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Personal Spaceflight Leaders Form New Federation
Neil Halelamien writes "A number of entrepreneurs in the nascent commercial space industry are establishing the Personal Spaceflight Federation, an industry group which will work with federal regulators to come up with standards to promote crew and passenger safety. The founders include both suborbital and orbital spaceflight entrepreneurs, such as Armadillo Aerospace's John Carmack, Scaled Composites's Burt Rutan, SpaceX's Elon Musk, and t/Space's Gary Hudson. Commentary available on MSNBC, Space.com, and Space Race News. In related news, NASA is looking at commercial options for resupply of the International Space Station."
http://www.xprizenews.org/index.php?p=764
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Rep. James Oberstar [D-MN]) introduced a new bill:
H.R. 656: To amend title 49, United States Code, to enhance the safety of the commercial human space flight..
To amend title 49, United States Code, to enhance the safety of the commercial human space flight industry.
You can track and check for latest updates related to this bill at:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h10
This could be one of the first concerns for the leaders from the newly emerging Personal Spaceflight Industry that announced their intent to organize an industry federation to design and uphold the standards and processes necessary to ensure public safety and promote growth of the personal spaceflight industry.
Why Burt Rutan would offer his coattails to these other clowns I'll never know.
Because Burt Rutan wasn't always recognized as an aerospace genius. Once upon a time not all that long ago, he was the one being called a clown. You have to start somewhere. Burt Rutan realizes this. He also realizes that competition is GOOD. For the industry, even for him. Without people snapping at his heels, he probably wouldn't have nearly as much motivation to push the envelope and come up with some of the amazing work he has done.
Random and weird software I've written.
Right, except for one thing: Suborbital flight, even doing half an orbit, is a heck of a lot cheaper and easier than orbital flight. 30% delta-V less equates to a huge reduction in required TPS, greatly reduced ISP (and thus reduced maintenance) or greatly improved payload fraction, etc. The difficulty of getting out of a big gravity well scales geometrically with the required delta-V, not linearly.
;) ).
:P It probably could fill a niche industry - a combination of space tourism with Earth tourism.
Another bonus of suborbital is that you can do a lot more of the work on airbreathing engines - either tow-launch, carrier-launch, launch-and-midair-refuel (i.e., Black Horse, Black Colt, etc), or even surface launch on a craft with both jet and rocket engines.
Lastly, since it's in a suborbital flight path for so short of a period of time, you don't have to worry so much about thermal or atmospheric regulation as you would for a true orbital craft that would be up there for days. This could be an especially big advantage for simplifying hydraulics (although I'd like to see spacecraft move away from hydraulics anyways...
Lastly, you get much better economies of scale. All in all, I'd expect travel on a suborbital liner to cost at most 1/20th as much per kg if built properly, and probably much less. You might even be able to go under 100$/kg if you got enough passengers. No matter what, though, probably way too expensive for ordinary commuter flights
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
> You make sense until I consider a human infant.
1 &q =site%3Anasa.gov+novel&btnG=Google+Search
Human infants don't require large teams of people and vast financial resources to walk. Sure, if Rutan had vast financial resources and huge teams of people, he could get to orbit. He doesn't. He has a small team and proportionally small resources. As a consequence, he achieved a proportionally small feat. I believe I've fairly demonstrated the scale of difference between suborbital and orbital, but I could go on if you'd like; if you think that one can go from the proportionally easy challenge of suborbital to the complex challenge of orbital without an equivalent scaleup in resources, I'd like to know how.
> Nor from any direct descendant of the steam locomotive, but without
> machine tool expertise gained in commercial production of steam locomotives,
> there'd be no space flight.
Rutan is not developing the figurative machine tools; NASA is. Rutan does not have any sort of effective R&D budget for that. Rutan is taking what is already known, and using the proportioanlly low-cost components (all that he can afford) and low-labor, undiversified manufacturing (all that he has the human resources for) to produce a low performance craft.
> NASA in the 1950s couldn't make ANYTHING on their own.
Amazing what a real R&D budget can do, isn't it? Rutan doesn't have one.
Most of NASA's progress - the "machine tools", to reference your earlier analogy - was based on hundreds of papers representing large amounts of research released every year like you find here:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-
> I'll bet you that Rutan couldn't build the chip fab necessary for
> producing avionics components. Somehow, I don't think that was an impediment.
Luckily for him, CPUs are cheap commodity components. Unluckily for him, high performance rocketry equipment is not. That's why he bought such a poorly performing engine from SpaceDev. It's not much more than a hollow tube partly filled with rubber with a de laval nozzle at one end (flaring to a bell) and an ignitor at the other. A ball valve and small actuator connect to a nitrous tank. That's all it is; that's why Rutan could afford it; and that's also why it will never scale.
> But serious strong points when it comes to selling suborbital space tourism.
Indeed they will be. I think Rutan has the low-suborbital market down for years to come (high suborbital (i.e., your flight lasts for hours instead of minutes)? Real rocket companies (still private, mind you) are probably more likely to win that slot.
However, I'm not talking about suborbital; I'm talking about orbital (orbital spaceflight, not Orbital, the company - one of many private companies that make *real* rockets that most people don't know about).
> I think for a 2-3 hour orbital flight
Rutan will have some significant trouble scaling up even that far; an SS1-style craft certainly won't do it. A "real" rocket company like SpaceX or SeaLaunch or whatnot would be in a much better position to take a market like that with their existing infrastructure.
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
Virgin Galactic's web site has a new computer-generated
0 0002175.png 0 0002215.png 0 0002260.png
video available, which shows the full flight profile of the Virgin
Galactic craft. It's available for streaming at the bottom of this
page:
http://www.virgingalactic.com/news.asp
I took the liberty of capturing just about all the key frames from the
video, and posting them on the web:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
The most interesting images are seen right after the question "What
Next?" flashes on the screen. These are images of what appear to be a
Virgin Galactic space station, with a SpaceShipOne-style craft docked.
Of course, they're probably complete vapourware for now, but they
certainly look interesting:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/virgingalactic/
I've been told that these some of these images also appeared on the Discovery Channel's Black Sky: The Race for Space DVD, with descriptions from Burt Rutan.
"Russia is a minor partner in the ISS"
That's silly American self centeredness. You apparently glossed over the part in my previous post where I said the Russians have built enough modules in the ISS that if they were to undock them from the U.S. parts they would still have a fully functional space station. Without the Russian built modules the U.S. has nothing.
They would have to go back to rockets for attitude control, since the gyro based system is U.S. built but they could live with that. There could be an ownership dispute over one of the Russian built modules, because NASA paid for it through Boeing but its a Russian design and Russian built.
The other obvious thing you gloss over is that since the Columbia disaster the Russians have carried 100% of the burden, at their expense to change crews and resupply the station.
Minor partner indeed. The only way you could cubbyhole them as minor is if you are counting the massive sums of money the U.S. has squandered on the ISS over the last 30 years, but that counts for nothing other than to prove how pathetic the U.S. manned space program and politics are.
"yet we're totally committed to a huge presence in space"
About 2010 when the shuttle is retired the U.S. will have NO manned presence in space unless its at the good will of the Russians. The U.S. will have no manned launch vehicle until the CEV in 2014 at the earliest. Committed indeed.
@de_machina