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Burt Rutan On his Upcoming X-Prize Attempt
dkleinsc writes "The BBC is running an article about Burt Rutan, the head of Scaled Composites and creator of SpaceShip One. He talks about his motivation (besides fame and a big pile of cash) for the project."
Do you know how well "Have you ever had sex in outer space?" works as a pick-up line?
Reading this story, I am remided of the movie October Sky. For wannabe rocket scientists, this is one of the most inspirational movies.
It's based on a true story. The protagonist is now in a very high position in NASA.
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
I was under the impression that more money was being spent than he'd win on the X-Prize.
It must be like that joke: I made a small fortune on the stock market. Problem is, I started with a large one.
Putting dreams into actions - gotta love the guy!
Energy: time to change the picture.
The Gates foundation has donated Billions to Global Health care issues.
Lucky me, I have cool boss. ;-)
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
You can't but like Paul Allen sometimes just because of how insane he is. Watching an old Windows 1.0 "commercial" he did, it almost seems like a parody of a computer commercial. It might be, but I cannot tell ;)
They talk a lot about space tourism in the article, but I believe that is a long, long way off still. The first thing that would happen is private launch of payloads, but that already happens..
Even so, even something like $20,000 is cheap for a ticket and right now you'd only get a 10 second ride in space, and back down ya go.
X-prize => Priviate citizen's in space => tourist's in space => priviate "space resort" => Advertisements in space => advertisements visible from earth in space => coca cola constlation / starbucks galaxy? Serriously, if we have tourists in space, they are gonna want to spend time up there, so we will need long term staff in space... Space tourourism (sp) is not a feasible buisness for many years to come imo.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
The X-Prize is a 10 million dollar privately funded prize, not a 1 million dollar government program. NASA, the FAA, and any other agency of any government have nothing to do with it other than issuing launch waivers.
It has everything to do with kickstarting private, commercial space flight.
This
he's going to cue up Steppenwolf before takeoff and ushering in a new era of peaceful space exploration and mini-skirts?
I'm laughing at clouds.
Say what you want about Microsoft's lack of fair competitive practices.
But you will be hard pressed to find any corporation their size that give as much back to global education AND global health care. Free PCs for entire school systems, money for AIDS research. How much do you think your friends at Google gave of their IPO profits?
Oh...
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz, etc. did not use tiles. SpaceShipOne is using similar ablative compounds to remove the minor heat that it produces.
Of course, if they were doing orbital flights where you would have to remove the insane amounts of kinetic energy they would probably use carbon-carbon or something similar. Tiles are too complex a beast for extremely reliable space flight.
Orbital craft need to travel fast enough to orbit the earth. Fast enough to travel all the way around the planet in 90 minutes. That's why they come back in so fast.
This craft is going to straight up, and fall back down. Much slower.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
" But, he says, ask the same question of Nasa now and the answer is the same as 30 years ago. Nasa is working on it and it will be affordable in 30 years' time."
Yeah tell me about it, on the 27th NASA is going to do a dress rehearsal for the X-43 flight in October. Next month they are going for a new world record in the fastest jet powered aircraft in the world. The X-43 could have led to an airplane that can "fly into space" like Rutan mentioned as wanting to do in the article. However, from what I understand, NASA decided to cancel the successor of the X-43. Which is a shame because it is a very solid concept for finding a cheap way into orbit.
This reminds me of the X-20? The successor of the X-15, that was planned to go into orbit. If Rutan, can succeed with a spacecraft that resembles the X-15 and enter orbit, I think that would show that NASA, in all it's wisdom, has held us back as far as manned space travel is concerned.
As many already know, Scaled Composite's "SpaceShipOne" is set to fly on Sept 29th, 2004 in the early-morning hours (Pacific-time) in it's first attempt to fulfill the requirements to win the Ansari X-Prize. Chat will again be available for the flight and the following flights as well.
We had a VERY sucessful chat-session during the previous flight on June 21st and expect to have a good round this time for the X-Prize flights. The channel is open to all (we prefer you register/identify your nicks but is not a requirement for this channel). IF any 'over-flow' occurs, a back-up channel will automatically re-direct those as needed. A !news bot (Space.com) and !countdown bot is available.
We also set another 'special' channel ( #SS1-FltData ) to record/display near 'real-time' Flight-Data from SS1 but the final decision is still not complete and not expected for the first flight-attempt. In any case, we expect to still have some limited data/info available. This channel is to monitor only, no chatting there, unless you are 'voiced'. The #SpaceShipOne channel is for that. ;) You MUST be a registered nick and identified in order to join this channel. There is no cost to register.
The chat-server is located on the Freenode.net series. Point your chat-client to:
-- Server: irc.freenode.net
-- Channels: #SpaceShipOne and #SS1-FltData
Hope to see you back there for the flights. ;)
b>John B. -("Pandelirium")SpaceShipOne Admin/Ops/Moderator
For other 'space-related' chat on Freenode, goto:
- #space (general-combined channel)
- #maestro (Mars Rover/SAP/Maestro Planning Software)
- #cassini (Cassini/Huygens to Saturn)
- #messenger (Probe to Mercury)
- #celestia (3D Space/Solar-System Simulation)
- #roverware (NexGen Rover/Planning Software development)
Is there an advantage to orbital flight? Why couldn't an orbiting craft stop orbiting before reentry and return to the atmosphere like SS1? In order to stop orbiting, they have to slow down from very high speed, and that requires getting rid of a huge amount of kinetic energy. In the case of the shuttle, capsules, etc, that energy is just turned into heat by the atmospheric drag. If you want to avoid that heating, you need to slow down in a different way. The only other choice is to use an engine burn, and that is hugely expensive because it means that you have to lift a lot of extra fuel into orbit along with your payload. In fact, it takes as much fuel to slow down as it takes to get into orbit in the first place (unless you get rid of some mass by tossing out a satellite). But carrying that extra "deorbit" fuel means that your original load on the launch pad has to be much much bigger too. It is better to just let the atmosphere slow you down.
Recently, one of the folks from Vulcan Ventures came to Microsoft to give a presentation about their space program. (Vulcan Ventures is the VC firm funding the program, and is owned by Paul Allen, co-founder of MS, which is why we got this special presentation.)
We saw an amazing video: a 20-minute presentation showing their first space flight from beginning to end. Lots of tiny clips have been shown on the news, but in the video we saw, the entire space portion of the flight (from rocket fire to atmospheric re-entry) was not time-compressed. We heard every radio transmission, saw every moment of the acutal space time.
It was amazing. Brought tears to my eyes. (Embarassing, when you're sitting with 80 other researchers.)
There was a long Q&A session afterwards. They answered everything from techno-nerd questions about the details of some aerodynamics problem to visionary questions about the future of their program and what this means for humanity.
It was the most moving and inspiring presentation I've seen in a long while.
Answering my own question the Ansari X-Prize webiste has a link to a September 29th live webcast of the launch. The link is in the top, right hand corner.
Currently, that link has videos of the other launches made by Scaled Composites. It looks like there is an external camera, a wing camera, and a cockpit camera. Hopefully they have all three rolling on Wednesday =)