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/
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.
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
...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."
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 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!
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?
"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.