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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?"
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.
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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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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
Electromagnetic rail looks promising for real orbit possibility: http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/ MassDrivers.html
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...)
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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
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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.
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.
Why not just go to a country where it's fully legal? Instead of paying $200,000 for 5 minutes in space, you can take a week's vacation in Holland, Germany, or Switzerland for under $2000, including hotel. Really nice brothels in Zurich charge about $175 for half an hour.
IMHO this is a service industry which you want to be regulated by the government, as long as the govt is not in the hands of a bunch of bigoted puritans, like the US.
The thing is economies kind of exist in a homeostatis. If the US dollar falls, it gives US manufacturing and US-based services a competitive edge - so in many quarters, the weakening of the US dollar is in fact welcomed.
I agree entirely that a weaker US dollar would be useful in certain areas. But again, that's another domino: where is US manufacturing? Most manufacturing has been outsourced oveseas, and very little takes place in the US. Certainly a dramatic fall in the US dollar would give a huge incentive to bring some of that manufacturing back (the benefits of free market economics providing incentives to rebalance systems), but I think we need to be realistic. Any such move to bring manufacturing back to the US in response to a severely weakened US dollar is going to take considerable time (the weaker side of free market economics is that it doesn't always work in human scale timeframes), and in the interim you'll have serious problems.
Also, there is the meantime factor that, should the US dollar fall severely against world currency you'll find the price of oil and other major commodities for the US absolutely skyrocket. That's going to cause massive inflation as the price of everything shifts upward to adjust. Consider that that will be in conjuction with downward pressure on the US job market as many companies try to shift away, and you have a very serious problem while waiting for manufacturing jobs to arrive.
I'm not implying that such a major shift wouldn't be compnesated for by global free markets, what I'm saying is that, during the preiod of flux during that time of readjustment the US economy is going to be facing massive inflation, and downward pressure on the job market. How long that situation will last (perhaps a couple of years, perhaps a decade) is pretty uncertain, but regardless it's going to be a very unpleasant thing to live through.
Ask you local representatives about it. Ask any US politician you get a chance to about it. It's worth discussing, even if it is a slim possibility, because the dangers are so severe.
Jedidiah.
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