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

To little?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:To little?

[JDevers]

My take on these type of awards is that the cash prize is just there to try to encourage both the small and inventive teams as well as help pay back some of the bills accrued by the big teams. The real reward will come a few years AFTER the competition, but the award will help keep the company solvent from point A to B.

Basically, this isn't like a lottery or something where if you spend $11 to make $10 you loose, instead you got to do $11 worth of science for only $1 and more importantly you might be able to move your company/team towards a future where you can make 10x-100x times the award per year or more...

Technicality Smechnic..thingy

[Clappingman]

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.

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:80% reusable?

[tepples]

Then begin your rationalizing by claiming that the part that lifts off is the 20 percent, and the launch pad is the 80 percent.

Lighten up.

[Anonymous Coward]

" The risks involved increase polynomially the longer the craft is active."

I don't mean this the way this sounds, but I think you made this up completely. You may be right. But I don't see any data to support this.

"If people die in the course of attaining this prize"

People die skydiving, scuba diving, bungee jumping, skiing... all the time. Unlike many people, I don't think the loss of a spacecraft with 6 people on board is any more tragic than the loss of 6 people in a minivan accident on the freeway.

"say goodbye to private space travel and hello to new laws and regulations."

New laws and regulations are inevitable anyway. Or did you think Virgin Airlines (Branson) is just going to fire up Spaceship one and start taking reservations? Its really hard getting FCC certified for any kind of commercial flights.

"The chilling effect from "Columbia" is nothing compared to what will happen if a private attempt goes wrong."

What chilling effect? The space shuttle is a piece of crap; it should be grounded because its too expensive.

"This contest also has the potential to create an international incident."

So does fingerprinting and retina scanning all foreigners entering the country, but that doesn't seem to have stopped us.

Stop worrying about the sky falling.

Re:80% reusable?

[Zarniwoop_Editor]

Can the crew be part of the expendable 20%?

Might save on life support overhead for the two orbits. ;-)

Re:Better Idea

[Harinezumi]

Wind power is not practical for large-scale power generation. Never was, never will be. We already have a clean, efficient, and safe source of power that would last us for centuries even if we we used it for all our power generation needs, and its name is nuclear.

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.

Re:Sounds like a recipe for disaster

[aardvarkjoe]

If people die in the course of attaining this prize, say goodbye to private space travel and hello to new laws and regulations.

Yep. Just look at what happened when people first died in a private automotive accident. The government stepped in, and now we're all back to horse and buggy.

Rutan is leading contender to win, though.

[MtViewGuy]

I think people forget that Burt Rutan's company is probably the leading candidate to win this US$50,000,000 prize.

Scaled Composites did a lot of development work for both the McDonnell-Douglas Delta Clipper and Lockheed Martin Venture Star projects. This means Scaled Composites already has enough technical knowledge to start work on a space vehicle to win this prize as soon as they get enough funding to pull it off (Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures could easily part with the US$200,000,000 estimated development cost; Allen's group paid US$30,000,000 to develop the X-Prize winner).

Orbital Gremlins

[jshark]

The aerodynamics of a Gremlin are such that the giant rubber band will give insufficient lift to attain orbital velocity. You'll be better off with a good strong plank and one of those weights from Acme that read 16 TONS on the side.

The only drawback is that the sudden acceleration may cause your passengers to look like pancakes of mercury on the floormats, assuming they don't just flow through the rust holes in the floorboards.