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What's Next in the New Private Space Industry?
Cesaro asks: "I'm as thrilled as every other geek out there with the success of SpaceShipOne. But what are realistic expectations of our next steps into this new industry? The Economist clearly thinks the next step is high paying 'space tourism' at a whopping $200k+ per trip. That is all well and good, but what do *we* think the goals and schedule should look like?"
"How about travel? A flight to Australia will currently take me 20+ hours. How long down the road until I can take off from the US and land SpaceShipOne in Australia where another White Knight is waiting to ferry it back into the air again? (Anyone know how fast I could get there?) I only get 10 days of vacation a year and spending two of them in a metal cylinder is not such a good deal. How many years until we can start carrying cargo and DHL/UPS/FedEx can promise around the globe next day delivery? So I ask Slashdot: What should be the next steps and what is a realistic expectation of when those steps could occur?"
Space Pirates, of course!
Nothing to see here; Move along.
Hopefully we can get to something more along the lines of spending the night in space for, say,$50,000. If we could do that within five years that would be awesome. I don't think I would spend 210K for three minutes even if I had it.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Make normal meals eatable in space.
Mike melvill and Burt Rutan were on tv yesterday (Jay Leno). They said Paul Allen is expecting to make a lot of money from this. They were contacted by airline tycoons with interest in purchasing the technology.
Once airline industry embraces this, it will be very quickly coming down to affordable level for commoners for tourism atleast. For commerical travel, it might be a while before this technology is used as we can see from the example or Concorde.
Jay Leno was joking that Southwest will offer space flight for $99 but you will have to stop in fresno, LA and SFO first.
And what's up with these messages?
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If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
a high price will limit the industry but at the same time it will keep just anyone from going on a ride. this could keep people who dont know the risks involved away
Martian Settlement in our lifetime.
Read a little bit about it before you yell that it can't be done or that it will cost a trillion zillion dollars.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Not gonna happen (though it would be cool)
Thread 1817224
I read about the early space programs (Mercury/Gemini/Apollo) as a kid and dreamt of going into space. My statement was always "I'd give my lefty to take a ride into space"....unfortunately, they want $200K+. I guess I'll have to wait a little longer. Dammit.
sex in space is where it's at. I'm almost not even kidding. It's out of the control of any state, and who wouldn't want to have sex in space?
No joke. It's an industry. It should make money.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Personally, I'd like to see this technology used to get supplies to people suffering.
Imagine how far we could reduce the death toll from hurricanes, droughts and floods if we could get supplies there hours/days faster than if we used airplanes.
What if we were to use a space elevator to get materials into orbit, and then spaceshipone or another vehical to deliver them to wherever they would be needed?
I want to see whichever member of the Knievel family is still alive jump out of this thing at the apex of the flight, and parachute back to the ground.
Assuming he makes it, then the next thing would be some kind of horrible reality TV show.
Tonight on Discovery Channel you can check you Black Sky. The documentary on SpaceShipOne and the Ansari X Prize. Be sure to check it out. It's simply amazing!
Seeing as the maiden voyage of the ship was a little spotty, I'd be wary of sending up tourists. It'd only take one incident to stop this new industry in it's tracks
Congrats mate!! You got the first post for the next story.
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
Unfortunately, Rutan's technology is not applicable to orbital space travel, as near as I can tell, so I'm not sure that this does anything for space tourism, except as a something for the press to report (which may be worth something, but I tend to doubt that it means much).
The question is how many people are going to be fooled that this is really space travel.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
i would pay 200,000dlls if they kept me a day in orbit.. AT LEAST!
:(
well thats me.... im no 50 cent or madonna
------
mmmm round and soft...
I think the flight fare will be halved at every 5 years.
Meaning 100K at 2009, 50K at 2014, 25K at 2019, 12K at 2024.
I don't think it will go below 10K per trip - up and down round trip.
the first first post from space should be our first goal!
(this post would've been first if it were'nt for the several minutes delay between here and earth)
The next step: ????
The step after that is, of course, PROFIT!
what do *we* think the goals and schedule should look like?
You got a $200,000 frog in your pocket? Otherwise it jest don't matter a whole hill of beans what *you* think the goals should be.
Infuriate left and right
I only get 10 days of vacation a year and spending two of them in a metal cylinder is not such a good deal.
You could always move to a country where everyone have 5 weeks of vacation...
Without a special port of call out in the void, the ride has to be the attraction. And if that's the case, a stretch limo service would be a better business model than a cruise line would be. Imagine if you could show up to your high school reunion in one of those puppies . . .
Find a way to put this capability into a Lear jet or similar. Make it one helluva a status symbol. Then, it won't matter so much how many ordinary people use the service, so much as it will matter *how many* of the filthy rich can boast of using it.
John Hancock wuz here.
Burt Rutan, take it overseas. Let the united states fall if they want to kill off anything that would give this country some hope and create new jobs.
Suborbital legislation suddenly sinks
Amended bill said to carry 'poison pill' for spaceflight
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6201543/
Just days after SpaceShipOne's prize-winning flight opened the world's eyes to the prospect for private spaceflight, legislation that might have opened the way for paying passengers to get on board has sunk into a congressional black hole -- at the urging of space entrepreneurs who were once its biggest supporters. Those one-time boosters say the compromise version that emerged Thursday from a House-Senate "preconference" would actually kill off private spaceflight by holding the industry to an unmeetable safety standard for passengers and crew members.
SpaceShipOne is about to become the new Tucker.
Take the technology to china, take it to all our enemies, i dont care. don't let our fucked up government kill off something that beautiful. something where we actually had a chance to change something.
LET THE UNITED STATES IMPLODE
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
I want to see a building your own space ship contest on one of the Junk Yard Wars!
Industrial Space
Several things come to mind:
- Tourism: the view is fantastic.
- Medical Recuperation: SciFi hit on this a long time ago. The movie CONTACT did so, even. The zero-gravity environment would be much easier on a heart patient.
- Theme Park: One of the consistent features of theme parks is 'Gravity Games!' - roller coasters play with positive/negative G's.
- Real Estate! If you want to build "a house on a hill", there's no bigger hill than Olympus Mons. You will NOT run out of real estate.
- Scientific exploration: Obvious, isn't it, to put an conventional large telescope (even a multi-mirrored one) in a vacuum?
- Industrial Processes: there has to be some industrial use for very, very high heat in a vacuum and zero G. Honeycombed metals? The heat could be from a very simple parabolic mirror made from cheap mylar. There's no breeze, it's unflappable at higher orbits, etc.
- Prospecting: Asteroids made of small chunks of pure metal. that's worth something right there. When the impurities in the iron are Nickel and Platinum?
Just a few ideas.The whirlygigs spin you around. Well, Zero G must be a lot of fun, lots of people pay lots of money to experience moments of zero g.
The problem is that Antartica is far more hospitable than Mars. But, that can be fixed with increasingly reliable machinery.
There's value there not just in the metal, but in the location of the metal, already out of our gravity well.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
To think that we'll be able to fly into space to get to Australia may never happen. Economically, it makes sense that, rather than space travel taking over commercial air flight, commercial airflight will simply continue to improve. Larger jets, more fuel-efficient, better accomodations. The idea isn't to necessarily make the trip much faster - though that will happen over time with conventional air travel - but to improve the experience enough that passages won't mind a 20 hour flight so much.
Besides, if flying in space becomes so commonplace that I can get to Australia - I might as well just go to the moon! (Though it lacks the Sydney Opera House... or does it?)
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
warning above includes referral
(poster makes $$$ for your click)
would be to take a submersible trip to the furthest depths of the ocean, upon surfacing at the nearby seafaring space platform, I would be taken on an orbital trip, reentry would be over the Antarctic where (havent got this figured out) we would land on the ice, followed by an overland trip to an icebreaker for a trip home. Beat that!
Going into space would be awesome, but I'd rather be able to read slashdot in firefox.
