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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!"
This will be the "look at me" popular thing for awhile, like ballooning was.
Something will replace rocket-powered flight, and that will lead the way into space flight.
16-year olds are going to get a "spacing permit", along with Dad's old clunker, only capable of going to the moon and back.
Hey...just a thought.
Maybe not for you, but if you were a multi-millionaire, $100K may seem a pretty small price tag for the opportunity to do something truly unique like this. This is not targetting the average man on the street, it's an exotic vacation for the very rich.
This was pretty much the aim of SpaceShip One from the beginning. The X-Prize just helped to give it that extra edge of excitement and competition that makes the media drool and gets you lots of free press. Winning it is a springboard to the tourism industry, but it wasn't the primary goal. This thing would have been eventually used for space tourism whether it won the X-Prize or not.
I always wanted to get the chance to go into space. But after the Challenger disaster and the ensuing slowdown in spaceflight and exploration--to say nothing of the strict requirements for NASA astronauts even before that--I figured I wouldn't likely get the chance. Space seemed the domain only of scientists and researchers with government contracts.
But I never really considered commercial spaceflight as being something viable, something that could grow and prosper even without the imprimatur of a major government. Not until now.
I wonder how many other young astronaut dreamers might now get their chance...if only for just one flight?
--- Where's my car, and why are these grass stains on my pants?
For those of you rolling your eyes at the $100,000 cost, the thing is about technology is that it is a rolling snowball; the effect gets bigger and bigger.
Just last week, spaceflight was only for NASA, Russian Astronauts, and Dennis Tito. Today, it is for rich multimillionaires with $100,000 to blow. A few years from now, it will be for rich millionaires with $10,000 to blow. Soon enough, we might have the 'M' prize for first privately owned craft to go to the moon. And this will probably be way after the Space Shuttle program got replaced by Southwest Spacelines.
Sound familiar? Samething happened with computers. First, the CEO of IBM said that only about eight would be necessary for all of humanity. Then came the mainframes, then came the minicomputers, and then came the personal computers. Now my PDA has more processing power than my computer had only eight years ago.
Its an inevitable process, and I look forward to observing it.
Well *of course*. Who you think owned the first automobiles? The first airplanes? The first big screen TVs?, etc. Get my point?
TODO: Something witty here...
It's going to come down rapidly over time. Dennis Tito paid $20M for a trip to the space station, Paul Allen paid $20M for his own spaceship company (and he's already got $10M back from it). Give it a while and it won't be that expensive to spend a week in an inflatable space hotel.
.. I would DEFINITELY do it. I mean, when I was in Vegas, I've seen people waste that and more in a single night at the roulette table. And not really give a shit afterwards. If I was in that position financially, I would definitely spend that on space tourism.
Until the first craft explodes. I mean this quite seriously. I think people will be enamored with the idea of commercial space flight initially, but if the first accident comes early on, its reputation could be damaged for a long time. On the other hand (you have other fingers), if it becomes a pretty accepted thing before the first accident happens, then no big deal, it will be an accident and the industry will recover.
Commercial space flight is important for space flight in general. As soon as it becomes something that people want to do, private industry will pour money into developing better travel methods, and will spend that money better than the government. With a little luck, NASA's research budget won't have to as big, because innovations from private industry will get some of the work done for them.
Please note that most real leaps in technology are only available to the fabulously wealthy at first.
Just look at airplanes. The first commercial flights were really expensive and only an exotic diversion for the rich. Now, I can fly across this country and back again for a couple of hundred bucks.
Cars were quite expensive until the Model T revolutionized the manufacture and made them cheap enough for everyone.
Entry level computers were multi-thousand dollar machines as recent as 5-10 years ago and now you can have a new machine every year for under $1 a day.
The only way that "affordable for the average person" arrives is to go through a phase of "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" first.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
SpaceShipOne is for quickie suborbital jaunts only. Rutan is still far, far away from reaching orbit. Your $100K or whatever would buy you just 3.5 minutes of weightlessness at about $475/second. If you're willing to give up the view (SpaceShipOne's windows aren't that great anyway), you can experience weightlessness a lot more cheaply on an airplane ($3K for several 20-second periods) or for 6.5 seconds on the "Superman: The Escape" ride at Six Flags. A full-price Six Flags ticket is $47, so that's only $7.20/second even if you only ride once!
Tourism may be the main result of the Ansari X prize. However, some of the contestants, have been designing systems with clear orbital capabilities(i.e. John Carmacks's team). Once things go orbital, a lot of commercial options open up beyond tourism. Satellites get cheap. We can start to look seriously at material science applications.
Bullshit. John Carmack wrote about a similar thing (Diamandis' Zero G airplane ride) the other week: "Like most people, he was hitting me up to invest in his company, but I said that I would rather be a customer than an investor (where possible, this is a better way to support companies). "
By buying a space tourism ticket, you are helping drive the development of cheap, reusable, sustainable space faring technology in the absolutely best way possible. You are paying the salaries of the people who are working on the next generation spacecraft, and spurring investment and competition toward improving spaceflight. To say that this does "absolutely nothing to benefit society" is so stupid and short sighted I don't know where to begin.
Beyond that I would like to say that I find your general attitude despicable. When people make money fairly - that is given to them by people who made a free choice to do so - they have a right to do as they please with that money. They owe NOTHING to the the looters and moochers who whine and complain because they did not feel inclined to make the money themselves. Egoism is the ultimate morality: it is forced , faked, altruism that is the root of evil.
The raw cost of putting someone up there has got to be going down fast now that the technology's been established. Yet I don't see the proposed ticket price going down in pace with the lowering cost any time in the near future.
Think of space tourism as an ingenious way to squeeze funding for development of space technologies (and whatever else) out of idle thrill-seekers. If these same rich thrill-seekers were to buy luxury cars and rent "companions" with that same money, they wouldn't be helping out new technology half so much, and still spending the money on things they may not use very much (in the case of the cars) or will only enjoy for the moment (the rented companions). The R&D on cars and whores is minimal, given that these are both very old fields.