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?"
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/
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
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
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
Nope. Ain't gonna happen. The planetary environmentalists will shut it down. Mark my words.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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!
Jeeze, this makes you wonder if there is going to be "dot.space" phenomena where people will throw money at anything that hints of private spaceflight. I envy the folks like Rutan who are positioned to catch this cash. Hopefully they'll hang on to it, unlike a lot of dot.com folks who thought the gravy train would never end.
http://www.busyweather.com/
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.
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
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."
...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."
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.
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."
The zero-gravity environment would be much easier on a heart patient.
If taking three or four G's for the boost phase of the trip to the space station didn't kill him, sure..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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?)
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!
Sadly, you are still in class 101, and after all these years here have not even made it up to a 200, let alone a 400 level.
Where do you define "space"? These flights were controlled. Was there an insertion? Obviously not. But it was controlled and according to all major and most minor definitions (except for yours), it was space. All of these definitions are arbitrary, JUST LIKE YOURS.
Now as to calling this a stunt, it was quite a bit more. There is a real reason why it is called spaceshipone. There are more to come. In particular, SpaceshipTwo is suppose to hold up to seven passengers or a small payload. That payload is expected to be a small launcher. It will be used to place small satellites into space. I am sure that it will be small (100-200 KG max), but that is a useable weight for a number of purposes. If this can be done for less than several million, then we will see small spy and communication satellites.
It appears to be that everybody has forgotten all about BG/McCaw's Satellites scheme. They were going to place a large number of small satellites into LEO. This will start up as soon as these are ready.
BTW, watch carefully for a new WhiteKnight with much greater capacity. In fact, I would estimate it out at about 1.5 years.
It seems to me that it might be better to first aim for a moon settlement. Or even a self-sustaining Antarctica settlement. Sure, neither one is as sexy, but we'd probably learn a lot more than putting all our resources into getting to mars.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
No, satellites require orbit. These flights are sub-orbital. Think pogo-stick versus jet plane.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
FYI... the reason food comes in tubes in space isn't because it's not edible in space. It's because normal food weighs a lot (comparatively), and therefore costs thousands to shoot into the air. So this really falls under "make space travel cheaper".
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
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
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."
"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."
And that day was in 1687. We call it Centrifugal force, one effect of Newtons laws.
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.
Same applies here. One off space tourists, yes. Regular business travellers no.
Cool, and the starting few Gs will help eliminate those patients who wouldn't survive anyway.
IOW, not such a good idea with the current way of sitting on a rocket to get up there. A patient in a space elevator would be much better off getting to the zero G level.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?