Space tourism? Okay. . . Sure, I can see it becoming a viable ongoing business, but I still think the really big payoff in the long run will come out of asteroid mining. The space tourist business might help that along -- if it leads to putting payloads in space at lower cost.
As seen on Transterrestrial Musings, spacepolitics.com, and RLV News:
Just got this message Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace that the current legislation to assist the development of the suborbital spaceflight industry has been distorted by Senate staffers into something that will instead smother the industry in the cradle:
There is a last-minute move by some staffers in the Senate to heavily amend HR 3752. The amendments would completely change the charter of the office of commercial space transportation (AST), placing the safety of the crew and passengers on equal footing with the safety of the uninvolved public. Since that is well beyond present technology, it would effectively stop development of the industry in the U.S.. It is too late to fix the bill before the session adjourns, but not too late to stop it. If you or people you know have connections to any Senator, please ask them to put a "hold" on HR 3752. That prevents it from passing by unanimous consent. We may have less than 24 hours.
If the bill is "held" there may be opportunity to fix it in a post-election session -- but if not, we would still rather the bill die than pass with these poison-pill amendments.
If your Senator is on the Commerce Committee, that's even better: http://commerce.senate.gov/about/membership.html
Personally, I'm in favor of having the AST in charge of the safety of the uninvolved public on the ground, as the bill was originally worded. However, I think that the last-minute changes to have the same agency regulate the safety of crew and passengers (and require the corresponding mountains of paperwork) would be an excellent way to kill off the budding US space tourism industry.
MSNBC has a more in-depth article on this.
The only thing we have to look forward to now is government regulation.
It's probably easier to get a job with 15 days vacation...
Self propelled rockets that fall down with a big boom. The US doesn't need them (we have enough nukes). But you can sell them to third world countries as cheap WMDs.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
I want to see a reenactment of the great space battle of 1978. I think it was called "Space Invaders".
meh
Sorry, but Kitty Hawk was a stunt, nothing more. I respect the engineering involved, but this is not flying. I don't care that some faceless person somewhere defined an arbitrary point as "the sky". Flight is CONTROLLED flight, minimally a transcontinental trip.
Unfortunately, the Wright Brothers' technology is not applicable to intercontinental travel, as near as I can tell, so I'm not sure that this does anything for the aero-plane industry, except as a something for the press to report (which may be worth something, but I tend to doubt that it means much).
The question is how many people are going to be fooled that this is really flight.
Blaze a trail to the New World
As posted to an earlier story, below is a paste from this article. Note that unless they're using some sort of continuous propulsion system while in orbit, the 130km orbital altitude is probably a mix-up:
One-man version of SpaceShipOne may be next stage in development of space holidays
A one-person version of Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne that reaches an orbit of 130km (81 miles) to rendezvous with an orbiting hotel may form the next stage of Burt Rutan's private manned spaceflight plans.
Speaking at a lecture organised by the Manx Festival of Aviation at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, the aerospace designer detailed how such an orbital vehicle could be evolved from his existing three-man, suborbital 3,000kg (6,600lb) SpaceShipOne. The amount of spacecraft mass dedicated to fuel would be increased to achieve the greater altitude and speed required.
"We'd have a small cramped cabin for the orbital flight and you'd be in it for a long time. You'd want to go to a hotel [because of that] and for orbital tourism you'd want an altitude of 130km," says Rutan.
In his lecture, Rutan referred to plans by Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace, to develop a space hotel based on NASA-originated inflatable habitat technology.
Before Rutan begins work on orbital flight technology, he will attempt to win the X-Prize, which requires two suborbital flights within two weeks carrying a mass equivalent to three people. Rutan's first flight is scheduled for 29 September and his second for 4 October. But before he flies for the second time, competing Canadian X-Prize team da Vinci Project is scheduled to try to reach space in its Wild Fire rocket on 2 October.
Another X-Prize team, Space Transportation, saw its Rubicon One rocket fail a flight test in Washington on 8 August seconds after launch. The engines of the $20,000 rocket failed after it reached an altitude of 1,000ft (305m). Rubicon One's remains crashed to Earth 61m from its launch site after its parachute system failed. It was carrying three dummies representing the pilot and passengers.
The Canadian Arrow team recently had a successful test firing of their engine. (They are the ones who set up the world's first private astronaut training centre.) The DaVinci team is likely to be the second private team into space.
Space tourism and Extreme space diving are not going to be profitable. The next phase is likely going to be a private satellite launch system. However, I could see a new "X-Prize" for private launch to low earth orbit as the next step.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The more people spring for a ride at $200K, the sooner the rest of us will be able to fly for $2K. I thank the people who bought CD players and VCRs when they cost over a grand, and all the people who are willing to shed their discretionary income on leading-edge products and services.
-jcr (Planning to fly to LEO in about ten years or so...)
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
A preemptive strike on mars. I mean c'mon, who knows what theyre hiding under the planet's surface?! Intelligence suggests they may have water! Oh and you are either with us or with Mars.
...without even going orbital!
Just a little more power, and something very much like Spaceship One should be able to get you from NYC to Tokyo fast enough that you could do the round trip in a day.
I can think of all kinds of situations where it would be worth it for a business to spend ten grand or more to get someone there immediately if not sooner.
Some very cool things are coming Real Soon Now, and I can't wait to see them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
As much as most people think about this New Private Space Industry as something to get rich human payloads into low Earth orbit, I think there is a lot of potential for small commercial/industrial/scientific payloads from people that can't quite afford a more traditional method such as the Space Shuttle (it still lives), large rockets, or the Russians. Even hobbyists might be able to afford communal payloads with these types of systems. Personal satellites, anyone?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
A true comparison would be for someone to build a catapult to vault someone through the air and then say, "We have flight! Making it powered and controllable is just around the corner!"
SpaceShipOne is not a scalable technology, it's good for suborbital and nothing else.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
An altitude of 130km? How long would a capsule stay at that altitude without additional boost? Just curious, because I don't take astrodynamics until next semester and that seems like a rather low orbit.
According to RLV News (one of the more popular space news sites), there's a huge pent-up demand for cheap suborbital science experiments.
... Now that such performance has in fact been proven by the SpaceShipOne, these kinds of knee-jerk rejections will gradually be replaced by enthusiasm for the new vehicles. Substantially lower costs, rapid re-flight opportunities, safe return of payloads, and nearby operator monitoring will make them irresistible. Researchers working with sounding rockets in areas such as atmospheric sciences, magnetospherics, astronomy, microgravity, and remote sensing will want to use them. Also, those developing sensors and other equipment for orbital and deep space vehicles will want to carry out suborbital flight tests."
From the report: "One space scientist, who puts experiments on sounding rockets, responded to my specification of a one week turnaround and a $200k price tag with "I don't believe these numbers (either the turnaround or the cost). Similar promises were made about the space shuttle 30 years ago, and they turned out to be grossly overoptimistic."
Rutan has received several offers from scientists and organizations who want to fly experiments on SpaceShipOne. He's turned them down, however, as he wants to focus on using SpaceShipOne as a development platform to perfect his next-generation space vehicle, which will be sold not only to Virgin Galactic, but to four or five other unannounced companies.
Interestingly, according to the BBC article: "Once its flight life is over, SpaceShipOne will be joining other notable ships of exploration at the Air and Space museum. Except for one piece. Rutan plans to pack up to 100g of SpaceShipOne to fly on the New Horizons' mission to Pluto - the first non-governmental launch into deep space."
Suborbital will for the forseeable future be the fastest way between two distant points on Earth. That has significant value since there are people and things that really need to get there as fast as possible. I see suborbital as a natural competitor to long-distance air flight. No idea on the time frame because it will depend on how rapidly the space tourism industry developes.
In other words, what does it cost to build it and the launch plane? How much does an individual flight cost (maintenance, fuel, telemetry services)? Overhead (office staff, paperwork, etc)?
And how many flights is one good for before it becomes non-air/spaceworthy?
