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After the X Prize
rscrawford writes "'Robert Bigelow, chief of Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace, is apparently setting higher goals for private spaceflight endeavors with America's Space Prize, a $50 million race to build an orbital vehicle capable of carrying up to seven astronauts to an orbital outpost by the end of the decade,' according to Space.com. Anyone think it'll happen?"
Although the energetic requirements are an order of magnitude higher for orbital spaceflight, this $50 million prize is almost an order of magnitude higher than the $10 million X-prize. The economic payback seems higher as well, since there are lots more reasons (both reasearch and tourism) to go to orbit than there are in sub-orbital spaceflight.
But at that time, they were trying to do somthing that had never been done before (not to mention Government programs are not exactly famous for their cost savings). Now, we already know how to get into space, the hard part is making it economical.
I think it would be unlikely, as whoever tries it only has about 5 years to start developing it, and I'm sure an orbiting capsule will take a while to build, and design. The only way I could see it happening is if a large corporation gets on board i.e. Boeing or Lockheed. Of course, surprises do happen, and it'd be a nice surprise.
Nothing as complex as the space shuttle is required to just get to an orbital complex and return with people. There are alot of people in the required spacecraft (7 vice 3), but both agencies have made simpler spacecraft that almost meet the requirements. Unfortunately for the X-Prize contestants, this prize would be many many times more difficult and would probably require a rocket and capsule idea (vice a very impressive airplane). The only reason I say this is because the difficulty in reentry (where a $50 million dollar prize isn't going to motivate people to spend $1 billion to be able to make an airplane reenter--like the space shuttle).
Well I don't reckon it's beyond possibility certainly. If the X prize is won next week then the sponsorship boost from the publicity could be astronomical, especially if passengers start to be taken up.
As for when people start dying, I reckon all the people likely to go up in the near future will be adults who are well aware of the risks they are taking and are more than happy to take their chances for the experience of flying into space. People die mountaineering, people die skiing. Lets try to keep some perspective.
Mention the Lord of the Rings one more time and I'll more than likely kill you.
Of course we think it will happen.
As long as someone can sell X units of Y product of service that costs less than X * Y to provide, then they will try to get that business model off the ground (pun intended).
If we can make a wheel, we can make 2. If we can make 2, we can make a bicycle. So if we finally can get a commercial program to send up 3 people, there should be a way to get 7 people up there.
If people can scam people from their money, why can't someone raise money for an X-Prize type prize?
submitter should not ask loaded questions in their submission... but oh yeah, I forgot. we haven't yet learned any manners...
This is completely false. This is not a sig.
What happens when people start dying?
They go to Heaven. Or possibly Hell.
Seriously, what's the point of the question? People die in privately-funded adventures from time to time. But if they want to do it, that's their business. Perhaps they seek historical notariety, perhaps they look forward to possible commercial gains, or perhaps they just want that "extreme thrill" that nobody else has. Either way, it's their money/life, and it's not hurting anybody else, so it's their choice.
http://publicvoidlife.blogspot.com
Plain and simply, companies and ppl LOVE competition. They also like being #1. In addition, there is a lot of money to be made in Space. There are launches of satillites. There will be a shot for the moon and hopefully for Mars. And if we go back to the skylab concept that was started in the age of President Johnson, then we will see many space stations.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I still find it so cool, how now that Software stopped being high-tech, all the top software visionaries are off doing space programs.
- SpaceX = Elon Musk from PayPal, Zip2
- Armadillo Aero = Carmack from Id
- Blue Origin = Bezos from Amazon.
- Scaled = Allen from Microsoft.
I find it extremely interesting that these visionaries see consumer space travel as the Next Big Thing instead of nano or bio. Do they see something the VC lemmings don't?"Duke Nukem Forever is a 1999 game and we think that timeframe matches very well with what we have planned for the game." - George Broussard, 1998
"Trust us, Duke Nukem Forever will rock when it comes out next year." -Joe Siegler, 1999
"When it's done in 2001." -2000 Christmas card
"DNF will come out before Unreal 2." -George Broussard, 2001
"If DNF is not out in 2001, something's very wrong." -George Broussard, 2001
"DNF will come out before Doom 3." -George Broussard, 2002
The Voyager 1 spacecraft has travelled approximately 2.5 billion miles since the announcement of Duke Nukem Forever.
The rovers Spirit and Opportunity were proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched and successfully landed upon Mars within the timeframe of Duke Nukem Forever's development.
The majority of the children who were entering high school the school year following Duke Nukem Forever's announcement are now eligible to drink.
