Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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!
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
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."
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
Actually, you don't need a whole lot of heat if you want to smelt asteroids. If you bag and asteroid and inflate the bag with carbon monoxide, it doesn't take much solar energy input for the CO to pull the oxygen off the metals, leaving you CO2(which you could either vent to space or electrolyze back into CO and O2) and a metal ore that you can pretty much use as-is.
(Learned about this from Keith Henson.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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."
The 100km boundary isn't exactly arbitrary. The thinner the atmosphere, the faster a plane has to travel in order to maintain lift. At 100km, the speed a plane would have to travel would be as fast as the speed a satellite would be if it were in orbit at that height. Above that height, you have to fly faster than the orbital velocity. Below that, you fly slower than the orbital velocity.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
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."