If you sum the first figures and divide by the second figure, it should give us a close idea as to what a quickie space tourist ride would cost. It doesn't factor in research, but I guess as a business I'd largely ignore that for savings relative to economies of scale of building several planes now that the design is proven workable.
I believe that one of the most likely reasons that the government is such a tightass when it comes to space is because it's the ultimate high ground.
It takes very little to launch a rock off the moon and drop it on earth causing an extinction event.
I believe it even more now that they're trying to use legislation to kill off private space tourism.
Our government is increasingly power hungry and they'll never let something like that leave their grasp. It'll take revolution first.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Indeed. According to Wikipedia, the lower range for orbit is considered to be 350km. I'm guessing the quoted altitude is either a mix-up, or Rutan's planning on using something like an ion thruster to deliver continuous thrust.
Hey I only need $199,500 more for my ticket, then I can be a space monkey too :)
roamingfeet
travel has a good immediate-term profit potential. I can see ICBM tickets transpacific as big sellers,
but the big bucks are in lassoing an asteroid and
sending bucket loads of precious metals earthside.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
(It would also force society to rethink the whole concept of "Intellectual Property", precicely because there'd be nothing anybody could do about it. Maybe the discussion could move from the "us vs. them" of CorporateThink and towards the point of intelligent discussion.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'd be far more impressed with commercial orbital flight. Not only could it seriously reduce travel time, but the 'space' threshold is not nearly so discrete as 100km... making the 'weightless' flights of Space Ship One rather comparable to flying in the Vomit Comet, only higher. Orbital flight has potential for relative permanance, on the other hand, and could better foster space tourism by fulfilling our futuristic dreams of hotels in the sky (and probably shopping malls and goodness knows what else). All that IMHO.
Everything is easy when you don't understand the problem.
Fedex would certainly be able to benefit. By flying significantly ahead of the Earth's terminator to haul cargo, they could change their slogan to "FedEx...when it absolutely, positively has to be there yesterday."
The amount of spacecraft mass dedicated to fuel would be increased to achieve the greater altitude and speed required.
He is full of bullshit. The recent energy of SSO is only 4% required to go orbital (8 times in vellocity terms), and due to Ciolkowsky law you need much more than 20 times amount of the fuel. You need completely different technology to go orbital.
Spaceship One is controlled and powered, too, and the Wright Flyer wasn't what I would call scalable. Wing-warping was a dead-end technology from the get-go.
SpaceShipOne is not a scalable technology, it's good for suborbital and nothing else.
There's plenty of money to make without going orbital.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm still waiting for the flying car they promised me!
ehintz
Judging from the name of the article poster I would venture a guess and say that he isn't a white man, but probably latin.
Ah such an obvious piece of flamebait, who the fsck marked it insightful?. Sweety, the reason the Wright Brothers' flight is a Big Deal, is because it the first time a man got off the ground using something heavier-than-air in a controlled and repeatable fashion. You have to have a fucking horse and cart before you can get to the Ferrari, duh! Fuckface.
The average Fortune 1000 CEO earned $8.3 million a year, way back in 2001. That's 22,000 USD per day. So, just in non-productive CEO time alone, sending the CEO to Australia costs 44,000 USD, on top of the 14,000 USD or so for the first-class return ticket. That's a big cost - not to mention that this technology offers the possibility of intercontinental day trips, something that is simply not possible now. There are people - not many, but some - for whom these features will be worth paying a lot of money for. Just like aircraft in their early days, in fact...
Also, I gather there would also be a market for really fast package delivery, which could theoretically carry even higher per-kilogram costs. Imagine if a crucial part is required to resume production at a major automotive plant. How much is a day's lost production worth?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Obviously you have never heard about the first amateur radio satellite, OSCAR (Orbital Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) or any of it's brothers. How long has this been going on? AMSAT is going to have it's 35th anniversary meeting this year. http://www.amsat.org/ Sig? We don't need no stinking sig!
Error 500. Linux rules.
Don't worry.... Richard Branson will save the save with Virgin Galactic
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not the responsiblity of the user, as I probably stole them anyway
There are numerous benefits resulting from this endeavor, and not necessarily the SpaceShipOne per se. There have been numerous projects to get spaceships into orbit using traditional VT (vertical takeoff) that have been axed even with much potential (e.g. X-33). Eventually the SpaceShipOne design will invariably be replaced with a horizontal takeoff craft similar to an airplane, and at a certain altitude a hybrid engine (probably SCRAMJET, actually) will ignite, taking passengers to altitudes that are sub-orbital but high enough that an NYC->SYD flight could be finished in 45 minutes.
..., those who see things different. .... We see genius. Or however the commercial went.
This is where the world WAS going, but very slowly and not exactly driven much. The really great thing about SpaceShipOne is not necessarily the design itself but the ATTENTION it is generating and the hope it is putting into people's eyes, most importantly those of INVESTORS! Investors are cold people who look at bottom lines and ROI's like doctors look at vital signs. They don't care about what is really cool and what could be amazing some day, with rare exceptions like Paul Allen and other dreamers. Those rare exceptions are the ones who often have the highest risk but also the greatest ability to influence change. Like the old Apple commercial: here's to the dreamers, the crazy ones,
Anyway, the attention we're getting on this front is AMAZING. The X-Prize Cup will continue to influence people to push into space, and companies like Virgin Galactic will actually push hundreds of people into suborbital flight within a few years! And given that humans would always push for more, they will invariably push to LEO flight, then the moon, and then Mars and elsewhere.
It has to start somewhere with a catalyst, and NASA has certainly NOT done its job in this effort (with all honesty, it was never their job to do this with the exception of Apollo).
I would predict that by 2014, you will have global flights with max times of 90 minutes, SAME-DAY global delivery (send a package from NYC at 10 AM and have it arrive an hour later in Rome), regular LEO flights to primitive but functional orbiting hotels, and even the first commercial expedition to the moon, funded by corporate investors and reality TV shows.
The point is that the catalyst has arrived!!!! I've been waiting for this catalyst for YEARS.
God bless everyone who has made this happen---the SpaceShipOne crew, Paul Allen, Peter Diamondis, and especially NASA for having done nothing in 30 years that required us to do it for ourselves.
Ad Astra Per Aspera!
Some of us can go just a bit longer...
Electromagnetic rail looks promising for real orbit possibility: http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/ MassDrivers.html
That has a lifetime of a few revs, depending on the ballistic coefficient. Heating would also be a significant problem. Brett
First, let's get the $200k from as many of the rich guys as we can. Then reinvest those profits in R&D for heavy launchers, orbiting habitats, asteroid mining, and planetary exploration and colonization. Those are the things that will make space pay off in the long term, and they can pay huge dividends for life on earth.
Oh, and if I can get a flying car out of this somehow, I'll be very happy.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
So, really, what you want is a local use of long distance development.
And that, really, means to move from "barely enters space" on to the harder things... in order, that would be
Each of those steps gets progressively harder. But, for your uses... once LEO becomes economical, your trip from L.A. to Sydney is just a modification of a LEO orbital insertion.
LEO is closer to 230 miles high, instead of the current 60 miles high. It's a serious difference, and, from what I've read, SpaceShipOne isn't really designed for that. I'm not bashing Rutan and his people, they made a well-designed craft for the purpose it was designed, which, unfortunately, has nothing to do with going into orbit.
But then, give them a few years of income from people willing to pay $200K for "Oh! I got in space for 3 minutes!" and they'll be working on the next level, which is that hotel in LEO you've probably already heard about. And then they (or someone else) will start thinking about hotels on the moon, and you'll get another level of development.
If you want to make this commercial, forget about science as a driving factor. It will be economics and Return On Investment, and for the next 10-20 years that's going to mean "silly" tourism. Profitable, but not terribly useful, other than for funding development towards stages that will be useful. If we're lucky, when the LEO hotel becomes a reality, some space will be devoted to science, but it will probably be purely for PR purposes.
