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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!
It seems like spaceship one spent significantly more than 10 mil on their first ship. Is 50 mil a large enough reward for other participants?
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.
Space Travel is exciting - but everyone who wants to experience space is already a scuba diver - and the experience is largely the same.
Cost effective Wind Power (Kilowatts/Construction costs) would mean the end of middle east conflict, global warming, rural poverty in developing countries, lung disease in Beiging.
How else could you solve so many problem with a 10 million dollar prize. If Burt Rutan was focused on a lightweight scalable wind turbine - My guess is we'd be there by now. Instead we've invented a private version of the vomit comet.
AIK
No.
The basic problem is not that we do not have enough power, it is that we have too many people stuffed in a limited volume (I'm going to avoid having to have two meanings of "space" in this comment, dammit!). Getting to space efficiently allows us to have a larger volume in which humanity can live.
It doesn't solve every problem in the world, but being to run very very far away from your problems helps. It's how the U.S.A. got started.
--Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
I'm a little disappointed with the name. Even if the money is put up by Americans and will almost inevitably be won by an American it just seems a little well clique-y to put America in the title. I'm aware this is private enterprise and they have the right to call it what they like, I'm just a little sad about their choice.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
The risks involved increase polynomially the longer the craft is active.
If people die in the course of attaining this prize, say goodbye to private space travel and hello to new laws and regulations. The chilling effect from "Columbia" is nothing compared to what will happen if a private attempt goes wrong.
This contest also has the potential to create an international incident.
The rules say that only 20% of the vehicule can be expendable. Why have this requirement at all? If someone can send a ship cheaply and reliably that doesn't meet this rule, then why not?
Stephen
Rutan's accomplishment was impressive, but as has been pointed out in other discussions, it was essentially a high-flying airplane rather than a true spaceship, and doesn't scale well. Anyone who wins this prize will have built something much more directly applicable to real space travel.
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Which isn't to say I don't want Rutan, or someone else whose approach is essentially aviation-based rather than big-boom-straight-up-based, to get it. When I was a kid, I spent endless hours reading my Dad's old 50's sci-fi collection, and somewhere in the back of my mind is the idea that a real spaceship has a needle nose and delta wings
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The idea that we should escape the world and live in space...
Why not jsut say lets live on water? Sure as heck easier to get to, and you can have sub-aqua settlements for those hoping to have gone to space.
Benefits of living on water:
No rocket accidents
Cheaper to ferry supplies
Less Gamma radiation
If the global warming occurs, water prices (like land prices, get it!) will plummet! Coastal regions will always be prime real-estate! (for the land views)
You can use desalinisation to drink sea water, you can use devacuumisation to magic up water in space.
You can have solar power and wind power and wave power.
You have a comfortable 1G, and sea level air pressure, and a salty air that will put a healthy hue in your cheeks.
Topless sunbathing.
Can move around the oceans, and fish.
Benefits of being in space:
0g sex
wearing silver clothing
Well I can think of a few more arguments, but going to space 'to live there' is so dumb, living in the desert is easier and cheaper than living in space. Many poor people with camels already do it!
Recycling and filtering our pollution is easier than recycling and rebreathing space station air.
Terrorist attacks are worrying on a space station, which brings us to the question:
So why do people want to go to space and offer prizes for new space technology?
Not for living! not for Star Trek/Wars/n!
But for commercial flights, transports, satellites, RIAA, Micheal Jackson and Military purposes.
So there, I hope we are all done pandering to the space race, as we will be living int he oceans before we live on mars.
Actually, we will all be dead from all the new space weapons.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
What we really need to do is offer a prize for someone to convince all the myopic NIMBY types to give the pebble bed reactors a try. And yes, if you want to build one in my backyard, go right ahead.
Others have already expressed dismay at the USA-onlyness of the prize. The solution, of course, would be for a Non-USA billionaire or corporation or consortium thereof to offer a similar, but better, prize. Keep most of the rules the same, except that the corporation couldn't be American, and development & launch would have to take place outside of the United States. I agree that $50 million seems too low. How about €100 million to €150 million?
3 years might have been nice, but 5 years seems a little too long to me
Sorry, 3 years is infeasible for the kind of development this will take. How long was SS1 in development? This is at least an order of magnitude more complicated.
I'm not sure 5 years is possible, but I'm hoping to be proved wrong.
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g ives-you-cool-stuff-in-the-afterlife has to be the best thing since gays. Gays don't make babies, Athiesm doesn't make terrorists. We need more gay athiests (et al).)
That's right, hell to pay and they'll have plenty of our money to pay it back to us with. Endless amounts of money are funneled out of the USA and into the Middle East without any real checks or balances. They've got oil, we think we need it. Once we stop thinking we need it, we'll stop buying it, then they'll have a little oil and a whole lot of money. What does one do with a little oil and a lot of money? Well buy/build airplanes that drop bombs of course!
I'm sorry, but the Middle East is unfortunately a land beyond hope. There are too many people with too many conflicting ideas who are willing to kill one another over those ideas. The last part is the key, the part where they're willing to kill over their different ideas. We need to nuke them and turn the whole desert into a giant solar panel before the "conflict" in the Middle East will be resolved--I'm not saying we should, I'm saying that is what it would take for there to be peace in the middle east, as thousand-year wars don't just up and get resolved. By acting in the middle east though, we're no better than they are. We might be in a different PLACE but the whole philosophy is the same, you're forcing your ideas on somebody else by either controlling or killing them. A lot of people over there are after power, and they achieve it through instilling fear and committing murder. I don't know if power gives them a hard-on and they go home and stroke after gunning down some civillians or what, but there's some very strong driving force behind this perpetual power-seeking and idea-forcing. It's probably religious: they think that if they do certain things here they'll get certain things in return later from their deity. The Christians do it too, remember that Christianity CAME from the Middle East.
(Parenthetically, Agnosticism/Athiesm/Religion-without-a-deity-who-
[/rant]
In sum: I totally agree with you.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Think of the early space walkers and how even the most simple tasks caused them to flail about and sweat buckets. You know, Newton's Laws, action and reaction, and how partners having sex will probably have to be tied down with Velcro or something similar.
As far as solo sex, no one is admitting to that one either and whether there are any particular problem areas. Michael Collins said that the docs had recommended this activity for long-duration space station missions, you know, so a guy doesn't get prostate problems in space (one of the Apollo 13 guys got really, really sick with a UTI because he was holding it because there was some miscommunication whether they had enough electric power to take a leak), but the astronauts were indignant that the docs would even talk about such a thing.
On the other hand, these guys on 90 day cruises inside of missile submarines, don't tell me that no one has had solo sex, although the Navy doesn't check to see if you are imagining it with a chick or a dude.
This prize appears custom-tailored for a win on a Falcon V, a new rocket aiming for first flight in 2005 carrying a Bigelow Aerospace test module. The Falcon V is manufactured by SpaceX, Elon Musk's new rocket firm. Assuming that the Falcon V is a successful rocket, all of the prize rules are within the design capabilities of the Falcon V.
This appears to be part of Bigelow's demonstration to Musk that he will have a sufficient private market should Musk invest in designing a capsule plus ground infrastructure. Look at it as $50 million cash plus hundreds of millions in solid follow-on business. The prize reduces the risk of Musk's business case, which is important since the technical challenges of a capsule are certainly non-trivial.
Has the shuttle ever achieved a turnaround time of anything like 60 days?