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?"
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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!
Going into space would be awesome, but I'd rather be able to read slashdot in firefox.
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
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."
...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."
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."
"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."
Im sorry, is that your ship leaving? *as the Titanic departs* *or the Hindenburg*
Luxury is great, but no luxury holds a candle to the luxury that is SPEED. Get me from point A to point B twice as fast as the other guy and I will give you 4x as much cash. LAX to London, Paris, Singapore, Cairo, Sydney, whatever... in 3 hours. There *IS* a market for it, even at $200000 a pop. Just for specialists and the very rich.
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?
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...)
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
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....
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!
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. :-)
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.
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."
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.
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