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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!"
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.
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.
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