Remember also that this was never planned for heavy-lift capabilities, which limits the scientific usefulness, because scientific gear for space tends to be heavy.
People mention asteroid mining, but I'm not so sure that will happen any time in the next 50 years. It would be nice, I admit... but it's not even needed until we get some good space construction capabilities, and even then you have the moon to play around with first. There's plenty of resources on the moon, and getting them off is easy, as long as it's just cargo... Mass drivers built to barely exceed lunar escape velocity gets you processed packages in orbit for easy pickup, and not nearly the miles required to go snag an asteroid... even the closer ones inside the orbit of Mars. Remember, it's not just getting there... it's getting there with something you can use to move the thing back to a useful orbit close to Earth. That's a whole different level of complexity and difficulty. What do you use to move something that masses 100 million tons, anyway? That's about what an asteroid 1/2 mile in diameter will mass. (Aircraft carriers are less than 100,000 tons, oil super tankers around 250,000 tones.) Or do you want to set up an outpost there? (And you thought corporate-owned mining towns in the US Old West were bad...)
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Since you're so high up, how hard would it be to just fly all the way from NY to Tokyo in 1 hour or something like that? Some megaconglomorates could actually see the high price as being worth it, if it would allow them to sign a multibillion dollar deal...?
Can't we just take the rich, spoiled class of people who will do this and change their trajectory to the sun? At least NASA gave us velcro and Tang.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
It's been done. (Or at least it was being planned, and right now it's passed the planned date) 2 people were racing to do this - they both planned on taking hot air balloons up and jumping out when they hit technical space and parachuting down. The article about it all was in a popular mechanics a while back, but I can't remember what issue it was.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Probably won't happen in my lifetime, but with some kind of life-extension breakthrough it may; a generation ship is a ship that holds a lot of people and travels for a long time.
Given the length of time it takes to travel between solar systems, this is (currently) the only viable way to get a ship to another system with living humans on it (I don't think cryo would work, have they successfully defrosted anyone yet?). It would have to be sufficiently large enough to carry a large enough group of people to propagate without inbreeding over a very long time (50,000 years, i think it is, to travel to alpha (or is it proxima) centauri, 4.3 light years, i believe).
It would also need massive production capabilities, not only to produce the food and resources used by the passengers and crew, but also to research, develop, and apply any breakthroughs that improve the ship. Maybe an AI to run the whole thing as well, to maintain knowledge and history in case of societal breakdown.
Of course, all this is based on current propulsion methods. Come up with something that can tap into hyperspace and we're on our way!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship has some stuff about the generation ship.
this isn't a sig. i type this (including the two dashes), every time i post, just to make it look like a sig.
Regulation http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/0 7/1817224&tid=103&tid=160
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
You raise an excellent point.
The day we learn how to couple electricity and gravity to get precisely those amenities (which really need gravity to make them happen - pools, normal meals, etc.) will be the day space travel and in fact the world at large will be changed forever.
+++ATH0
I'm thinking the space equivalent to the dot-com investment of the 90's won't happen for five reasons.
For one, the initial investment required to develop a meaningful space-based business is significantly higher than that for a software/Web-based business. VCs are a lot tighter with their money these days. They are typically only entertaining large investments in the biotech industy, with has a lot more mature private sector component than the space industry.
Second, it's was relatively easy for an entrepreneur to sell the idea of an internet-based business by just pointing to an analog in an existing brick-and-mortar industry and saying a variation of, "We'll do what they're doing, but we'll do it more efficiently." It's hard to see how this sort of argument applies to the nascent private space-industry.
Third, the Internet bubble was partly fueled by a relatively large population of software development expertise. Training software developer, and developing actual software, is significantly easier and cheaper than doing almost *anything* related to space travel. Certainly cheaper than doing anything related to cutting-edge, industry transforming space engineering R&D.
Fourth, the VC's, and the rest of the investment community, are relatively savvy wrt software, computers, telecom, and related businesses (or, at least they *think* they are). It was easy for a VC to do some "due diligence" and a gut check and decide to commit some dollars to an internet-based business. As a group, they are not at all savvy wrt space. The majority of VCs/early stage investors are not nearly as cutting edge, forward thinking, or even smart as they'd have the general public believe. It'll take a lot more than one success by one group for the bulk of the early stage institutional investors to start licking their chops.
The fifth reason I don't think there will be 90's style spike in investment for space travel is that, as cool as SpaceShipOne is, it doesn't fundamentally alter the economics of space travel. None of the XPrize contenders that I know off were working on fit that criteria. The internet was so compelling to investors because they could see that it did improve operational efficiencies for a large number of industries, even if the investors didn't know *how* those efficiencies would be manifested. SpaceShipOne does seem to incrementally improve the space travel equation by executing a low-cost composite-based variation of the Orbital Sciences/Pegasus rocket. But I'm pretty sure that it's does not match up as a transformative technology that the internet was.
The one group where there might be a pick-up in interest is the private investors like Paul Allen and Carmack. I'd also think that their might be a pick up in investments in the institutions (universities and labs) that are doing fundamental research in novel space technology. I wouldn't be surprised if those institutions start mining their patents and papers to see if they can "monetize" them via spin-offs, start-ups and/or licensing.
Nah. I'd say that large scale early-stage investment in space is several decades off, barring the development of some technology that fundamentally changes the economics of space travel.
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
Read the article. It's a bit of a long winded rant, but I agree with (and have been predicting myself) some of its key points.
The US dollar is weak, not helped by the massive budget and current account deficits. For now that doesn't matter too much (particularly the current account situation) because the US is viewed as a strong economic powerhouse, and the US dollar is in high demand because it is the standard currency for most major commodity markets.
The catch is that both of those factors can change. World opinion of the US has definitely been on the decline of late, and while the US economy might be creeping its way out of recession, the rest of the world isn't having any such problems. Add to that a potential shift in commodity markets - Russia has already shifted to selling all its oil in Euros (and Russia is a major oil supplier) - to what could be viewed as the more stable Euro, and the US dollar could be facing a tumble.
There are some added factors the article doesn't really mention. A significant one is that Japan is pretty much the largets single owner of US debt - both budget and current account deficit: Japan is a huge buyer of US currency and government bonds. Japan has itself been in serious economic woes for the last decade and then some, but they are definitely on the improve. Should the Japanese economy kick into gear there will be a strong move toward dropping US investments, and investing locally. That's going to put a huge strain on US debt (it will effectively be getting recalled) while at the same time putting serious downward pressure on the US dollar as Japanese investors move to using yen for local investment.
All of these things add up to some very serious potential for the US dollar to have very major fall in the global currency market (and such a fall would only force more and more markets to switch to the "far more stable" Euro - the harder it falls, the worse it gets). Sould such a thing happen it will put very very serious pressure on the US economy. It is at that pointed that the much vaunted US innovation and entrepreneurialism will have to truly stand up and be counted. Unless it proves to be truly impressive indeed, the US could suffer an extremely major economic readjustment (think great depression).
Now, I wouldn't say any of this is likely, but it is a very very real possibility - the US dollar is surprisingly weak at the moment - and certainly there are plenty of dominoes poised. I'm surprised that these sorts of issues aren't of major concern during the current electoral cycle. Well, I guess I'm not that surprised, more disappointed.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I'm definitely interested in scoring some zero-G space nooky. My mom did say that I should wait and make sure my first time is special.
And, hopefully there will be room for two in that capsule, so that it can be even MORE special!
*JOY*
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
Having just finished watching all three parts of this tonight, they did have a segment were Rutan was showing some of his ideas for where to go with SpaceShipOne.
.02c
The first sketch he showed was SS1 attached to the top of a rocket, about twice the length of SS1. Presumably the idea being to boost it up higher than White Knight could get, then kick over to the internal rocket. Presumably to get into LEO.
