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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?"
...it's getting them down in one piece that's difficult.
Their space shuttle can do it, and they could sure use the extra funding.
The end of the decade timeline is just stupid. Kennedy gave Nasa more time to build the Apollo program and that cost many billions of dollars. To get it done so quickly.
A month after Duke Nukem: Forever goes Gold...
Having something go up to the edge of space and back is relatively easy compared to going into orbit then coming back down again.
For the technically minded, here's a short article with the specifics.
I wonder if Scaled will be able to tackle this too. I sure hope so, they've been an inspiration so far. I realize it's more than twice the amount of people, and they'd have to go much higher up to get to an orbiting station, but they've come so far with this competition.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Which members of nsync and backsteet boys are going to be on it?
In a digital world there can be only one..
The one, the only, MrDigital.
With John Carmack, anything is possible. We've all seen how he has changed the PC Gaming Industry... and for those that don't know, he had a 9 second Ferrari also... so he excels in everything that he does. Fact or opinion, John Carmack is a God. Aarmadillo Aerospace is going to win it.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
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.
Isn't this obvious? I'll bet of you scratch the surface- this is an award from the Casino History. Hoping to draw even more clients, the outpost will be a small hotel, complete with casino, in Geocentric orbit above Nevada, with your trip comped on a $5 million buy in of chips....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Robert Bigelow, Astro-Gigalo.
That you're going to need a rocket big enough to get your spaceplane into orbit, but small enough to not have to be tossed off into the atmosphere every time. This is a *very* big problem.
I saw this story this morning on CNN about Virgin going into this kind of thing...
I don't know about the privitization of this...I think it makes it too...hmm..what's the word - Republican.
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.
The Boeing Delta II rocket (one of the smallest we have) can launch about 4.9 metric tons into LEO, and goes for about 10 million per launch (IIRC). Its safety record over the past decade is such that it could probably be man rated. Now if you figure seven astronauts at 100 kilos each (these are BIG boys with their space suits! ;-)), then you've got about 700 kilos in cargo. If you can fit a useful craft in the remaining 4.2 metric tons, you'd have a very inexpensive launch solution.
Perhaps something like this could be scaled down rather than a flyable craft? Although I am kind of partial to lifting bodies. Bring on the Dynasoar!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Fact or opinion, John Carmack is a God.
I call opinion. We won't have a definitive answer unless someone stabs him in the heart and he doesn't bleed.
I think this is a great idea, but is the prize money enough? NASA should pony up another 50 mil -- they could use the help delivering supplies to the space station, and it's a no-lose proposition for them.
Rutan has already talked about going orbital, and there is a lot of buzz about this subject from all sorts of people. It is a good time to be alive!
More details available from SpaceFlightNow, which is actually a re-print of an Aviation Week & Space Technology article.
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.
In the last interview I saw with Burt Rutan, he said that he's at the same stage on an orbital vehicle as he was for SS1 a few years ago. I seem to remember that he said that he was expecting to start construction in 2008/2009.
What will be interesting to see if they can come up with a vehicle that could rendevous with the ISS; the orbit really was poorly chosen for jeverybody except for Russians.
Reaching ISS could seriously be the next challenge.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
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.
Astronomical boost.. yeah, that's the ticket... that should get us into space!
That's exactly what happened with early Jet Liners. It didn't stop air travel then, and I doubt it would stop space travel now. It would pretty much have to be a possible setback that should be expected and planned for.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Death didn't scare away or stop many of the early aviators or test pilot's after WWII. Almost all of the streets in Edwards Air Force Base are named after test pilots killed in accidents.
People dying may put off a few more people in this day and age, but it won't scare away the ones who believe in pushing manned space flight forward or those who want the adrenaline rush.
Now, if one of the rockets or space craft fall onto a city, that will affect private space flight programs (Maybe they'll just outsource it to India...).
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.
BTW -- read the backup material. This is a really cool story.