People die in crashing cars, in sinking ships and crashing aeroplanes. It's unfortunate and tragic, but it does happen and it doesn't stop us from travelling by those means again. It does make us try to make it safer. Of course people will die in space. Do you honestly expect no accidents will happen? It must be as safe as possible, of course. But not so safe that we'll never fly (the safest way to do anything, is to not do it at all).
At $150,000 per flight, I would think most people with that kind of money have at least a small appreciation of what risk means.
Just like Star Trek said....
It will be a "Joe Blow" who comes up with the warp drive...
And not NASA....
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
After seeing Burt Rutan talk this summer, I think that if anyone can do it, he can. And also, he hinted at the fact that why would he stop after making only one spacecraft, when he has designed over 40 airplanes. My guess is that he already plans to make an orbital craft after he wins the Ansari prize, even without this new offering.
It's the Shuttle, of course.
The trick isn't building such a spacecraft. That's been do-able since the 1960's. The trick is figuring out how to make a profit operating the damn thing.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Why is everyone complaining about this prize? Oh no, earth orbit, it's too hard! Let's just take our X-prize, go home, and never launch again. Waah waah.
WHAT THE HELL.
If anyone on the planet would say "wonderful, now we've got an incentive to get to the next stage", I'd think it would be the people here on Slashdot - but all of a sudden it's too difficult to reach orbit, with a fifty million dollar budget, in half a decade?
Did anyone really look at the X-prize and say "Oh, that's easy, no problem"? Then why are you looking at this and assuming it will be a problem? There's a lot of time to work on it and at least one group that's already a significant fraction of the way there.
If you think it's hard, okay, sure, no argument, it's hard - but how many times have you learned something new by practicing easy stuff over and over again? It's an opportunity to invent some new low-cost fabrication and launching techniques. It's research. And possibly, it'll even lead to true commercial spaceflight.
I think this is a fantastic turn of events. I can't wait to see who decides to tackle it.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
The problem is, its not the same thing. Jet liners weren't, and aren't, about going up in the air for the novelty of it, and then coming back down. This space "travel" thing is all kinds of goofy. Tons of cash just to go up and come down? zzzzz Tons of cash to go to an orbital space station? More appealing, but people don't go to hotels to see the hotel....and they don't go to resorts with beautiful views but are forced to stay locked in your room or else you die. A Cruise Liner would be the best parrallel, assuming you're not on the boat to visit anything -- but will the orbital station be THAT elaborate, with ballrooms and dining halls and gambling? That would be pretty advanced....
IMO space travellists should be looking for the tech for suborbital ultrafast business flights, say go from NY to Switzerland in just a couple hours. That's where the money would be.
Moo.
The problem I have with prizes like the X-Prize and like this one, which have deadlines, is that they encourage people to take risks which they might not otherwise take, in order to hit the deadline.
This is exactly the kind of thinking which caused the Challenger disaster.
Deadlines like those of the X-Prize and this new one create an incentive for unsafe behavior, as is being seen by the Da Vinci Project's insane plan to have their first test flight be a manned prize attempt.
I wish the deadlines would be reconsidered -- competition between teams should be enough to insure urgency.
See, I don't see that being as much of a problem as you'd think.
The point is, once you lower the cost to orbit (As any orbital tourism vehicle would) there's a lot of markets or improvements to markets that can open up.
National Geographic routinely sends out photographers exploring the world. If they could offset the cost of an expedition by magazine sales, you know they'd be launching their own space exploration missions. It's just too expensive right now.
Imagine communications satellites with 100x the power available, antennas signifigantly larger, etc. Suddenly an Iridium-like system can actually penetrate through a building and not require a massive phone. Remember, more decibels of gain means more information can be packed in the same frequency space.
The big thing to remember is that when the Internet finally hit the Average Joe, there were a lot of notions about what it could and couldn't do. It's hard to say what people will build on top of the infrastructure once it's there. But somebody's got to build the infrastructure.
Gentoo Sucks
That kind of cash is going to get a response. Though a one time $ prize will probably be slower than a $ stream. If someone finds a reason to go into orbit that they will have $ flow from - it won't take long at all.
/. should be able to come up with something for that! ;)
I'd say someone needs to offer a prize for finding a way to make orbital and space travel pay!
Someone here on
In the early 1990s research was done on quick turn around vehicles for low cost space access. Two very good articles by Dr. Jerry Pournelle are The SSX Concept and SSTO Revisited.
