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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!"
Is off and running. Perhaps in a few years.
:D
My wife even said I could.
I figure I can save up $100,000 by only eating out once a week or so..... for the next 400 years.
It sounds neat and all, but I think I'll wait until it costs around $10,000 total. Hopefully I won't be too old by then.
Now there won't be any place where I can go to avoid the tourists.
We're not talking extended orbital flight, are we? Just a quick peek above the atmosphere, then straight back down, right?
While that might be fun, I don't consider it especially compelling -- certainly not to the tune of $100K.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Last one into space is a rotten egg!
:-)
No thanks. I think I'll wait until there is an actual destination before going into space. Let me know when you find the dimensional rift that leads to Utopia and I'll sign up then. I would love to see Utopia! Oh my. I bet it's got lots of systems in it that can play Doom 3 in Ultra mode.
I'm now positive that Lance Bass is finally going to go to space. Mentally the guy is already there! He was going to pay $20mil to go to space, and now all the dregs of society can do it for merely $100k. Oh poor Lance! Well at least he can go now.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
the "official beverage" of the AnsariX Prize, the soft drink 7Up
Kind of gives new meaning to the 7up slogan, "Show us your can"
It time to start saving my pennies so I can buy a trip to space. The big question to ask....
What are you willing to give up in order to save the money for a flight to space?
For me, I'm considering moving into a shittier apartment. Oh, and I plan to start drinking more 7-Up.
congratulations, dave, you won a trip into space. but i have been hacked by pepsi and you must now die. i'm sorry dave.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
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.
Making money? I hate it already!
Oh, in that case nevermind what I said before
--
Free gmail invites
...waaayyyyyyyyy up.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Doesn't SpaceShipOne burn rubber and nitrous oxide?
What are the environmental side-effect of that!
Just so some rich guys can have a thrill.
At the very least there should be an enivronental surtax on it (say one million bucks). Or how about
force all frivilous astro-tourists to clean up some toxic waste on Earth.
The excitement will last right up until one of these flights explodes, killing everyone aboard. After the lawsuits clear up, methinks you'll see the market for "space tourism" dry up for a while.
I think I'd throw that cap away....
Throw it away? Are you NUTS?!?!
Ebay!!!!! (with no warranties or liabilities, of course)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Mello Yellow will be offering a school bus ride across the US as its prize.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
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?
I guess that it's a nice idea, but aside from novelty flights is there any practical application to all of this in the next ten years?
Also given all the junk that government sponsored space flight puts off, how are we to regulate these novelty flights in regards to jettisoning various bits of detrius? Or am I just being paranoid?
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.
...to join the 65 Mile High Club?
..inter-continental transportation.
Compare number of people who would pay for a ride on SpaceShipOne vs. number of people who would pay for something more practical - say getting you and two bags to Hawaii in 1.5 hours.
Imagine a SSO like design big enough for 20 people and second stage and launched at 45 degrees instead of vertical. Any rocket scientists in here to calculate what a range of something like that might be?
.. 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.
maybe she said should.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Unfortunately, I can't figure if the X-Prize is on the path to orbit, or merely a distraction. The rubber/LOX hybrid most likely doesn't scale up well enough for an orbital vehicle. I don't know enough about Armadillo's use of H2O2, whether it's used as oxidizer or monopropellent, but I doubt it scales to orbital capablity, either. Nor do I know enough about any of the other efforts.
IMHO, the only part of the sub-orbital effort that's reusable for getting into orbit will be the vehicle handling experience, aloft and especially on the ground. That's nothing to sneeze at, because from every report I've heard, it's the ground costs that make the Shuttle cost so much.
I kind of expect the orbital competition to turn into X-Prize types building the crew vehicle and possibly upper stage, with a more conventional, though likely cost-reduced lower stage.
Even with that, X-Prize contenders aren't fit for a true orbital re-entry, either. Mach 17 is a whole different ball of wax than simply falling from apogee. But I also expect them to be more nimble about using new materials and other fail-safe techniques, like SS1 does now.
"Virgin Galactic"... How cool is that?
Sounds like your average Star Trek fan to me.
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Last one into space is a rotten egg!
And the first one into space is an egg whose shell has cracked open due to lack of air pressure, whose yolk then boiled as all the water evaporated into vaccum, and who was then incinerated upon re-entry.
Call me a cynic, but I'd wait a little while to be going into space, even if you can afford it.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Plus, you know their ads will eventually feature bondage. :)
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)
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.