What happens if 10 years from now we have a private space station (or, horror of horrors 2 or 3 stations) with tourists going up and still the ISS isn't completed? How are all of us going to feel about all of those tax dollars we're pouring into the shuttle and ISS now?
Wouldn't it be better take a couple of billion right now and set up a series of prizes that take us from suborbital all the way to mars? You could stretch it over 20-30 years, and make the prizes high enough to keep the independents in the game. Isn't this better than putting all of our tax money in one basket and hoping the basket holds up?
Make chaos work for you, not against you.
Orbital is going to take some serious doing beyond what Rutan et al have come up with.
Armadillo has a lot better shot at it than Virgin.
Seastead this.
NASA has announced its own intentions to offer cash prizes for private space accomplishments through its Centennial Challenges office, which may offer prizes that range from $250,000 to $30 million. Potential challenges could include soft lunar landings and asteroid sample return missions, NASA officials have said. This seems like it would have been a bit of a better story then this asshole looking to find a partner for his inflated space hotels.
By offering the $50 million prize he is essentially forcing someone else to do research and development. He already promised to dump $500 million into the space hotel project, so he really can't afford to put another couple of hundred million into something else.
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.
Really, the things holding us back from manned space exploration is lack of a reason to do it. If someone found out that you could manufacture CPUs that are twice as fast by doing it in zero-G, I'm sure Intel would have a space station within the decade. If you could make toothpaste that would get your teeth extra white while giving fresh breath that lasts for twelve hours by doing it in zero-G, P&G would have a space station within the decade. But none of these things are true. All the reasons for sending men into space mostly come down to "humans have an innate drive to explore", etc. It's true but that doesn't motivate investors to put together the many millions of dollars needed to do this. That's why governments do it: taxpayers have such low expectations of getting something in return for their tax dollars that governments can build space shuttles, the Big Dig, etc.
Of course, pretty soon we will have to have more manned missions to Mars to figure out what's going on over at Union Aerospace's secret research facility.
they *just* chose a physics engine (saw this press release today)
Norrköping, Sweden - 27th of September, Meqon, an up and comer in the physics middleware industry, announced they have been selected by 3D Realms as the physics engine provider for their long awaited game Duke Nukem Forever.
I think it's quite possible to assume that this new prize will come and go before DNF will be on the shelves...
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.
Seriously?!?! The socialist nanny-state has an obligation, nay, a sacred duty to protect them from themselves! We shouldn't ever go into space until the risk is less than 1 in 55 trillion that anyone will be injured. Except of course for highly trained astro-bureaucrats who navigate the proper NASA departmental absurdities.
Thank you, and give me my welfare check.
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).
It would be a shame to award the prize to some old technology that doesn't build on the inherent economies of the reusable first stages being developed by the Ansari X-Prize contenstants.
As Robert Truax told me, people keep studying what the optimal number of stages for an orbital launch vehicle should be and they keep discovering the answer is "2". The first stage is always lower exhaust velocity and cheap per kg. The second stage is always higher exhaust velocity and more expensive per kg.
The ideal first stage derived from the Ansari X-Prize entrants would be one that is cheap to:
Rutan's technology doesn't really fill the bill here because fabricating hybrid rockeet motors is expensive compared to refueling. Also its unlikely his aerodynamic body scales up as cheaply as does simple tankage with vertical takeoff.
As it turns out, John Carmack just reported his team has reached probably the most critical milestone for such a first stage by demonstrating a scaled up version of their methanol/H2O2(50%) mixed monoprop engine.
This could be the really big deal -- not just for manned spaceflight but for cheap access to space generally.
Seastead this.
The submission was a little sparse on the info, and since I've been following Bigelow Aerospace for a while, I feel obligated to share some more info on it. First off, there's an article with better photographs available here, and a press release here. The founder Robert Bigelow was also the founder of Budget Suites of America, and is applying a lot of the cost-cutting tricks he learned from his previous contracting experience to the aerospace industry. He licensed the Transhab technology from NASA (which had previously had its funding cut), and is subcontracting for things like life support from other companies who already have systems running.