The second was a concept for a orbital hotel, with a wheel nearby for an "exercise ring." He even admitted that the ring was cribbed from Von Braun. He was a bit "mystical" when describing what you could do in the hotel (observation domes where you could go to "contemplate"), but none the less, it would be a potential cash cow, if he / they can get the funding / customers / aproval.
Initially, if it flys (pardon the pun), I could see the uber-rich schmoes forking over $50k a night to stay up there, plus flight expenses. Eventually, just like with airline travel, the prices would begin to edge down to where normal folks could swing it, but it would be one of those "once in a lifetime" trips.
Of course, success hinges on on a few things. Money, first off, as always. Second, the public, and governments, will need to be willing to accept a certain amount of risk, and likely a few tragedies (Space hotel suffers blowout! News at 11!) The public, if the costs come down before any tragedies, *might* be willing to keep on going. The government, will potentially, and if the bill that is also being discussed here gets passed, try to kill private spaceflight with passengers (and possibly all together)
Which would bite. Because I want to retire to the damn Moon at Armstrong Base. Or be around to see the Utopia Planetia yards begin construction.
Just my
Jason
Do you see the FNORDS? I refuse to post anonymously, as I am fireproof!
it seems to me that the primary issue would be one of safety. If just one of those commercial space flights crash, it's all over for the industry. Who is going to pay 200k to die...slowly? how far are they away from providing *safe* space travel? 5 -10 years??? t
I predict a new episode of Junkyard Wars, where the show will provide the rubber & N20 burning engine, but the teams will have to scrounge up the rest of the parts from the junkyard. Teams have the customary 8 hours to build a vehicle, and the first one that makes it to suborbital space... and comes back alive... wins a complete set of all 20 TV espisodes, plus the 2-hour movie, of Andy Griffith's "Salvage One" series on DVD. :-)
Wing-warping was a dead-end technology from the get-go.
9 92813
Maybe not:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99
You claim the criteria used to determine that the Wright brothers achieved "flight" was arbitrary. Yet your criteria is equally arbitrary, and ludicrious if taken literally. By your criteria, anyone piloting a Piper Cub for a day of fun would not be flying!
t ml
I understand the jist of your argument, though. I've heard it said many times that the Wright Flyer (Kitty Hawk was the location in North Carolina where the flight took place) really made what amounted to short hops across the ground. The first attempt was 3 1/2 sec and ended with a stall and crash. Most people know about the second attempt, the official "success" in 1903 that lasted only 12 sec and 120 ft. But what has been largely forgotten is that the Wright brothers made three more flights that day, each longer the previous. The last lasted 59 seconds, and ended 852 ft from the start. The four consecutives was far better than what anyone else was able to achieve to that date.
Is that noteworthy? I'd argue yes. You may argue no. But, what is not arguable is that the Wright brothers were not one-trick ponies. They followed the Wright Flyer with further improvements and innovations, including the first circular flight, in 1904, and the first "practical" airplane, in 1905. No one else was even close to matching their 24 1/2 controlled flight at Huffman Prarie in 1905.
Your argument that the Wright brother's contribution to the aviation industry reveals in incredible lack of knowledge on the subject on your part. I don't know of any early pioneers that contributed as much to developing viable human powered flight, and the aviation industry in general, over a sustained period of time as they did, both in terms of R&D of actual working airplanes, and in the development of the aviation industry. They pioneered the military use of the airplane, the commercial use of the airplane, and stunt and competition flying.
To say, as another poster argues, that their technology doesn't "scale" and thereby marginalizing the work they did also demonstrates an incredible ignorance of how new technologies and industries develop. There isn't a single category of invention that sprang from the inventor's mind perfect in it's initial incarnation. By that argument Goddard contributed nothing to the space industry because his rockets never even came close to getting to space.
Enough diatribe from me. If you want to get educated about the subject, there are plenty of resources you can read. Two that pop up via Google are
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stwright/WrBr/taleplane.h
and
http://www.nasm.si.edu/wrightbrothers/
I'd also suggest that you read Henry Petroski's excellent book "The Evolution of Useful Things" for an easy read about how design and invention evolves over time.
Interesting about how good a year 1903 was for transportation. The Wright brothers, Ford, and Harley-Davidson all had significant milestones that year...
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
I think it could be good to start creating a government subsidized cleanup program. We need to start getting rid of stuff, like nuclear waste, etc. Just pull a Superman, and dump it all into the Sun! Get private corporations to build huge SpaceBarges.
Move to Australia, 4 weeks of holiday a year.....
Uh you might wanna get your sarcasm detector looked at; it seems to be broken.
"If you build castles in the air," Thoreau said, "that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
Before there IS anything, we first must imagine it.
Wernher von Braun said the most important ingredient to building a moon rocket is: "the will to do it!"
The space industry exists. Now we have to build it.
"Nobody writes jokes in base 13." - Douglas Adams
Well - the bubble burst and some people lost a lot of cash. (Those who kept their heads didn't.)
As a result, half the population in the first world accesses the net via broadband connections. In most of the rest of the world people do at least have the chance to visit an internet cafe.
And the net is changing our cultures. IMO for the better. There is f.e. a lot of information I simply wouldn't care to look up without it. And even scientific publications will (hopefully) break the dependency on publishers.
If something like this would happen to space flight, it would make me pretty happy.
Ok, maybe they'll bring it back from the dead. (Although I would describe the technology your link describes a more of a wing-morphing technique.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Upcoming space tourism is all well and good. The lucky bastards dropping 200 grand a pop are gonna experience what we've all longed for since we first knew what space was. All I really care about though is that this is a reminder that some day, you, me, that dude over there, WE are going to go into space. The price will come down eventually, and we will get to be astronauts. Ten years ago, I still wasn't sure I personally would ever get to go into space. When I was a little kid, I was sure it would remain a dream for my whole life. Somewhen during the last ten years, I don't remember when, it slowly began dawning on me that it would really happen. Can you believe it? Can you BELIEVE IT?
"Humanity lives and dies by its capabilities of communication, or lack thereof."
I would predict that by 2014, you will have global flights with max times of 90 minutes...
90 minutes around the globe means orbital speed pretty much exactly. Once you are in orbit, you can choose the time you're up at your leisure.
ALL I gotta say is they better make it tough, or agile, otherwise ...(talking to insurance co.)"it came out of nowhere, I mean, that satellite LEAPED in front of me, officer!"
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Wing warping worked well enough well into WWI. They had dogfights with wing-warping technology then. It might even come back soon in new jet fighters in aircrafts with "intelligent skins". You'll see.
Your post is akin to saying "horse and carriage was a dead-end technology". Of course it was, everything is, except it worked very well for thousands of years until something better came along.
Similarly silicon wafers are a dead-end technology, the Internet is a dead-end technology, and definitely rocket-powered space flight is a complete dead-end technology that will never get us to the stars.
Except no one has found a better alternative as yet.
Hmm...I see what you mean...now. DOH!
I didn't follow the thread to the parent to realize that the Wright bros reference was a sarcastic response. Apologies to "kippy".
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
The whole 'tourists in space' is more of a novelty than an -important- advancement. Now that the barrier to entry to leave the atmosphere has been (or rather, will be) shattered to a fraction of it used to cost, what I'm waiting for is to see more private satellites in space. There's all the momentum with open source software, and people scratching a particular itch. It's allready made big waves in the embedded realm... well I see that same momentum extending into 'open source (based) satellites'. Specifically communications. Want to start your own satellite radio service? The barrier to entry isn't going to be anything like what it is right now in 5 years. Someone will literally be able to cobble together some open source libraries onto a tiny footprint computer and launch it into geo-synchronus. Want to get the internet somewhere? For a couple thousand dollars (as opposed to millions today) you'll be able to stick a 802.11g repeater in orbit. If we're judging by the accomplishments from the most recent DefCon Wireless shootout, it won't even have to be amplified beyond the stock configuration; You'll just need a big dish. Want to start up a new TV service on an unlicensed band and sell the terrestrial reciever (ala DirectTV)? How about a new satellite cell-phone service? Right now they're terribly expensive, but this is bound to drive the prices down over time. Putting people in space is cool and all. What's really cool is what else we're gonna be able to put there real soon now. The possibilities are endless, now that the power is in the hands of the average CEO and not just the government and the extremely wealthy.
