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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"
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.
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.'"
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?
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.
"Virgin Galactic"... How cool is that?
Sounds like your average Star Trek fan to me.
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gravity really pull you down.
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!
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
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.
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..."
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.)
Hello?!?
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..."
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.