I don't think you want to drink any carbonated beverages in space. I assume when you open up a bottle of 7UP in microgravity, the bubbles would begin to form, but then they wouldn't go anywhere, they'd just clump and get bigger.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
gravity really pull you down.
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
Well, what do you know. NASA has already done this research! The bubbles all stay distributed throughout the drink, BUT an even bigger problem is that the bubbles go all the way through the astronaut's entire digestive system, because they don't "float" to the top of their stomach like they do when there is gravity!
Boy, I hope not....
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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!
$10,000 isn't much more than what it cost to fly the Concorde in it's last days (around $9,000).
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
Burt Rutan is our Zephram Cochran. no, he didn't make it to warp 1 or catch the attention of the Vulcans. he didn't even pilot the ship. but the opportunity for significant change was certainly made, and that is what makes history.
SpaceShipOne of course wasn't the first spacecraft, but it's the first technology that's accessible to such a large number of people. being the first is not as significant as bringing change. Columbus wasn't the first to visit America, but he's the one that started the change. this is what makes history.
How's the closet?
A blog about stuff.
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.
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.
Technology has an obvious path you're missing the middle step before common man.
1. Military
2. PORN
3. Common Man
The airline industry was lucky in that they worked out all the major glitches well before the advent of mass visual media. Will the space tourism industry manage to avoid killing lots of people while working out all the kinks? Who knows.
STFU about slashdot bias.
Maybe he was actually referring to orbit. You dont think that the company is going to stand still and just offer outer-atmospheric hops for the next decade do you?
He's not worth that.
Especially if he breaks it. SS1 belongs in a museum so when I have kids, I can take them to see it.
No, I think that all Darl deserves is to go on a parachute flight with an empty backpack labeled "PARACHUTE" strapped to his back. Much more efficent.
Gentoo Sucks
Yes. As far as I'm concerned, if you can't put yourself in orbit you can't really say you've gone to space. You just touched it.
Besides, being able to see the whole world in both night and day, big weather, a sunrise, a sunset, and so forth, would make this a much more interesting trip than just going up and coming down.
Anyway, I presume that would be the next space prize.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
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
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.
This is a bit of a double edged sword here.... First off, I think we'll have to start a pool on who will be the first to put a McD's or Tacobell in space. With the development of cheap, inflatable "space stations" already being talked about, it will only be a matter of time before Virgin is approached by someone to include a "rest stop" at the top of the route. Granted, this will come when the tourist ships start entering a higher orbit, and I don't think anyone will pay $200 for a whopper, so we'll most likely see a 5 star type establishment. But it doesn't matter. Consumerism will be the first step into space once regular trips are being made. Absurd you say? Do a little research on how luxurious and decadent the first Zeplins were. So we'll see that, followed by gift shops, and not much longer after that.... BILLBOARDS. Soon, the stars will be a memory. This is a bit on the extreme side, but I'd put money on some form of the above being a reality within the next decade or two. After reading this by fireboy1919: "It's a excellent opportunity to provide a considerable drain on the earth's resources for one's own benefit over a very brief period of time while at the same time producing absolutely nothing to benefit society." It brings up a good point... This will be the play toy of the rich for a while. But it's a nessesary evil. They'll pump money into the system, supporting developments and creating an industry. Once it becomes less of a new thing and more affordable we will look back upon this as the Airlines look back on their predecesors. Awe inspiring and unattainable at first... now a common thing in life. The events we are watching today will be the stepping stones to colonization, space mining, energy harvesting. Now all we have to do it get the damn Space Elevator built. http://www.liftport.com/ (liftport.com)
...and she used it years ago to veto skydiving! Mwha ha ha ha haaaaa! I'm allowed to fly in space! Yipee!
I can hear her now: "We agreed on one expreme sport veto, but I still have an extreme travel veto that hasn't been used. And oh yea, I have an endless supply of sex vetos. Choose wisely."
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
Anyone read Dale Brown's "Deception Point"? A fun book by the same author of The Davinci Code. Anyway, in it it brought up the dangers (or supposed dangers) of commercializing space. Basically if you gave corporations like say, pepsi, free reign to go into space as they pleased, do you think they would be more concerned with:
a) putting a huge "Drink Pepsi" sign on the moon or
b) continuing the mostly and un-exciting scientific research that NASA currently does.