If this sig is witty, it was probably borrowed from someone else's sig.
Take some old laptops, put foil around them and voila - we have a lot of low orbit sattelites.
(now if only someone could think up an application...)
Concorde was fast and sleek but few people could afford or justify a ticket to go from London or Paris to NYC in a few hours. Concorde operations broke even but never repaid back the R&D budget spent on it. Remember that Concorde was a British-French national project, not a private endeavour.
Since then no one has come up with a reasonable alternative to Concorde, because it is all driven by the bottom line. Most people will put up with staying in a cramped cabin to go from Sydney to London for 30h (I know what I'm talking about because I've done it many times) if it means paying $1500 rather than $3000. It's not that bad and you get over it quickly.
Air travel supplanted ships because it became actually cheaper. Until the 70s most people still came to Australia by boat because it was cheaper. The big Boeings and MDDs changed that.
To be an enormous success that will change the face of travel as opposed to a pricey technology for the happy few, space travel has to become incredibly cheap, so that flying from SYD to NYC costs the same or less than a plane ticket does right now for the same distance.
Is this going to happen? Well if it is possible it will, it is as simple as that, but I'm not optimistic that it will happen in less than 10 years.
For all of those who rail that NASA (or NASDA or ESA) haven't done their jobs, I'm pretty much convinced that putting things into orbit using current rockets technology is already as cheap as it can be, for the simple reason that the satellite market is already a commercial venture and that there is fierce competition between the Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Chinese and Russian space agencies to drive the prices as low as possible. Any newcomer will have to (a) absorb the cost of R&D and (b) run an even tighter ship than any of these agencies to be able to compete. At the moment it doesn't look too good on the bottom line.
As for human travel in space it is still incredibly dangerous, as the recent space shuttle disaster reminds us. CEO might want to travel fast, but they also want to arrive in one piece.
So, what's the plan? Innovation. Someone somewhere has to come up with a new cheap, efficient and safe space drive.
Maybe Rutan or someone like him will be able to put a sputnik-equivalent something into orbit within 10 years but unless he can make it incredibly cheap by some unknown means then it simply won't fly.
Right now the rubber-NOX engine suborbital flight is a very cool stunt. I just hope they have something much more interesting up their sleeve.
The real holy grail of spaceflight is a space elevator. Although the technology to build one does not yet exist, it is definitely on the way. A space elevator would allow a cheap way to move large masses into orbit, paving the way for easy interplanetary travel. Ships could be built in orbit, avoiding the need for compromises that would be inherent in any vessel that had to both escape from earth's gravity well and travel to another planet.
I see alot of posts here talking about the demand for fast transcontinental flights and somehow that would be fulfilled with the next generation of ss1. you forget about the concord, which was much cheaper and got you there almost as fast. the truth is, there really isnt that much demand for this kind of transportation...
I am sorry but no matter how high is your karma I still put my money on Sir Richard. ;)
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
The bubble companies didn't last, but the aftermath is: that this thing called "the internet" quit being a comp-sci toy, and became quietly useful in the ordinary lives of regular people.
A result like that for space would a big win.
I'd have to agree with you on there, in regards to the media calling it a space flight. It is in someways because it did touch the point defined as space. Anyway, I think comparing this to the wright brothers is ludacris, spaceshipone is not the first to touch the edge of space, its not exactly a technological leap if one considers where nasa has been to!
:)
I'd look more at the cost of the project rather than the technological side of things (sure materials have evolved to create such light crafts), when such projects become feasable - they turn into commercial ventures.
still i can't help imaging how all of our favorite science fiction movies will come alive.
space tourism? wtf, to see what? other than to feel weightless, you can see everything from a telescope. we need warp speed, that'd be a real technological leap
Take a standard globus of +/- 30 cm wide. Your X-prize winner can carry you 2 millimeters over the surface. It is not even high enough to see 50% of the earth surface, you can see "only" a couple of thousand km. Right now it is a very expensive theme-park ride. But given enough rich playboys willing to pay for this ride, there will come an impulse to make it better, higher etc. It is not a bad start.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
all well and good. the xprize was finally handed ... why? ... sorry .... of :)
out. real space travel for the masses is still more
then 50 years or even more in the future
because there's nothing out there. so far the only
"cool" thing about space is that you become
weightless. so unless some important physical or
industrial procedure acctually needs zero-g
environment, no one is going to speed BIG bucks to
make a highway to orbit. and big bucks is what a
initial investment is going to take to have the
equivalent of a train station where you can buy a
ticket 5 minutes before the train arrives and
you're off kinda convinience
course i would start working for food and shelter
but i doubt the rest of the 50'000 odd person
workforce needed to pull this off would
"How about travel? A flight to Australia will currently take me 20+ hours. How long down the road until I can take off from the US and land SpaceShipOne in Australia where another White Knight is waiting to ferry it back into the air again?"
The SpaceShip One and White Knight aircraft were built to exceed a specific altitude, not for quick travel. NASA is working on hypersonic transport at Edwards AFB / NASA Dryden, just down the road from the airport where SpaceShip One earned the Ansari X-prize. That research is much more likely to yield quicker intercontinental travel than the Ansari X-prize entrants.
lots of space and near the equator? - plenty of sub-saharan African countries very happy to see the income!
Local budding space industry and high tech facilities? - India, South Korea...
Close to USA? - Mexico, Canada
Proven history of space launches? Kazakhstan (home of soviet space programme), French Guiana (home of ESA's space launches).
No problem if people really want it to happen. Move somewhere else. This happened in the UK 100 years ago, British were at the forefront of automobile technology but then the govt. brought in a regulation that meant autos had to restrict speed to 5mph with somebody walking in front of them with a red flag - apparently this bill was heavily supported by politicians who had commercial interests in existing horse drawn transportation. UK fell way back in auto development but the designers/builders just flourished elsewhere.
Add to that a potential shift in commodity markets - Russia has already shifted to selling all its oil in Euros (and Russia is a major oil supplier) - to what could be viewed as the more stable Euro, and the US dollar could be facing a tumble.
One of the reasons to remove Saddam Hussein was that he sold oil for Euros and also converted the cash reserves of the nation to Euros (~ $10 billion). He served as a bad example to the region.
And now you claim the cost of occupying Iraq destabilizes the Dollar?
Personally I think the intimidation factor to be more important than the US deficit (at least in the short term).
The Kitty Hawk technology was scalable. It needed more efficient engines, better control mechanisms, and so on - all changes which could be made gradually. The airplane in which Alcock and Brown first crossed the Atlantic is a recognisable descendant of Kitty Hawk. An airplane needs to be able to take off, fly, turn under control, and land. Kitty Hawk could do all those things.
A space ship needs to be able to reach orbital velocity (about Mach 30), and it needs to be able to withstand re-entry into the atmosphere at a speed of about Mach 25. SpaceShipOne can do neither of these things.
SpaceShipOne can reach about Mach 3. To reach Mach 3 requires about 1% of the energy required to reach Mach 30, since kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the velocity.
So SpaceShipOne has got 1% of the way toward meeting half of the key goals of a true space ship.
Well, not really, this is more like those cheesy helicopter rides you can have from your local airfield! And we all know how economically significant that is!
How about a Y-Prize...
The first private craft capable of docking with the ISS?
I realise there are some issues with allowing a competition where the aim is to TRY to dock with something that expensive. But it would be a real shame if the X-Prize worked out the same as the US efforts to visit the moon...
We cant stop now and simply say "ok, done that"...
its GOT to be "ok, done that, next step..."
the X-Prize CANNOT be seen as an end in itself, but a stepping stone to the REAL commercialisation of space.