The inflatables themselves (photograph here)are quite interesting, with a docking mechanism designed to attach with either a Russian Soyuz, a Chinese Shenzhou, and/or whatever vehicle comes out of the aforementioned America's Space Prize. A one-third size prototype of the inflatable module will be launched on the maiden flight of SpaceX's Falcon V rocket, which is itself a very interesting vehicle (~3000kg into LEO for $12 million, and the first orbital vehicle designed to be man-rated since the space shuttle). The first full-size inflatable habitat will be up by 2008, and it's planned to have a crew by 2010.
What's exciting about this is that the inflatable modules appear to be designed, built, and have undergone some preliminary tests. The outsides of the modules have withstood projectile impact tests fairly well. Pretty much all that needs to happen now is for them to undergo further tests and be launched. Bigelow's use of multiple contractors for the same part will allow him to ramp up production if there's a demand for it, and sell the inflatable modules for ~$100 million each to whoever wants them.
Regarding the prize itself, I'd actually be quite interested to see if somebody ends up just designing a descent capsule and sticks it on a Falcon V.
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
Inflatable space hotels?
Ugh, and to think the Physics building at my alma mater is named after him....
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Funny, that's the same thing they said about the X prize... the problem is too big for such a meager prize. Fortunately it's not really about the prize money.
If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
-=sig=-
The reason is simple: Burt Rutan has extensive experience building things that could be applied to a real spacecraft.
Remember the Delta Clipper? Or the aborted X-33 project? They may not be complete successes but it gave Scaled Composites the learning experience that could lead to a cheap reusable Low Earth Orbit space vehicle.
By the way, there is an easy way to do this: launch it on top of a modified 747-200B. Given the large number of 747-200B's that have been retired in the last 3-4 years Scaled Composites could cobble parts from several such 747's and build a launch plane with a powerful rocket engine in the back of the plane, which will allow it to fly steep climbs up to 50,000 feet. Mounted on the top of this modified 747-200B would be a small lifting-body type space vehicle with a small fuel tank beneath that will provide enough fuel to reach LEO with a load equivalent of 6-7 astronauts aboard.
The launch profile would go something like this:
1. The 747 with the space vehicle on the back takes off like a regular 747.
2. Once it reaches 28,000 to 30,000 feet, the rocket engine on the 747 is fired, allowing the 747 to climb at a 45-50 degree angle up to 50,000 feet.
3. At around 52,000 feet, the space vehicle with its attached fuel tank is launched as the 747 approaches the top of its climb.
4. While the 747 falls away, the space vehicle's own rocket engine will use the fuel from the attached fuel tank to reach LEO, jettisoning the tank when it reaches orbit.
5. The space vehicle will return to Earth in a Space Shuttle-style re-entry and land on a conventional runway.
There were serious studies during the 1980's for such a concept by (I believe) Boeing, and if any that could make this concept become reality at a reasonable cost it is Scaled Composites.
Going to space and back in a single stage vehicle is extremely difficult because it requires it to be almost completely made of fuel, leaving little mass for thermal protection system, recovery gear, etc (payload?).
Doing it in a multistage vehicle is difficult because it then becomes much harder to reuse it. Even if you ignore the cost issues of throwing away hardware you really want reusability because otherwise every launch you are using brand new hardware with unknown problems. It's hard to get reliability this way.
A lot of the people looking at CATS (Cheap Access To Space) seem to agree that an "assisted" single stage vehicle is the way to go. Starting at high altitude may not give the vehicle significant savings in kinetic and potential energy but other factors such as drag, pressure losses and structural loads can make a very big difference.
There are several promising designs for an assisted SSTO. One example is is Spacevan 2008. It seems to fit the profile of the America's Space Prize very well. The big kite may seem a bit odd but don't be fooled - it's not one of those "designs" that space crackpots keep promoting. It was designed by veteran space engineer Len Cormier. He is one of those people who really know what they are talking about. It's actually a pretty conservative design using mature and proven technology.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.