No offense to corporations, but they are there to make money, and investing a billion dollars to put an earth orbiting banner up is going to satisfy their shareholders more than searching for the origins of the universe. Taken to an extreme think about space and the skies above us being as littered with advertising and crap as the roads and buildings and entertainment that we are subjected to every day are. How long before every shuttle is as littered with badges as a Nascar is?
Maybe it's the 'slippery slope' argument, but the book did a good job of explaining why NASA is in "control" of space and not the corporations.
Many more can afford this. Considering what some people have put into weddings 10k won't be that bad of a fix. Also, factor in what it would cost for 2 or 3 good cruises and you can pay for this trip very easily.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Nope, nope, wrong, wrong, wrong, nope, wrong.
To get SpaceShipOne to make it to altitude, they had to actually strip over a pound of *unused wiring*, among other things. Every pound of mass you cut from it gives you almost 150 feet of extra altitude. You'd be crazy to think of adding the mass of the White Knight to it and expecting it to go anywhere.
This is one of the most basic parts of rocketry: multiple stages are the only economic way to get low-ISP/high tank mass craft to perform well. And SpaceShipOne is definitely one of those (heavy nitrous tanks, ISP of around 250(!)).
There's a reason why almost all serious proposed SSTO designs are very high ISP and very low tank mass; it just doesn't work otherwise.
Now, there are alternatives to carring the craft on the underbelly of a carrier. One I'd like to see is a tow-launch vehicle with midair fuelling. You can tow to altitude and fuel using even a cheap, used commodity aircraft, which is known to be safe, pilots are plentiful and cheap, maintinance is predictable, parts are mass produced, etc. The tow plane would be essentially a negligable portion of your cost, and even the poorest funded of X-prize teams could afford one.
By fuelling in midair (not really much harder than fuelling on the ground for most fuels/oxidizers, if your line is attached from takeoff and has more slack than the tow line; you just need to take the pumps and a power source along as well as the fuel. Doesn't work for solid fuels and is a poor choice for pressurized fluids, however), you can drastically reduce the required landing gear strength and save yourself a lot of mass.
Still, this whole getting into "space" thing is kinda silly, apart from a 3 minute free-fall and a good view. It's an adrenaline kick, but it's so far from what is needed for orbital, it's not even funny.
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
Before everybody gets swept up in all the hype and euphoria, remember that altitude -- even 100 km -- is easy
For $10 million dollars, why didn't you do it years ago then? I know what your point is but I think there is a pendulum reaction going on here. Some guys are saying, SpaceShipOne is better than the Space Shuttle, which makes guys like you come back with something absurd saying that 100 km is nothing at all.
In reality, and objectively speaking, somewhere in the middle of these two extremist viewpoints is where the truth lies. No, 100 km is not orbit. However, until a couple months ago nobody in the private sector could even go suborbital, and only a 3 governments in the world had done it. So it isn't "easy." Nor is SpaceShipOne a rip off of X-15 like some posters are saying... among many things, the engine is safer and the feather mechanism is unique, and the White Knight is no B-52.
So please, guys, spare the drama on saying how "easy" all of this really is. Oh, and SpaceShipOne does have one similarity to X-15... X-15 led to Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Shuttle. This is only the absolute beginning for commercial exploration. All this was done with $20 million or so. What do you think bright minds will come up with when 8 or 10 years of suborbital tourism and additional investors have given Virgin Galactic a few hundred million to play with?
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.
This is something I was wondering about myself. When NASA developed the Apollo missions, they were designed in anticipation of about a 90% success rate for each mission. (I believe it was about this and someone can correct me if they know otherwise, but it certainly wasn't incredibly safe.)
I'd be interested to know what the safety goals of Scaled Composites were with their design, what can be done if something goes wrong, and how it relates to commercial viability. Presumably it's much higher than 9 in 10 successes, and there are likely to be plans to work a lot on safety before any serious potential commercial partners would want to be involved. But does this translate to 99/100 successful flights, 999/1000 successful flights, or even better?
So far we've seen two properly successful test flights. That's less than 1/50th of what we've seen of the US Space Shuttle. (Granted that it's far less complicated.)
...for a ride? Sell chance tickets, limited to one to a human slashdotter,once enough accumulated for a ticket, then have a webcast with a live drawing?
what say, owners, nifty idea? what say slashdotters?
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Friends?!?
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
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..."
This might have a really interesting application for fast travel in a few years. New York to Japan in under an hour anyone?
Do something like that, and CEOs will be lining up to give you money.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
And they've aready announced the next phase of the X-Prize, the X-Prize Cup. CNN covers it here.
SharkJumper
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.