The evidence is that there is precious little prepresentation, or in fact democracy.
i no rityrules.htm
n de x.html
http://www.fairvote.org/library/geog/congress/m
http://www.fairvote.org/library/geog/congress/i
Anyway. Virgin Galactic as part of Virgin group is a global company, there's no particular reason to run the company from America, launch from America or even to build the craft in America.
Deleted
The whole point is that this is privatized. Privatized means "they", not "we". We don't get anything unless we have money in a privatized system so the Economist is probably right. See, if the governement does it, then "we" who do not have money might get something. Sadly, the government has made it all too beauracratic. I would suggest that the ties to the military have been a major culprit in this.
I think a lot of people are missing the point, to push the envelop on what can be done, and on what they said could not be done. I applaud the efforts and sincerely hope it does open a new path in the travel industry.
As you can launch in any direction, to get anywhere on the globe you only need a half orbit, or 45 minutes.
It doesn't matter which ape activates the Monolith
Another issue is that people making high altitude flights already get a fair bit of radiation exposure from cosmic rays. A ballistic trajectory is likely to be a bit worse. It won't mean much to your average passenger, but the flight crews may have to be limited in the number of flights that they can make per year. Or perhaps we will use totally un-crewed craft. It takes almost 45 minutes before drinks get served to the back row, and in the event of an in-flight emergency a ballistic flight plan is pretty hard to change once you've "lit the candle". I can picture being helped to you seats by a stewardess who then exits the craft, and a different crew boards at your destination to help people off of the craft.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
The sex industry are always the first to make real money from anything new. It will be interesting to see how they exploit this one, though.
sudo ergo sum
We call it "falling with style."
Who the fuck cares about space tourism. It's the wrong model. Re-useable launch vehicles are the first step to space colonization. Thinking in terms individuals having to pay the hefty $200k price tag is the wrong way to conceive of the possiblities here. Think more in terms of groups of people forming small companies and finding seed capital (or mortgaging their houses, etc.) in order to get into space to form burgeoning economies.
The rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer. Don't get me wrong this is a great achievement. Now that we can send rich people into space it still doesn't solve alot of the more 'simple' problems for the majority of the earth bound population. Think there was a quote I read somewhere at somtime, and anyone who can give me the exact phrasing would be nice... goes something like... 'A civilized society should not be judged by the highest and best of it's achievements, but by the way it treats the lowest memeber itself.' But I think I'm a hippy at heart, and like I say what ever makes your bum humm..
100 year ago most "automobiles" were big, steam operated and without breaks. You absolutely understand that law if you see such a locomotif on wheels.
Kitty Hawk was not a stunt. That flight was the first controlled flight of a human-carrying powered aircraft. What SpaceShip One did -- drop an tiny rocket-propelled airplane from a bigger aircraft, punch the thrust and then coast as far as possible -- is a technique that's been in use since the X-1 more than 50 years ago. The only really new aspect of Rutan's efforts is that it is privately funded.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Combine a pressure suit with an adrenaline junky and maybe a little tin foil? 100km of freefall fun.
What's interesting is that Scaled Composites were heavily involved in both the McDonnell-Douglas Delta Clipper and Lockheed Martin VentureStar projects. While they were not complete successes, the experience learned from working on these projects will already give Burt Rutan's team a major headstart to build something to win the US$50 million America's Space Prize for the first low-cost manned orbital spacecraft.
If Scaled Composites succeeds on this project, it will revolutionize access to space on an unprecedented scale.
- TSA employees who say "Enjoy your flight" in a genuinely cheerful manner after body-cavity searching me.
- A flight that leaves on time.
- More than just a bag of pretzels thrown on my tray by a surly flight attendant -- I want my snacks served by Heidi Klum (or other supermodel).
Chip H.
At a minimum you need orbital insertion with a payload, the bigger the better. Then you build :)
a space station. Then you build robots to
mine the 100,000 ton asteroid and build a NICE
space station. You could even sell iron ore
to whoever wants some. Hey, delivery is cheap.
"Got big open spot where we can drop this?"
I wonder if you can use reentry heating to
smelt it?
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
I remember about 1986 or so, and I saw what the
internet was. Maybe archie (remember that), ftp,
and a few sites. Email was pretty cool but I
never thought of http, or anything like that,
and what it would mean.
I look at SS1 and the developments Rutan is making
as what I saw back then. In 10 years, I see
something I never imagined. Quickly all the
low earth sattelites will be launched by people,
not governments. Geosynchronous will take a little
longer, and more money.
I'd love to have hotels and such, they will
happen, eventually, but more likely there will be
workshops or stopping off points (think motel,
a convenience, rather than a luxury hotel). As
the flights get to be more regular more stuff will
be put in orbit, and eventually people will
start the assembly of larger space craft to head
out for more distant voyages.
The infrastucture will take a while, but it'll
happen. If I was starting college today, I'd study
aeronautical engineering or structural engineering
there is a future there.
Except that the U.S. goverenment already had a "Kitty Hawk" over 30 years ago.
Maybe SpaceShipOne has a pretty good idea. I know there has been talk of a space elevator. A simple system of establishing some kind of hook attached to the earth with something stationed in a geo sychronise orbit to that attached point.
Why not instead, built an orbital space tether. Launch some type of system that stays in orbit and is constantly refueled somehow. Attach a giant nano carbon fiber type line to it that reaches to the 62 mile zone that seperates earth from space. Launch SpaceShipOne and the vehicle that disengages from it flies to the 62 mile zone and connects to the space tether. The space tether then "reels" the detachable model to a hire orbit.
Okay, um sounds good? Work out the bugs but I think it sounds great.
An altitude of 130km? How long would a capsule stay at that altitude without additional boost? Just curious, because I don't take astrodynamics until next semester and that seems like a rather low orbit.
:) (the first cosmonauts only did one orbit or so also though...)
According to SMAD III table of earth satellite parameters the estimated orbit lifetime at 100 km is 1 orbit (0.06 days). At 150 km it's 4 orbits, so at 130 I guess it would be about 2 or 3... Without any dV boosts. So orbital flight at 130 km is definitly possible, you just won't get that many orbits
Give me a job. Please?
Indeed. According to Wikipedia, the lower range for orbit is considered to be 350km. I'm guessing the quoted altitude is either a mix-up, or Rutan's planning on using something like an ion thruster to deliver continuous thrust.
Ok, that's wierd, the definition I usually see for LEO is 200-2000 km (upper limit usually differs...), and there are plenty of satellites below 350 km. 130 km however would not be of much use for most satallites since it will only stay in orbit for a couple of revolutions, but it's still orbitting.
I really commend our fellow civilians from SpaceShip One on taking the XPrize. They've shown to the world that one day Space Travel will be just as commonplace as the car has now become. However, I still believe that chemical combustion has seen it's time. We need to move on to more effecient means of propulsion. I feel we need to focus more on understanding how gravity works and ho w to manipulate it effeciently. The use of water and hydrogen will be our only means of resupply once out in deep space. Until we move past this point, we are stuck on Earth with or without affordable space travel.
Why wait? We should start sending the supplies and materials needed to build a self-sustainable permanent colony on the moon. Water and air may pose interesting logistical issues but I'm sure that they can be overcome :)
From Infosphere to the First Inforb
The infosphere wants to be in orbit, and soon, it will be.
In space there is no need to lay optical fiber nor to obtain right-of-way from an international committee, you simply point a laser and shoot at the destination of your message.
The vast majority of digital communication traffic is from server to server. The big problem is "the last mile" of communications, and that is because of the difficulty of laying cable around urban areas.
You can go wireless from home or office to a local Ka-band ground station that uplinks direct to an on-orbit infosphere consisting of servers and routers.
This will unfold approximately as follows:
1) Wireless will replace cable in urban areas, thus dispensing with "the last mile" problem and waking people up to the fact that you pay heavy hidden taxes for trying to lay cable that crosses terrestrial bureaucracies.
