize passengers will be going into space, a realm that has, until now, been restricted to hand-picked astronauts, self-made multi-millionaires, and congressmen on junkets. So what if it's only sub-orbital for now. That at least puts them on a par with the early Mercury flights. The Wright Flyer flew only a few hundred feet to begin with. That doesn't detract from the fact that it flew.

      Like every aviation prize before it, the X-prize is encouraging vehicles designed specifically to win the prize.

      And the prize is specifically designed to encourage vehicles that support fast-turnaround with minimal infrastructure. Those two features are essentially what the launch vehicle community is referring to when they talk about "airline-like" operations (and relative to the way launch vehicles are currently operated they do represent something much more like the way an airline operates). Ok, so you won't be using an X-Prize competitor like an actual modern airliner. But as you say "It took the airlines and manufacturers decades to achieve those levels." They did it by trying lots of different stuff, discarding what failed, and keeping what worked. The beauty of the X-Prize is that we're finally getting away from NASA's stale "one true way" of doing manned launch, and experimenting with a variety of approaches. All of these approaches must, as a result of the competition rules, give at least some consideration to reusability and operability. Some will work. Some will fail. We'll learn from them all, and probably learn a lot more than we would from the endless paper studies that characterize NASA's attempts at manned launch. The current crop of X-Prize contenders may not be the equivalent of a space-going DC-3, but they sow the seeds from which such a craft can eventually emerge.

    6. Re:Come on by AGMW · · Score: 3, Insightful
      The shuttle's 60,000 lb cargo capacity is wasteful and useless.

      In my book we'd be looking at two distinct types of craft. Lets build something specifically for shifting stuff into orbit as cheaply as possible, and then lets build something else for shifting people.

      I'd wondered about a massive rail gun that could fire small-ish canisters into orbit, where they could be caught by a space station somehow. This setup could potentially fire a canister every few minutes containing unbreakable commodities - oxygen, water, pies, that sort of thing - and do so very cheaply (once you've build the rail gun!). The bodies of the canisters would also be a source of raw material for orbital construction projects.

      --
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      handmadehands.co.uk
  8. FAA authority by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful
    Only a team that did request FAA approval (i.e., get a license) would be recognising the authority of the FAA.

    Legally, a case could be made that the FAA has no authority to regulate any team that did not specifically get a certificate from the FAA.

    As a bureaucracy, the FAA does not automatically get to make its own rules binding on everyone in the U.S. (Only Congress can do that!)

    1. Re:FAA authority by falcon5768 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      now THAT would be a good question.. since we have pretty much made the case that while a US craft would be "US territory" space is not owned by any country.. my guess is once you pass what nasa considers the threshhold of space.. your not under US authority

      --

      "Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."

  9. Re:Throwing stuff into space ... legally. by Kenshin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Of course, in alot of cases, it may just be easier to launch from a country that isn't so uptight.

    --

    Does it make you happy you're so strange?

  10. Re:eek by DerekLyons · · Score: 4, Insightful
    While the highest criteria to issue a license is public safety, applicants must undergo an extensive pre-application process, demonstrate adequate financial responsibility to cover any potential losses, and meet strict environmental requirements.
    this might put a lot of people outta the runnings
    And frankly, that's a Good Thing. While I applaud and encourage the small company and backyard inventor, they should not be allowed to endanger the public any more than the big companies should. (In theory all are equal before the law, but sadly the size of the bankroll sometimes tips the scales a bit.)

    In addition, if the thing isn't safe enough to test without endangering the public, it's nowhere safe enough to fly in actual service. The thousands of homebuilt and homebrewed aircraft flying legally every day shows that safety and experiments are not mutually exclusive requirements.

  11. Burt Rutan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I first noticed Burt Rutan because of a homebuilt plane that he designed. It was composite construction (fiberglass and foam) and extremely strong. It was a canard (it had a lifting surface on the nose) and therefore very stable. Some time later he built the first plane to fly around the world without refueling.

    The guy is a genius and an innovator in a field that does its best to discourage innovation.

    If I have understood correctly, lawsuits have basically killed innovation in general aviation. Check it out the next time you are airside: most of the designs of small aircraft are fifty years old. I wonder if we will be saying the same thing about software in fifty years.

    www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/GENERAL_AVIATIO N/ rutan/GA15.htm

  12. Re:The Man Who Sold the Moon by fucksl4shd0t · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Um, sorry to burst your bubble, but this has absolutely no comparison to DD Harriman and company. See, DD Harriman was the guy at the top of the power conglomerate, and as such had much more power than the government itself. Be thankful we don't have that kind of world--yet. He was also an idealist, so I have a real hard time believing he got to be where he was in the story in any fashion that resembles real life corporate politics. ;)

    --
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  13. Re:license for 312,000 ft? by voidptr · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How do you get to 60,001 feet without climbing through the first sixty thousand? If we could just magically apear above restricted (and everything from 1200 feet to 60,000 is restricted to some degree) airspace, it'd be kind of a moot contest.

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  14. X-Prize and space by robert.broome · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Remember though that the X-Prize is for suborbital flight. The height isn't important-it is the speed. Spaceship 1 won't have to deal with reentry temperatures, making it MUCH simpler to build and fly. If X-Prize was for an orbital flight, or any Mach 25 flight, there wouldn't be any entries. Is it the first step to cheap flight or just a cheap flight? Only a real reentry system will tell.

  15. Re:More paper mass to lift than payload! by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Well, normal aircraft can't fly until the mass of paper outweighs the aircraft. What makes you think rockets are any different? :-)

    Actually, I think that the FAA regulatory process for suborbitals is very lightweight compared to aircraft. It's not like the general public can just step on board; and they are currently cutting them some slack.

    The problem is that if they don't do this, then spaceflight can never, ever get going. Reliability of entirely new classes of vehicles is simply not going to be like a 777. The regulatory authorities (particularly the FAA people who work on suborbitals, and whose jobs depend on it succeeding), know this and are actually on the side of the embryonic industry.

    --

    -WolfWithoutAClause

    "Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
  16. hmmm... by fantomas · · Score: 2, Insightful

    speak for yourself, but I really wouldn't want to be underneath a 50kg lump of metal that has fallen 40,000 metres / feet from an exploding rocket, however it was powered... I think people would still die... there could be a fair spread of debris colliding with people if such an explosion meant the fallout path was across an urban area.