You may or may not agree with Dr. Pournelle, I sure don't, on a lot of things, but he's spot on about what happened to the SSTO concept, NASA got control of it, let a contract out to Lockheed to develop the X-33, spent a whole bunch of money and didn't produce any real hardware unlike the SSX project which spent 60 million dollars and produced a prototype that was able to take off and land twice with a 26 hour turnaround with a support crew of 14 and which also managed to land safely after a hydrogen explosion tore off part of the aeroshell.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Ummm... The Shuttle, Apollo, Gemini, Mercury, etc. all had range safety devices on them.
The Falcon, oddly enough, doesn't. They are the first vehicle certified for range safety without requiring a bomb... errr... explosive flight termination device.
It's not incredibly hard to make an existing booster "man-rated". Generally, it just means that you need a certain level of redundancy over that necessary for payload operations, favorable possibilities for abort, etc. The Falcon series is already designed for a greater level of reliability, so they'd just have to make sure that the vibration/noise/acceleration environment is compatable with humans.
Gentoo Sucks
Although the energetic requirements are an order of magnitude higher for orbital spaceflight, this $50 million prize is almost an order of magnitude higher than the $10 million X-prize. The economic payback seems higher as well, since there are lots more reasons (both reasearch and tourism) to go to orbit than there are in sub-orbital spaceflight.
The problem is that the increase in difficulty is far, far greater than the increase in either energy or delta-v required seems to warrant at first glance.
There are two regimes in which a rocket can operate. In one, the delta-v required for the mission is much lower than the exhaust velocity. In this scenario, fuel is only a small fraction of the total craft weight, and scales linearly with delta-v. This is the easy scenario, and it includes the X prize's "get a rocket to a relative altitude of 100 km".
The second regime, the hard scenario, is the one in which the delta-v required for the mission is much higher than the exhaust velocity. In this scenario, the craft weight is dominated by fuel, and the fuel-to-everything-else ratio goes up exponentially with delta-v. Truly exponentially, not the "this is a quadratic but I'm calling it exponential" variety that I see so often around here. Craft design goes from "really hard" to "damn near impossible" to "outright impossible" very quickly.
Ground-to-orbit is balanced right on the knife-edge of "really hard" and "damn near impossible", and that's only when we use multi-stage rockets. Reusable single-stage-to-orbit chemical rockets are well into the "damned near impossible" regime, even with the advanced composites we have now. If the earth was even a little heavier, we wouldn't be getting off of it with chemical rockets at _all_. Orbital velocity is about 8 km/sec, escape is 13 km/sec, and the highest-Isp chemical rockets have an exhaust velocity between 3 and 4 km/sec (with SS1 having one in the range of 2 or so).
There are ways that you can make the hard scenario marginally easier. One is to use multi-stage rockets, though that's generally pretty much _assumed_ past a per-stage mass fraction of 5:1 to 10:1. Another is to use high-Isp chemical fuels - but these make your craft far more expensive due to handling concerns, and in the limiting case this can even be counterproductive (H2 is a lousy fuel for anything that launches from deep in the atmosphere or under a lot of acceleration, due to low storage density and large tank size). Another is to use as small a craft as possible to take advantage of stress scaling laws, but a) that means an upper-atmosphere launch instead of a ground launch, and b) your minimum cargo weight places a lower bound on the craft weight.
The only realistic options for a 7-human manned craft are a big, expensive multi-stage chemical rocket with disposable boosters (because refurbishing to man-rated spec costs an insane amount of money), or an exotic craft with a high-Isp drive, to push the problem back into the "easy" regime. The only high-Isp craft we can build right now with the required thrust is one with a NERVA-style nuclear drive. A remotely laser-powered craft can work too, and we have a good idea how to build these, but full-scale engineering of these haven't been done yet. Orion is _too_ large scale, and would be even less popular than NERVA.
So, I don't expect any vehicle-based solution to be easy to build or cheap enough to run to make the prize offered a significant attraction.
A single-passenger craft would be much easier, due to reduced craft mass (materials scaling, again).
Looks like we need a new moderation category - "Understatment".
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
The difficulty in reaching the ISS's orbit isn't only due to the energy involved, it is also due to trying to achieve the same orbital plane. You could say it's not a big deal because you just launch when the ISS is directly over you, but that doesn't happen very often... If you launch out of plane, then a lot of propellent (ie cargo) is lost getting into the plane and the problem returns to one of energy.
Conversly, redevousing with an object orbiting the equator from a launch point close to the equator is a lot easier with more available time slots and minimum fuel required (for maximum cargo).
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I think they'll have a better chanc of handing out the cash if they change the name of the prize. There are quite a few X-prize people who aren't from the US. I don't think it's productive to limit the potential contenders to a single country, even if the limit is only psycological.