2) Existing satellite Internet systems (note here that Iridium was _not_ an Internet system) will expand, possibly including the deployment of Teledesic.
3) The success of these wireless systems in previously underdeveloped areas such as China will further establish the viability of this general approach.
4) Launch prices lower as western protectionism over the launch industry is finally removed. (Interesting, isn't it, that even as the West was trying to figure out how to get hard currency businesses to employ Russian military personnel in commercial capacities, the West was bullying Russia into raising its launch prices so that Western government-subsidized launch firms could compete? Just goes to show you the Soviet public sector was more efficient than the West's public sector which isn't surprising when you think of it in those terms.)
5) With lowered launch prices, satellite prices will, at first drop gradually, and then plummet. Satellite prices will plummet when launch prices are low enough that satellites can create internal "office environments". This will not be for people -- it will be for the "office environment" mass produced electronics that go into servers and routers. Note: This will occur much later for geosynchronous satellites which must carry far more massive shielding from Van Allen belt radiation.
6) As the infosphere is going through the most rapid movement from the biosphere to Earth orbit, the most economic means of fixing a satellite will be to replace it. The increasing, industrial capacity, launch volume will drive launch prices to levels comparable with other transporation industries.
7) With launch prices lowered to industrially rational levels, human presence will become permanent on the various orbital planes in order to service the satellites on those orbital planes.
Seastead this.
This level of cluelessness is breathtaking.
The space shuttle is operated by NASA, which is problably better funded and staffed than SpaceShipOne, and already two Space Shuttles have crashed. How long will it be until there is a major accedent on SpaceShipOne, and how will we all react when two people are killed and they have lost the very expensive spacecraft.
the idea of capitalizing off space exploration, saddens me..
because just like everything else, it slows down the progress of learning more.. learning what we want to know, instead of just learning about more ways to make money..
the only way I could see it benefiting anything, is if the money gets directly invested back into the space fund.. otherwise its a waste of time
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
someone with common sense! the current abilities of spaceshipone may be minor, but it is the gateway into space tourism which has been longed delayed, now this isn't space travel, but it is space tourism, which has to first exist in order for space travel to come, my guess is that from profits of this an oribital could be designed, I mean you have to start somewhere, this is a huge achievement, no it's not as important as my news sources would lead you to believe, but it still will be looked back on as a big event in flight history, not as big as the Wright Brothers at Kitty hawk, but 66% as important
Signatures are so 90s
Odd number you chose there.. 66 eh..
ohh - but maybe we should also first figure out that space-time thingy
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
The X15 space plane set the previous space plane altitude record in 1963 at 107 km. SS1 execeded this on Monday's run, but it was a similar style. The main difference SS1 is a private effort.
Though humorous, this is exactly what I see is next for commercial space. That is assuming that the X-Prize Cup can "get off the ground."
With the price tag of 200K USD, its out of range of the average joe. So why not turn it into a spectator sport? With the rise of reality TV, makes sense.
Down side to this is, that the reason why it so popular to TV execs. The profitability. No special effects, don't pay actors (and no Screen Actors Guild fees) Sure there is a prize money. Usually a million, but the cost of one tv drama is in that neighborhood. Survivor runs for 13 or so episodes each time, maybe 4-5 million in logsitcs, plus the million prize and a million post production. so that makes the cost about $500k an episode, with high ratings versus anything else.
Now most of the shows that revolve around the X-Prize cup will me more documentray type reality shows. But a number of them may need have a part of the cost of production actual sponsership of a team. And with this expense it starts aproaching normal teen angst dramas, and soon hitting the budget of sci-fi shows.
However, it is free advetising to the sponsers if they make the condition that no logo of a corperation that is a sponser of a race be blurred out. (Cept exception of a rival network maybe?)
Only time will tell. I do hope that the xprize cup works, as I see it a big public outreach which us space advocates really need.
Perhaps we can do this on the cheap? Use the model of ICBM with MIRVs, but instead pack a passenger in there instead of a nuke. Target the specific locations to land the guys in and voila, intercontinental travel in less than 3 hours. And just think of the huge bragging rights you get when your passenger IRV parachutes down on the lawn of your rich pal's estate on the opposite side of the planet!
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
Why is everyone getting so excited about this? The same thing happened back in the 60's except there was an actual space race against the Soviet Union to become the first humans to set foot upon another heavenly body, not watch some tiny white blur on CNN. This entire SpaceShipOne story has been blown completely out of proportion. And $200K just for three minutes of weightlessness? These guys not only charge you a huge amount of money, but they charge that amount a lousy three minutes of weightlessness. I'd rather buy a house.
ALLAHCANBESEEN
I think your original question is interesting, but at this point irrelevant in this context. The point of government, among other things, is to pool resources and engage in public works projects that *we* all agree with. Now, its not that simple of course, but averaged out over time and space, it works more or less. These recent endeavors are entirely private in an as yet unregulated arena, and as such, *we* have no input. Government could start regulating them, which would be the first step in injecting *we* into this realm. I personally favor strong regulation of industry in most areas from a social policy standpoint. I think there are numerous obvious social policy implications of this fledgling industry. It seems that both state and federal environmental protection agencies should start looking at the impacts this could have. What does this do to the upper atmosphere, what about noise, what about false alarms of early warning defense systems, use of natural resources? The list is extensive. But, the first step is to get government involved, otherwise there is no *we* in the equation.
One of the problems with supersonic flight is that the overall cost of developing aircraft that can withstand those kind of environmental stresses is incredibly high. Keep in mind that you must meet the current safty requires that it appears the U.S. Congress also wants for spaceflight: That you are safer in an airplane from death or injury than if you are walking down the street on the sidewalk (statistically speaking).
Also, there have only been two supersonic aircraft project built for commercial passenger service, and both were massive government projects with pork everywhere and befitting of comparison to the Space Shuttle rather than Space Ship One. The American supersonic plane became so expensive that finally it was canned before it could get into regular service.
There were other problems with the Concorde besides the ticket price. Its landing gear was notorious on runways, and for regular service required a runway that was extra thick that could handle the beatings it would get on landing. Not even a 747 has as many problems in this regard.
Also, the Concorde was extreamly noisy, and many community noise ordinances (at least in the USA) would stop this plane from being able to land at their airports. Because of this when flying over the continental USA it had to fly at subsonic speeds, which kinda defeats the whole purpose of its design.
The Concorde also had an unfortunate design limitation that made its flight range to just a little bit more than crossing the Atlantic Ocean. For example, the Concorde, without refueling, couldn't go from London to Sydney. Again this defeats the whole point of flying a supersonic plane. A 747, on the other hand, can and does cover this distance non-stop. And hauls many more passengers is what would be an equivalent time for a Concorde with refueling along the way.
Finally, there were other companies that wanted to contine to fly the Concorde, including Richard Branson and Virgin Atlantic. He thought he could make a profit off of the plane, but the UK government refused to let him even try. Keep in mind that the two airlines that used the Concorde, Air France and British Airways, were owned by their respective governments in much the same way as the Post Office.
Many of the above issues are not as relevant for sub-orbital ballistic flight, and a better design can help deal with some of the issues. Also, the time advantage for sub-orbital flight is even more significant than with the Concorde, so the utility of the higher price is even more of an advantage.
Prices for going into space have largely been driven by military concerns (even with the Chinese, Indians, and Iranians) where cost per pound is not as important as fulfilling certain objectives that the missions require. Even NASA can be considered in this regard to be more like the military with mission objectives rather than a commercial enterprise scheduling flights. It is not NASA's fault that they have made orbital flight so expensive, it just isn't even in their overall agency objective to even make it cheap.
Actually, it's a joke. The way I heard it, the Lone Ranger says to Tonto "those Indians are killers; we're gonna die!" And Tonto says "What you mean 'we,' paleface?" It's a joking way to say "speak for yourself." But the substitution of 'white man' for 'paleface' makes it harder to trace to the original Lone Ranger joke.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!