Rules Set for $50 Million America's Space Prize

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that The rules have been set for Robert Bigelow's $50 million 'America's Space Prize'. The gist of it is that the winner needs to get a crew of five people up 400km, complete two orbits of the Earth, and then do it again within 60 days. I've got a gremlin and a huge rubber band... now if I only had 4 friends!

Comments

Re:America's Space Prize?

[91degrees]

Read the rest of the article. The winner has to live and do business in the US.

Re:America's Space Prize?

[TopShelf]

quoth the article:

"Another set of the rules for the prize require that any contestant reside and do business in the United States."

Hence the name...

Re:Probably much more useful than SS1

[Wyatt Earp]

How do you know SS1 doesn't scale well? Did you see the documentary on Scaled that was on the Discover Channel? Scaled has plans for an orbiter vehicle with a big old booster.

Re:Better Idea

[nels_tomlinson]

The negatives outweight the positives by several orders of magnitude, at the minimum.

The Earth has been warm before, and it was good.

From that link:

By 5000 to 3000 BC average global temperatures reached their maximum level during the Holocene and were 1 to 2 Celsius warmer than they are today. Climatologists call this period the Climatic Optimum. During the climatic optimum many of the Earth's great ancient civilizations began and flourished. In Africa, the Nile River had three times its present volume, indicating a much larger tropical region.

From 3000 to 2000 BC a cooling trend occurred. This cooling caused large drops in sea-level and the emergence of many islands (Bahamas) and coastal areas that are still above sea-level today. A short warming trend took place from 2000 to 1500 BC, followed once again by colder conditions. Colder temperatures from 1500 - 750 BC caused renewed ice growth in continental glaciers and alpine glaciers, and a sea-level drop of between 2 to 3 meters below present day levels.

The period from 750 BC - 900 AD saw warming up to 150 BC. Temperatures, however, did not get as warm as the Climatic Optimum. During the time of Roman Empire (150 BC - 300 AD) a cooling began that lasted until about 900 AD. At its height, the cooling caused the Nile River (829 AD) and the Black Sea (800-801 AD) to freeze.

The period 900 - 1200 AD has been called the Little Climatic Optimum. It represents the warmest climate since the Climatic Optimum. During this period, the Vikings established settlements on Greenland and Iceland. The snow line in the Rocky Mountains was about 370 meters above current levels. A period of cool and more extreme weather followed the Little Climatic Optimum. A great drought in the American southwest occurred between 1276 and 1299. There are records of floods, great droughts and extreme seasonal climate fluctuations up to the 1400s.

From 1550 to 1850 AD global temperatures were at their coldest since the beginning of the Holocene. Scientists call this period the Little Ice Age. During the Little Ice Age, the average annual temperature of the Northern Hemisphere was about 1.0 degree Celsius lower than today. During the period 1580 to 1600, the western United States experienced one of its longest and most severe droughts in the last 500 years. Cold weather in Iceland from 1753 and 1759 caused 25 % of the population to die from crop failure and famine. Newspapers in New England were calling 1816 the year without a summer.

Those who don't know history will only repeat the bad parts of it.

Re:Technicality Smechnic..thingy

[AKAImBatman]

Low Earth Orbit is not frictionless. It's just EXTREMELY thin air. Anything that stays in LEO for an extended period will require an occasional boost to maintain its orbit. That's why NASA occasionally gives the ISS a boost or two.

Re:Technicality Smechnic..thingy

[IPFreely]

The spacecraft must reach a minimum velocity sufficient to complete two (2) full orbits at altitude before returning to Earth; It doesn't say that it actually has to orbit twice though, just reach the velocity necessary to do so.

I suppose there could be reasons that you would not actually want to perform the orbits even though you've reached the appropriate speed.

Orbits take time. If you just pop up to altitude and speed, then immediately fall back down then the total trip is probably an hour or so. In order to orbit, you have to have to support several hours in space, maybe a day:
1. Air supply and air tightness of cabin to maintain the crew for the duration of the orbits.
2. Depending on length of time you spend in orbit, you might need other "human" facilities on board, food, water, restrooms.
3. Radiation and debris shielding. There's less debris in the upper atmosphere, but lots in orbit.
There may be fuel considerations to actually entering and exiting orbit rather than just passing through and falling back down.

Re:Technicality Smechnic..thingy

[logpoacher]

consider the fact that if you fired a bullet from a decent rifle a thousand miles up, it would go into orbit, but obviously bullets don't go into orbit here on the ground.

Well, careful here. That's the big misconception - that orbital velocity is anything like the speed of a bullet. Ok, ok, it depends on your definition of "decent rifle" :-), but no Earth rifle even comes close to firing at 5 miles a second - a tenth of that is more likely.

Similarly, SpaceShip One only achieved about 0.6miles/sec. That's why - amazing though it is that they achieved what they did on such a small budget - the orbit challenge is so much harder than just "touching space". When you consider that chemical rockets project propellant at about 2 miles/sec, you'll see that a single-stage rocket's mass must be almost entirely fuel (>85%) to achieve orbital speed alone - and that's after you've reached a suitable height! Multi-stage boosters help with the physics, of course, but they slaughter the economics. :-)

Anyway, achieving height is just the easy "Part 1" of the problem. Speed's the hard part. Try doing the momentum sums yourself - it gives you serious respect for people who can build machines to overcome the problems, and it shows how close Earth is to being completely un-escapable (at least using chemical rockets)!

Of course, re-reading your post, the rifle thing does illustrate your point rather well. Oh well ...

Re:Better Idea

[tdemark]

Most new installations are "bird friendly" - larger, slower rotating blades, turbines designed to prevent birds from landing or nesting on the housing, and placement taking into account migratory patterns.

Using this as a reference, there are approximately 180 turbines in use or proposed by this provider. At full capacity, this would account for 1/3 of a percent of the US electrical demand.

Using Altamont Pass (not included in the above calcuation) as a reference, and this page for kill rates, you get about .126 kills / year / turbine. This is a worst case, since it is generally accepted that Altamont Pass has an unusually high kill rate because it was built without taking into consideration migration paths and bird friendly engineering.

So, 180 turbines * 300 (needed to supply the whole US) and you get 54,000 turbines. Which converts to:

54,000 * .126 kills / turbine year = 6804 dead birds a year

Sounds like a lot, right?

Well, according to this (note: facts from a wind energy provider), 57 million birds are killed by automobiles each year, 97 million die from "sudden plate glass deceleration", and 1.5 million die from running into things that aren't even moving.

I don't know about you, but 7000 birds a year to generate all US electricity via a renewable resource with no emissions seems to be a good deal. Especially when it only costs 2.54 cents / kWh above non-green power.

- Tony