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Space Tourism is Off and Running
ackthpt writes "The ink wasn't even dry on the Ansari X Prize check, after Brian Binnie piloted SpaceShipOne into space, when deals were already being made. Announced last week, Richard Branson of Virgin Group would be licensing the technology, and according to p2pnet is already embarking on plans to build a fleet of 5 passenger carrying craft. Space tourism? Preposterous! It'll take years, decades. Isn't that the consensus? According to The Australian Cadbury/Schweppes may be giving away a the prize of a space flight under the cap of your next bottle of 7 Up: 'Within hours, one of SpaceShipOne's sponsors and the "official beverage" of the AnsariX Prize, the soft drink 7Up, announced it would be offering the first free ticket into space.' Further, 'another company, Space Adventures, has already collected $US10,000 deposits from about 100 customers for its planned flights, which will cost less than $US100,000.' Last one into space is a rotten egg!"
Now, the X Prize will evolve into a regular competition called the X Prize Cup, says the Associated Press, going on:
"In May, organizers selected New Mexico to permanently host the X Prize Cup."
Cool. A Blue Riband for space. Based on distance rather than speed, I suppose. Someone should offer a prize for whomever gets close enough to the moon to photograph the Sea of Tranquility, and shut our conspiracy-laden chums up once and for all.
So does the p2p in p2pnet now stand for planet to planet, then?
Uh, Lance is ponying up 20 mil to go orbital.
Big difference
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
Can't you take your useless left wing fingers and type some shit into google before spewing your garbage all over slashdot?
click
The system also touts a somewhat cleaner way to reach space. Its byproducts -- water vapor, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen -- are a bit more preferable than the waste produced by shuttle SRBs, which burn ammonium perchlorate and aluminum.
"Just last week, spaceflight was only for NASA, Russian Astronauts, and Dennis Tito"
You forgot China.
Cheers,
Tels
The difference in energy required is substantial. For orbital flight you need a large tangential component of velocity so the spacecraft falls around the earth as it's pulled down by the force of gravity and the energy needed to do that is much more than what's required to reach low earth orbit altitude. Like 30 times more.
NASA and the ESA have both studied it although NASA denies it.
Speak truth to power.
I read today on CNN that the X-Prize has all of a sudden evolved into an annual "grand prix" event with the next competition in the '05-'06 timeframe. There will be cash prizes for accomplishing various tasks including making the fastest trip,carrying the most passengers, etc.
Being an aerospace propulsion research and design engineer myself, I was wondering if there were in any start-up projects envisioned to compete that could use some volunteer help, as I would see this as a neat sort of hobby to pass away my free time. Anyone here involved in an X-Prize project, or know of any that I might be able to seek out?
Thanks,
RcktMan77
Probably never, since a double barrel (or any shotgun for that matter) is not very effective against anything larger than a duck much past 50 yards. Try educating yourself before any more anti-legal-gun-owning diahreah spews out of your mouth.
Current SSO Boost is 85nm vertical; thus, fired at 45' you get about 60nm out; about 50nm out on the way back down to about 80K feet... then you start to glide (this assumes no friction to slow you so nothing to glide on above 80K). While SSO covered 35nm from launch from White Knight, you can probably get a lot more (call it 75 on this envelope), but you're WAY, WAY short of making it to Hawaii. Compared to a glider, SSO will drop like a rock.
I imagine the total coverage by SSO could be about 200nm + flight by White Knight, which is perhaps another 200nm. That's only about 2500 miles short if launched from Los Angeles.
Coming back from true orbit and coming back from sub-orbit is a world of difference in the terms of speed collected when you hit the atmosphere.
Speed + Atmosphere = Friction = Heat
So if you hit true orbit you're likely going to need heat shielding unless you plan to stay up there.
If you need heat shielding, that's a lot more weight to carry up. Which means more push. Which means more fuel. Which means more weight.
It's entirely possible that this design is *only* practical for sub-orbital space flights.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Actually, the byproducts of this form of fuel are water vapor, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen. This is far preferable to the solid rocket boosters of the shuttle, which burn ammonium perchlorate and aluminum. Even kerosene, burned in jet engines, could be considered worse, producing the same pollutants as SSO, plus sulfur dioxide - a major constituent of acid rain.
Seems to me that someone has been mixing a lot of stories to come up with this! I actually listened to the press conferences and X Prize coverage. Let me explain what they really said:
Don't get me wrong, I'm as excited about this as the next guy. $250K is still a bargain in today's market, but mixing those stories together made it a lot more exciting sounding than it really is.
No, it doesn't. Not even remotely close. SpaceShipOne is barely even suborbital. It hardly gets into space. Are you aware of how much bigger of a problem it is to get into orbital space (and back)? Apparently not.
:P
The V2 was suborbital. The Nazis could pump them out (albeit with slave labor) by the thousands. Note the difference vs orbital craft, which pretty much everywhere in the world are mean, nasty beasts.
You can get to suborbital space on an ultra-simple nitrous/polybutadiene hybrid. But with a requisite heavy tank and an ISP of 250, it's not going any higher than that. You want orbital, you're probably going to need a turbopump, you're going to need higher ISP fuels, you're going to need a lighter tank, you're going to need either multiple stages or an incredibly light tank *and* incredibly high ISP... and that's just to get up there. Reentry is an incredibly diffuclt problem (although there are some good solutions on the horizon, such as inflatable parachutes), components suffer far more problems in orbit (for example, everything that has hydraulic fluid or fuel or oxidizer needs a heater, a cooling line, temperature sensors, and all of the requisite pumps and breakers required to maintain temperature, plus backups.), life support becomes far more complex for trips of more than a few minutes, and a whole host of other problems.
THAT is why orbital isn't cheap. Some guy building a ship out of epoxy with a "just open the valve and it flies a bit" rocket engine doesn't even begin to scrape the orbital envelope.
Not to denigrate all that Rutan has done, mind you - I, too, was touched to see the X-prize won. But, it's not close to orbital, and people need to dispense with this misconception. Rutan's pilot is flying a manned, reusable sounding rocket.
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
I take it you havn't read Robert A. Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon. D. Delos Harriman is a person hero of mine, and this is an interesting book by itself. It also gets into the legal issues of owning non-terrestial real-estate and a very interesting view on how American business really works, not just how it should on paper.
In this book, Heinlein specifically mentions a 7-up ad on the moon (he called it a 6+ soft drink, which I suppose could be anything), and to make things really fun (keep in mind this was written in the 1950's) the protaganist throws a hammer and sickle on a overlay over the moon during a board meeting that includes some FAA representatives.
Of any of the early science fiction that is inspiring the X-Prize and private commercial spaceflight, I would have to say that this book is clearly very influential, and it wouldn't surprise me to see a company called "Harriman Industries" get involved with spaceflight some time in the future, if only to invoke the flavor of Heinlein's future history.
A sad footnote in the book was that the main guy behind the whole project, Harriman, was denied from going into space due to poor health, and the FAA wouldn't give him clearance to get on a spaceship.